Nicolas Notovitch
Encyclopedia
Cossack
Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...
officer, spy and journalist known for his contention that during the years of Jesus Christ's life missing from the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, he followed travelling merchants abroad into India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
and the Hemis Monastery
Hemis Monastery
Hemis Monastery is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Drukpa Lineage, located in Hemis, Ladakh . Situated 45 km from Leh, the monastery was re-established in 1672 by the Ladakhi king Sengge Namgyal...
in Ladakh
Ladakh
Ladakh is a region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of the Republic of India. It lies between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south, inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent...
, India, where he studied Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
.
Life of Saint Issa
Notovitch claimed that, at the lamasery or monastery of HemisHemis Monastery
Hemis Monastery is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Drukpa Lineage, located in Hemis, Ladakh . Situated 45 km from Leh, the monastery was re-established in 1672 by the Ladakhi king Sengge Namgyal...
, he learned of the "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men." His story, with the text of the "Life," was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ. It was translated into English, German, Spanish, and Italian.
Notovitch's account of his discovery of the work is that he had been laid up with a broken leg at the monastery of Hemis. There he prevailed upon the chief lama, who had told him of the existence of the work, to read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the " Life of Issa," which was said to have been translated from the Pali
Páli
- External links :* *...
. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses " in accordance with the requirements of the narrative." As published by Notovitch, the work consists Of 244 short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters.
The otherwise undocumented name "Issa" resembles the Arabic name Isa
Isa (name)
Isa is an Arabic name corresponding to Jesus in English. It is a common male given name for Arabs and Muslims.Arabic-speaking Muslims refer to Jesus as Isa, while Arabic-speaking Christians refer to Jesus as Yasu...
(عيسى), used in the Koran to refer to Jesus and the Sanskrit "īśa", the Lord.
The "Life of Issa" begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, its deliverance by Moses, its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. At the age of thirteen the divine youth, rather than take a wife, leaves his home to wander with a caravan of merchants to India (Sindh), to study the laws of the great Buddhas.
Issa is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend time among the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. Issa spent six years studying and teaching at Jaganath (Juggernaut), Rajagriha, and other holy cities. He becomes embroiled in a conflict with the Kshatriyas (warrior class), and the Brahmins (priestly class) for teaching the holy scriptures to the lower castes (Sudras and Vaisyas, laborers & farmers). The Brahmins said that the Vaisyas were authorized to hear the 'Vedas' read only during festivals and especially not to be read to the Sudras at all who are not even allowed to look at them. Rather than abide by their injunction, Issa preaches against the Brahmins & Kshatriyas, and aware of his denunciations, they plot his death. Warned by the Sudras, Issa leaves Jaganath and travels to the foothills of the Himalayas in Southern Nepal (birthplace of the Buddha).
At twenty-nine Issa returns to his own country and begins to preach. He visits Jerusalem, where Pilate is apprehensive about him. The Jewish leaders, however, are also apprehensive about his teachings yet he continues his work for three years. He is finally arrested and put to death for blasphemy, for claiming to be the son of God. His followers are persecuted, but his disciples carry his message out over the world.
In the Notovich translation, the section regarding Pontius Pilate is of particular note; in this version of the events around the death of Jesus, the Sanhedrin go to Pilate and argue to save the life of Jesus, and they are the ones who 'wash their hands' of his death, instead of the Roman Pilate. Another point is the role of women that appear to be more free than what most historians think.
Controversy
Edgar Goodspeed describes the debunking of Notovitch's claims as a hoax.- Notovitch's writings were immediately controversial. The German orientalist Max Mueller, professor of indian philosophy in Oxford who'd never been to India himself, published a letter he'd received from a British colonial officer J.Archibald Douglas, which stated that the presence of Notovich in Ladakh was "not documented". The head of the Hemis community signed a document that denounced Notovitch as an outright liar.
The story of his visit to Hemis seems to be taken from H.P. Blavatsky
Madame Blavatsky
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , was a theosophist, writer and traveler. Between 1848 and 1875 Blavatsky had gone around the world three times. In 1875, Blavatsky together with Colonel H. S. Olcott established the Theosophical Society...
's Isis Unveiled
Isis Unveiled
Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, is a book of esoteric philosophy, and was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's first major work.The book discusses or quotes, among others, Plato, Plotinus, the Chaldean Oracles, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, Pythagoras, Ammonius Saccas, Porphyry, Iamblichus,...
.
