Other Authors On The Life of Jesus in India
While Notovitch is the first author known to claim Jesus traveled to India, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (died 1908), who proclaimed himself the awaited Messiah, wrote a more detailed account of Jesus's time in South Asia. Unlike Notovitch, he claimed that Jesus had traveled towards India post-crucifixion in search of the lost tribes of Israel and there he died a natural death. Ghulam Ahmad founded the Ahmadiyya sect. Others claim to have seen the same manuscripts.
Many other authors have taken this information and incorporated it into their own works. For example, in her book "The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus' 17-Year Journey to the East", Elizabeth Clare Prophet asserts that Buddhist manuscripts provide evidence that Jesus traveled to India, Nepal, Ladakh and Tibet.
During his stay in Ladakh, Notovitch collected several Mani stones on which were engraved sacred Tibetan words which were later donated to the Trocadero Museum in Paris. Also in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris there is a piece of Kashmiri fabric registered under his name. The night between the 3 and 4 November 1887 Notovitch suffered severe toothache, for which he sought the assistance of a German missionary, Dr. Karl Rudolph Marx, who had studied medicine in Edinburgh, and who had been working as the director of the Leh hospital since 1866. Marx belonged to the Moravian brothers. The diary of Dr. Marx correctly reports having treated Notovitch for his toothache.
In 1893, Notovitch's work was first presented at an international forum in Chicago by Shri Virchand Gandhi, an important delegate to the First Parliament of the World's Religions. Shri Virchand Gandhi is credited for originally translating and publishing the same work in English in 1894 from an ancient manuscript found in Tibet. This version is available online.
One of the skeptics who personally investigated Notovich's claim was Swami Abhedananda, who journeyed to the monastery determined to either find a copy of the Himis manuscript or to expose it as a fraud. His book of travels, entitled Kashmir O Tibetti, tells of a visit to the Hemis gompa and includes a Bengali translation of two hundred twenty-four verses essentially the same as the Notovitch text, corroborating the existence of the documents.
In 1925, the Russian philosopher Nicholas Roerich also journeyed to the monastery. He apparently saw the same documents as Notovitch and Abhedananda.
There is a documentary and a book on this subject, by Richard Bock, who seems to believe Notovitch's claims (book and film 1976-77, DVD released 2007).
An extended publication regarding the years spent by Jesus in India, with extremely detailed historical accounts and pictures, is contained in the best selling book "Jesus lived in India" by Holger Kersten.
Read more about this topic: Nicolas Notovitch
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