Madame Blavatsky's teachings also significantly changed the attitude of Europeans towards Christianity. The general tendency to demythologize and humanize Jesus made him a curious, but quite ordinary figure of one of the teachers of mankind. He found himself on a par with Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Manu and Lao Tzu. Moreover, there are several "testimonies" that Jesus stayed for some time in one of the monasteries in India. In the 19th century, the found "evidence" of the Indian period in the life of Jesus was not questioned, because people wanted to see the world differently.
In 1894, Russian journalist NA. Notovich published the book "The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ", in which he claimed that before the crucifixion, Jesus traveled in the mountains of India for several years, where he received secret magical knowledge that allowed him to perform miracles. In addition, the book stated that after the reproach and crucifixion Jesus revived and left Palestine for Tibet, where he spent a long life in meditation and prayer. This book was an attempt to combine disunited religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism into a coherent whole.
True, it also played into the hands of the anti-Semites, who thus separated Jesus - a Jew by blood - from his roots and made him a man of a different culture. Notovich claimed to have found a manuscript describing that period in the life of Jesus about which the canonical gospels are silent (from 14 to 29 years of his life). He allegedly found it in North India in 1887. While traveling around Ladak, Notovich broke his leg and was forced to stay for a long time in the Buddhist monastery Hemis, where he learned that the monastery library contains works on Issa written in Tibetan. It was not a single text, but disparate stories, and Notovich arranged them in chronological order with the help of lamas. As the lamas said, these traditions were recorded in India in the Pali language in the middle of the 1st century. AD from the words of people who saw Jesus when he lived in India and Nepal,as well as from the words of Indian merchants who maintained trade relations with Jerusalem.
About 200 AD, Pali scrolls were brought from Nepal to Tibet. They were subsequently translated into Tibetan at a monastery on Mount Marbur near Lhasa, and copies of these translations were kept in Hemis.
The second testimony about the Indian gospel belongs to N. K. Roerich. He visited Ladakh in September 1925. In his diaries, Roerich quoted lengthy quotations from the "Tibetan Gospel". Their comparison with the text translated by Notovich shows that Roerich retells the same thing, but in different words. The most delicate moment in this whole story is that 15 years before "Roerich's Notes" the Indian Gospel had already been translated into Russian by the same Notovich. It is difficult to judge whether Nicholas Roerich retold the book known to him or whether he really saw the original text. By the way, Nikolai Konstantinovich himself did not know the Tibetan language, but his son Yuri translated for him (or retold Notovich's text?).
True, the Roerichs, in their travels across India, allegedly discovered another mysterious scroll telling about Jesus, which is considered even more reliable than the one mentioned by Notovich, since there is no mention of Buddhism in it. However, if both of these texts are fake, it is not surprising that the second forger, who is better acquainted with the historical material, corrected the mistakes of the “previous” one in the “new” manuscript.
But can it be that these texts are real? Indeed, in many respects, doubts about the authenticity of the texts are explained precisely by the fact that they were discovered by close friends or followers of Blavatsky, known for her charlatan tricks.
Curious information is contained in the treatises of the ancient Tibetan religion Bon. One of them mentions "the miracle worker Eses from the country of Iran", who appeared "in the country of Shanshun - Mar" (North India). The date of its appearance roughly corresponds to the beginning of our era. In Bon iconography, Yeses was portrayed to the right of the main god - and in the Christian tradition, Christ must sit on the throne "at the right hand of the Father."
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Perhaps there is an influence of Christianity on the ancient religion, but it should be emphasized that the Bon tradition was distinguished by its isolation. The fact that Jesus is called Iranian in the text can be explained. The fact is that the route from Jerusalem to Tibet most likely passed through Iran.
Another person who saw the mysterious gospel was the Russian orientalist L. V. Shaposhnikov. According to her, she saw the manuscript at Hemis Monastery in 1979, but time constraints prevented her from making a copy or photograph of this wonderful text. The manuscript had the title: "The Life of Saint Issa, the Best of the Sons of Men." By the peculiarities of writing letters L. V. Shaposhnikova dates the manuscript to the 5th – 6th centuries. AD
So, for the first time about the Indian gospel became known more than 100 years ago, but it has not yet been studied by any scientist. There are no photographic copies of the scrolls either. The texts that are available to the European reader are the translations of Notovich and the Roerichs made at the end of the last century - the beginning of the last century. The author of another Russian translation of the Indian Gospel, published in 1910 in the Kharkov religious journal Faith and Reason, chose to remain anonymous. However, it is obvious that this translator, who signed himself "Archimandrite Chr.", Did not translate from the original, but from Notovich's French book. But even if you believe that this text of the Indian Gospel is the original, and not a fake created by Notovich, the translators have modernized it so that it makes the translation a poor helper for scholars. This is how the “Life of Saint Issa,The Best of the Sons of Men "in the Roerichs' translation:
“The earth shook and the heavens wept over the great atrocity that had just taken place in the land of Israel. There they just tortured and executed the great righteous man Issa, in whom the soul of the Universe lived. Here is what the merchants who traveled to the country of Israel told about this. The people of Israel, who lived on a very fertile land, which gave two harvests a year, and owned large flocks, aroused the wrath of God with their sins. Israel was enslaved by powerful and wealthy pharaohs who then reigned in Egypt. " But the words "Israel" and "Egypt" could not have been in the original text! There were some names of countries that Roerich considered Israel and Egypt. If we delete all the place names, we get a text that can refer to any place on the globe. And until a scientific study of the text is made, to state definitelythat this is really a story about Jesus is impossible.
