Nicolas Notovitch

Shulim or Nikolai Aleksandrovich Notovich (Russian: Николай Александрович Нотович) (August 13, 1858 – after 1916), known in the West as Nicolas Notovitch, was a Crimean[1] Jewish adventurer who claimed to be a Russian aristocrat, spy[2][3] and journalist.

Notovitch is known for his 1894 book claiming that during the unknown years of Jesus, he left Galilee for India and studied with Buddhists and Hindus before returning to Judea. Notovitch's claim was based on a document he said he had seen at the Hemis Monastery while he stayed there.[4][5] The consensus view amongst modern scholars is that Notovitch's account of the travels of Jesus to India was a hoax.[5][6]

Notovitch also wrote some political books on the role of Russia in war.[7][8]

Life of Saint Issa

Notovitch's 1894 book La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ (Life of Saint Issa) claims that during his unknown years, Jesus left Galilee for India and studied with Buddhists and Hindus there before returning to Judea.[9]

Outline of the book

Hemis Monastery in 2006

After breaking his leg in India and while recovering from it at the Hemis monastery in Ladakh, Notovitch learned of the Tibetan manuscript Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men—Isa being the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam. Notovitch's account, with the text of the Life, was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ. It was translated into English,[9] German, Spanish, and Italian.

Allegations of forgery and alleged confession

Notovitch's book generated controversy as soon as it was published. The philologist Max Müller expressed incredulity at the account presented and suggested that either Notovitch was the victim of a practical joke or he had fabricated the evidence.[10][11] Müller wrote: "Taking it for granted that M. Notovitch is a gentleman and not a liar, we cannot help thinking that the Buddhist monks of Ladakh and Tibet must be wags, who enjoy mystifying inquisitive travelers, and that M. Notovitch fell far too easy a victim to their jokes."[4] Müller then wrote to the head lama at Hemis monastery to ask about the document and Notovitch's story. The head lama replied that there had been no western visitor at the monastery in the previous fifteen years, during which he had been the head lama there, and there were no documents related to Notovitch's story.[4][12] Other European scholars also opposed Notovitch's account and Indologist Leopold von Schroeder called Notovitch's story a "big fat lie".[4]

J. Archibald Douglas, who was a professor of English and History at the Government College in Agra, then visited the Hemis monastery to interview the head lama, who stated yet again that Notovitch had never been there and that no such documents existed.[12] Wilhelm Schneemelcher states that Notovich's accounts were soon exposed as fabrications, and that to date no one has even had a glimpse at the manuscripts Notovitch claims to have seen.[5] Notovich at first responded to claims to defend himself.[13] But once his story had been re-examined by historians, Notovitch is said to have confessed to having fabricated the evidence.[4]

Bart D. Ehrman, a Biblical scholar, says that "Today there is not a single recognized scholar on the planet who has any doubts about the matter. The entire story was invented by Notovitch, who earned a good deal of money and a substantial amount of notoriety for his hoax."[14] However, others deny that Notovich ever accepted the accusations against him. Fida Hassnain, a Kashmiri writer, has stated:

Notovitch responded publicly by announcing his existence, along with the names of people he met on his travels in Kashmir and Ladakh. ... He also offered to return to Tibet in company of recognized orientalists to verify the authenticity of the verses contained in his compilation. In the French journal La Paix, he affirmed his belief in the Orthodox Church, and advised his detractors to restrict themselves to the simple issue of the existence of the Buddhist scrolls at Hemis.[15]

Although he was not impressed with his story, Sir Francis Younghusband recalls meeting Nicolas Notovitch near Skardu, not long after Notovitch had left Hemis monastery.[16]

Claims of corroboration in India

Pilgrims at Hemis Monastery

Although Notovitch had been discredited in Europe, certain individuals in India and America considered his story to have credibility. Swami Abhedananda, who was a colleague of Max Mueller and initially sceptical of Notovitch's claims,[17] claimed to have visited the Hemis monastery in 1922 whilst travelling through Kashmir and Tibet to verify the reports of Notovich that he had heard the previous year in the U.S. He claimed that lamas at the monastery confirmed to him that Notovich was brought to the monastery with a broken leg and he was nursed there for a month and a half. They also told him that the Tibetan manuscript on Issa was shown to Notovich and its contents interpreted so that he could translate them into Russian.[18] This manuscript was shown to Abhedananda,[19] which had 14 chapters, containing 223 couplets (slokas). The Swami had some portions of the manuscript translated with the help of a lama, about 40 verses of which appeared in the Swami's travelogue.[20][lower-alpha 1] The original Pali manuscript—allegedly composed after Christ's resurrection[lower-alpha 1]—was said to be in the monastery of Marbour near Lhasa.[22]