In the original, the traveler with the broken leg was taken in at Mount Athos
Mount Athos
Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula in Macedonia, Greece. A World Heritage Site, it is home to 20 Eastern Orthodox monasteries and forms a self-governed monastic state within the sovereignty of the Hellenic Republic. Spiritually, Mount Athos comes under the direct jurisdiction of the...
in Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
and found the text of Celsus
Celsus
Celsus was a 2nd century Greek philosopher and opponent of Early Christianity. He is known for his literary work, The True Word , written about by Origen. This work, c. 177 is the earliest known comprehensive attack on Christianity.According to Origen, Celsus was the author of an...
' True Doctrine in the monastery library. But in fact there were found proof that Notovitch was in Leh and Hemis. A german dentist residing there had treated him extracting one of his teeth. There is the written record in his diary which is shown in the book of Holger Kersten.
The idea that Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
was in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
was also inspired by a statement in Isis that he went to the foothills of the Himalayas
Himalayas
The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...
.
Other authors on the life of Jesus in India
While Notovitch is the first author known to claim Jesus traveled to India, Mirza Ghulam AhmadMirza Ghulam Ahmad
Mīrzā Ghulām Aḥmad was a religious figure from India and the founder of the Ahmadiyya Community. He claimed to be the Mujaddid of the 14th Islamic century, the promised Messiah , and the Mahdi awaited by the Muslims in the end days...
(d.1908), who proclaimed himself the awaited Messiah
Messiah
A messiah is a redeemer figure expected or foretold in one form or another by a religion. Slightly more widely, a messiah is any redeemer figure. Messianic beliefs or theories generally relate to eschatological improvement of the state of humanity or the world, in other words the World to...
, 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
Ahmadiyya
Ahmadiyya is an Islamic religious revivalist movement founded in India near the end of the 19th century, originating with the life and teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad , who claimed to have fulfilled the prophecies about the world reformer of the end times, who was to herald the Eschaton as...
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
Elizabeth Clare Prophet
Elizabeth Clare Prophet was an American spiritual author and lecturer who was the leader of The Summit Lighthouse and Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Age religious movement which gained media attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s while preparing for potential nuclear disaster.During...
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 who had studied medicine in Edinburgh, and that had been working as the director of the Leh hospital since 1866. The missionary was Dr. Karl Rudolph Marx and belonged to the Morovian 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
Parliament of the World's Religions
There have been several meetings referred to as a Parliament of the World’s Religions, most notably the World's Parliament of Religions of 1893, the first attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths. The event was celebrated by another conference on its centenary in 1993...
. And Shri Virchand Gandhi is credited for originally translating & publishing same in English in 1894 from an ancient manuscript found in Tibet and this version is available online.
One of the skeptics who personally investigated Notovich's claim was Swami Abhedananda
Swami Abhedananda
Swami Abhedananda was a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, who Swami Vivekananda sent to the West to head the Vedanta Society, New York in 1897, and spread the message of Vedanta, a theme on which he authored several books through his life, and subsequently founded the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math,...
, 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 are contained in the best seller book "Jesus lived in India" by Holger Kersten.
Other works
Notovitch published a book in Russian and French, pleading for Russia's entry into the Triple Entente with France and England. It is entitled in French: La Russie et l'alliance anglaise: étude historique et politique, and was published in 1906. He also wrote biographies of Tsar Nicolas II and Alexander III. (Sources: worldcat.org, books.google.com.)He had also written "Mariage Ideal"; A Travers L'Inde" "La Femme à Trvers le Monde"
He had the dubious honour of being quoted by Adolf Hitler in his "Mein Kampf"
Further reading
H. Louis Fader, The Issa Tale That Will Not Die: Nicholas Notovich and His Fraudulent Gospel (University Press of America, 2003). ISBN 9780761826576A. Paratico "The Karma Killers" New York, 2009.
External links
- The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, at Google Books
- The Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men
- The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ Notovitch manuscript with historical introduction.
- http://home.swipnet.se/corbie/Fuskwww/notov.html
- http://essenes.net/sstibetg.html
- http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/scanned/notovitch.htm
- Robert M. Price, "Jesus in Tibet - A Modern Myth": http://web.archive.org/web/20080621040307/http://www.westarinstitute.org/Periodicals/4R_Articles/Tibet/tibet.html
- Norbert Klatt, Jesus in Indien. Nikolaus Alexandrovitch Notovitchs „Unbekanntes Leben Jesu“, sein Leben und seine Indienreise. Zweite Auflage.Göttingen 2011. Elektronische Ressource. ISBN 978-3-928312-32-5. VIII, 76 Seiten, 1 Illust. http://d-nb.info/1009467662.