satyam

K, The Missing Gospel
A film that explores how Christ spent his ‘lost years’ in Kashmir
Raghu Karnad

Shot By Shot

* A $20 million film, The Aquarius Gospel, will trace Christ’s “lost years” between the ages of 14-30, on which the Bible is silent.
* It will show he spent some of that time in Kashmir, was deeply influenced by Buddhist and Hindu teachings.
* In 1887, Russian Nicolai Notovitch claimed to have seen documents describing Christ’s years in India. A 1908 book by Levi Dowling claims he travelled to Persia, India and Tibet. Holger Kersten’s Jesus Lived in India was a bestseller.
* Kashmir historian Fida Hassnain says he examined ancient texts which say Christ came to Kashmir after surviving the Crucifixion, died there, and is buried in Rozabal Shrine in Srinagar.

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“And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”
—Luke 2:52
Among the nearly 8,00,000 words in the King James Bible, these fourteen words are all that describe the 17 years in the life of Jesus between his childhood in Nazareth and the beginning of his ministry.

Russian historian Notovitch heard of the prophet ‘Issa’ from the Buddhist monks of Leh’s Hemis monastery in 1887.

The ‘lost years’ have been an enduring mystery for religious followers, historians and archaeologists. Now a Hollywood film, The Aquarian Gospel, will follow Jesus through his lost years, in which he travels the Silk Route to Kashmir and Tibet and has encounters with Buddhism
and Hinduism that inspire his own teachings.

The film borrows its name from a 1908 book by Levi Dowling, in which Jesus travels East, through Persia, India and Tibet. The producers have built a story by picking and choosing from Dowling’s book and other sources, in consultation with Biblical scholars. In the course of the story, Yeshua (the Aramaic name for Jesus) survives the perils of the road, resides in a Buddhist monastery where he absorbs Buddhist and Vedic philosophy and castigates Brahmins for forbidding lower castes from reading the Vedas. Yeshua also meets Princess Menaka, “the most beautiful woman in the East, never seen or touched by any man”—a tantalizing hint at romance.

“We have an adventurous narrative that will thrill audiences and a spiritual tone with a mood of its own,” John F. Sullivan, who co-wrote the screenplay, told Outlook. With a budget of $20 million, it will be rendered in the style of 300, the steroidal action film about the Spartan battle of Thermopylae, with heavy use of digital special effects and animation. At the same time, director Drew Heriot says he wants the film to “present Yeshua’s spiritual development with such clarity that the audience will experience their own awakening”.

Any account of the life of Jesus that is based on apocrypha (texts outside the recognised canon) is potentially controversial, especially when it claims that he was inspired by pre-Christian eastern theologies, rather than pure revelation. The Aquarian Gospel faces the delicate task of presenting the story as a meaningful parable but not a scriptural proposition. “We don’t claim this film is scripture,” says Sullivan. “The canonised Bible simply doesn’t give any information on what Yeshua did for a very long period in his life. So we are presenting a vision inspired by exhaustive research and a whole lot of prayers.”

The idea of Jesus having travelled East began to spread in 1887, after a minor Russian historian, Nicolai Notovitch, returned from Ladakh. He claimed that after falling from his horse and breaking his leg, he had been laid up in the Hemis monastery near Leh. While there, from conversation with the monks, he learned that they revered a prophet named Issa, an incarnation of the Buddha, who was born in far-off Israel and arrived in ‘the Sind’ in his 14th year.

The deeds of Issa were recorded in lengthy documents, some of which were stored in Hemis and which Notovitch was allowed to view after much pleading. They further described how Issa went to Orissa to study the Vedas, but angered the Brahmins by trying to teach the Sudras. Notovitch claimed he wrote down as much as he was able to from the Hemis documents, which he later published as The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ.

The documents that Notovitch claims to have seen are no longer at Hemis. But his story inspired a stream of revisionist scholarship that shores up other evidence—in scripture and history—of Jesus’s time in India. The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ was followed by Levi Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel, which was published in 1908 but became required reading for the 1960s counterculture in the US. Another book, Jesus Lived in India., by German scholar Holger Kersten became a bestseller in India.

The producers of the Aquarian Gospel want to emphasise the similarities between Christianity and eastern religions. The idea that Jesus travelled to the then Buddhist Kashmir, they say, can explain these similarities, such as the non-violence and anti-materialistic passages in the Sermon on the Mount.

Fida Hassnain may be the most dedicated scholar and defender of the story of Jesus in Kashmir. As the former director of the State Archives, Archaeology Research and Museums in the J&K government, he has personally examined a number of documents—in Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Pali and Persian—which he says point to the presence of Jesus in Kashmir. “Naturally there is a gap in the life of Jesus in the Bible,” he told Outlook. “And that information is only available in the eastern sources.”

The most important piece of evidence, to him is the Bhavishya Mahapurana, one of the 18 Hindu Puranas. “It provides information that Jesus met the King of Kashmir,” Hassnain says. “He gives his name as Isa-Masih, he says ‘I am known as the Son of God, born of a Virgin’, and he also says he has suffered, meaning, on the cross. The manuscript was in the possession of Maharaja Partap Singh of Kashmir, who later gave it to the Bhandarkar Research Institute, Pune.”

Hassnain’s version of events is much more controversial than the one the filmmakers are using: he proposes that Jesus did not die on the cross, but recovered from the Crucifixion and returned to Kashmir to resume his preaching. The Ahmadiyya community of Muslims believes the same version of events, which is one of the reasons they are treated as heretics by mainstream Muslims. Like the Ahmadiyya communtiy, Hassnain believes the body of Jesus was interred at the Rozabal Shrine in Srinagar under the name of Yuzu Assef.

It is one thing to fill in a gap left by the Gospels and quite another to contradict the central tenet that Jesus died on the cross. “In the Gospels, it is said that Jesus lived with his parents—so it is the Catholic tradition that he lived with his foster father through the ‘missing years’ and continued his work as a carpenter,” Father Dominique Savio, the chancellor of the Bombay Archdiocese, told Outlook. “As for the story that he escaped death on the cross, it hits out at a central Catholic belief—it’s not what we hold to be true. There may be records of someone telling the King of Kashmir he is the son of a virgin, but it’s someone else. It’s definitely not based on historical facts.”

The makers of the Aquarian Gospel are at pains to dissociate themselves from the version of Jesus’s life that holds he came to Kashmir after surviving crucifixion, saying the film will not touch the years of Jesus’s life that are described in the New Testament. “Instead of dividing believers, the film will unify Christianity and other religions of the world by clearly presenting the underlying principles they all share,” Heriot told Outlook.Now, if that bit of prophecy fulfils itself, it might not be such a bad thing.