After his return to Bengal, the Swami asked his assistant Bhairab Chaitanya to prepare a manuscript of the travelogue based on the notes he had taken. The manuscript was published serially in Visvavani, a monthly publication of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Samiti, in 1927 and subsequently published in a book form in Bengali. The fifth edition of the book in English was published in 1987, which also contains an English translation of Notovich's Life of Saint Issa as an appendix.[23]

Paramahansa Yogananda wrote that Nicholas Roerich also corroborated Notovich's and Abhedananda's story during his visit to Tibet in the mid-1920s. He also wrote that "records of Jesus's years in India were preserved in Puri, according to Bharati Krishna Tirtha, and that after leaving Puri Jesus spent "six years with the Sakya Buddhist sect in... Nepal and Tibet", before returning to Palestine. He added that "the overall value of these records is inestimable in a search for the historical Jesus".[24]

Other authors' references

Author Alice Dunbar Nelson includes a review of The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ in her 1895 collection Violets and Other Tales.[25] In 1899 Mirza Ghulam Ahmad wrote Jesus in India (published in 1908) and claimed that Jesus had traveled to India after surviving his crucifixion, but specifically disagreed with Notovitch that Jesus had gone to India before then.[26][27]

Other authors have taken these themes 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.[28] In his book Jesus Lived in India, German author Holger Kersten promoted the ideas of Nicolas Notovich and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Gerald O'Collins classified Kersten's work as the repackaging of the same stories.[29] In his 2002 comedic novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, absurdist author Christopher Moore parodies the notion that between the ages of 15 and 30, Jesus traveled to Tibet to study Buddhism in a monastery (after first having traveled to Afghanistan), then to India to study Hinduism.

Other writings

In 1906 Notovitch published a book in Russian and French, pleading for Russia's entry into the Triple Entente with France and Britain. It is entitled in French: La Russie et l'alliance anglaise: étude historique et politique.[7] He also wrote biographies of Tsar Nicolas II and Alexander III.[30] He had also written L'Europe à la veille de la guerre.[8]

References

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 The lamas also told Swami that after his resurrection, Christ secretly came to Kashmir and lived in a monastery surrounded by many disciples. The original manuscript in Pali was prepared "three or four years" after Christ's death, on the basis of reports by local Tibetans and the accounts from wandering merchants regarding his crucifixion.[21]

Citations

  1. ↑ Born in Kertch on August 25th (13th Julian) 1858. Dictionnaire national des contemporains Vol. 3, Paris 1901, p. 274; Klatt, Norbert. 2011. Jesus in Indien: Nikolaus Alexandrovitch Notovitchs „Unbekanntes Leben Jesu“, sein Leben und seine Indienreise (2nd ed.). Göttingen: Norbert Klatt Verlag (Electronic resource; ISBN 978-3-928312-32-5; First print edition Stuttgart 1986)
  2. ↑ India Office Records: Mss Eur E243/23 (Cross)
  3. ↑ Public Record Office: FO 78/3998
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 McGetchin, Douglas T., Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2009, ISBN 083864208X. p. 133: "Faced with this cross-examination, Notovich allegedly confessed to fabricating his evidence."
  5. 1 2 3 New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. 1: Gospels and Related Writings by Wilhelm Schneemelcher and R. Mcl. Wilson (Dec 1, 1990) ISBN 066422721X p. 84: "a particular book by Nicolas Notovich (Di Lucke im Leben Jesus 1894) ... shortly after the publication of the book, the reports of travel experiences were already unmasked as lies. The fantasies about Jesus in India were also soon recognized as invention... down to today, nobody has had a glimpse of the manuscripts with the alleged narratives about Jesus"
  6. ↑ Price, Robert M. (2003). The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?. Prometheus Books. p. 93. ISBN 978-1591021216 "It remains quite clear that Notovitch's Unknown Life of Jesus was a hoax."
  7. 1 2 La Russie et l'alliance anglaise: étude historique et politique. Paris, Plon-Nourrit, 1906.
  8. 1 2 L'Europe à la veille de la guerre. Paris A. Savine, 1890
  9. 1 2 Virchand R. Gandhi (translator) (2003) [1894]. The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 0766138984. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  10. ↑ Simon J. Joseph, "Jesus in India?" Journal of the American Academy of Religion Volume 80, Issue 1 pp. 161-199: "Max Müller suggested that either the Hemis monks had deceived Notovitch or that Notovitch himself was the author of these passages"
  11. ↑ Friedrich M. Mueller, Last Essays, 1901. (republished 1973). ISBN 0404114393. Page 181: "it is pleasanter to believe that Buddhist monks can at times be wags, than that M. Notovitch is a rogue."
  12. 1 2 Bradley Malkovsky, "Some Recent Developments in Hindu Understandings of Jesus" in the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies (2010) Vol. 23, Article 5.:"Müller then wrote to the chief lama st Hemis and received the reply that no Westerner had visited there in the past fifteen years nor was the monastery in possession of any documents having to do with the story Notovitch had made public in his famous book" ... "J. Archibald Douglas took it upon himself to make the journey to the Hemis monistry to conduct a personal interview with the same head monk. What Douglas learned there concurred with what Mueller had learned: Notovitch had never been there."
  13. ↑ D. L. Snellgrove and T. Skorupski, The Cultural Heritage of Ladakh, p. 127, Prajna Press, 1977. ISBN 0-87773-700-2
  14. ↑ Ehrman, Bart D. (February 2011). "8. Forgeries, Lies, Deceptions, and the Writings of the New Testament. Modern Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions". Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (First Edition. EPub ed.). New York: HarperCollins e-books. pp. 282–283. ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. Archived from the original (EPUB) on February 15, 2012. Retrieved September 8, 2011.
  15. ↑ Fida Hassnain. A Search for the Historical Jesus from Apocryphal, Buddhist, Islamic & Sanskrit Sources. Gateway Books, Bath, UK. 1994, p. 29.
  16. ↑ The Heart of a Continent: A Narrative of Travels in Manchuria, Across the Gobi Desert, Through the Himalayas, the Pamirs, and Hunza (1884-1894), 1904, pp. 180–181.
  17. ↑ Avedananda (1919). Kashmir O Tibbote Swami Avedananda.
  18. ↑ Chaitanya 1987, p. 119.
  19. ↑ Swami Abhedananda's "Journey Into Kashmir and Tibet" rendered into English by Ansupati Dasgupta and Kunja Bihari Kundu.
  20. ↑ Chaitanya 1987, pp. 119–121, 164–166.
  21. ↑ Chaitanya 1987, p. 121.
  22. ↑ Price, Robert M. (June 2001). "Jesus in Tibet: A Modern Myth". Westar Institute. Retrieved March 7, 2019.
  23. ↑ Chaitanya 1987.
  24. ↑ The Second Coming of Christ, Chapter 5 (Self-Realization Fellowship, 2004)
  25. ↑ Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (1895). Violets and Other Tales. Boston: Monthly Review. pp. 110–122.
  26. ↑ J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena, 2007. p. 377
  27. ↑ Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India, (Jul 1, 2003) ISBN 1853727237 pages iv-v (publisher's note)
  28. ↑ Prophet, Elizabeth Clare (1987). The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus' 17-Year Journey to the East. Summit University Press. p. 468. ISBN 0-916766-87-X.
  29. ↑ Gerald O'Collins and Daniel Kendall, Focus on Jesus, Mercer Univ Press 1998. ISBN 0852443609. pages 169-171
  30. ↑ Nicolas Notovitch, L'empereur Nicolas II et la politique russe, Paris : P. Ollendorff, 1895.

Sources

  • Chaitanya, Brahmachari Bhairab (1987) [first published in Bengali in 1929]. Swami Abhedananda's Journey into Kashmir and Tibet. Rendered into English by Ansupati Daspupta and Kunja Bihari Kundi. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math. ISBN 0874816432.
  • Hooper, Richard (2012). Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and Lao Tzu. ISBN 978-1571746801.

Further reading

  • Douglas, J. Archibald (1896). "The Chief Lama of Himis on the Alleged 'Unknown Life of Christ". Nineteenth Century. 39: 667–678.
  • Fader, H. Louis, The Issa Tale That Will Not Die: Nicholas Notovich and His Fraudulent Gospel (University Press of America, 2003). ISBN 978-0-7618-2657-6
  • Müller, Max (1894). "The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India". Nineteenth Century. 36: 515.
  • Notovitch, Nicolas (2006). The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ: By the Discoverer of the Manuscript. Translated by J. H. Connelly and L. Landsberg. Murine Press. ISBN 1434812839.
  • Paratico, Angelo, The Karma Killers, New York, 2009. This is a novel based on Notovitch's story, set in modern times with flashbacks to the time of Jesus and to World War II. Most of it is based in Hong Kong and Tibet. It was first printed in Italy under the title Gli Assassini del Karma, Rome 2003.
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