Where was Jesus from 12 to 30 years old? The Gospel is silent about this, and many are trying to fill the gap - in particular, the so-called "Tibetan Gospel". But what actually happened?
We can feel the correctness of our faith, but we cannot always explain it or prove it to an unbeliever, especially to someone who, for some reason, irritates our worldview. Reasonable questions of an atheist can bewilder even the most sincere Christian.
Luke's Gospel contains an episode about 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple:
The next episode concerns the Lord's entry into public service when he was "thirty years old."
Vasily Polenov. Filled with wisdom, 1890s - 1900s.
There is no information in the Gospel about the eighteen years that passed between these events, and many have tried - and still try to fill the gap.
There is a medieval English legend that the young man Jesus visited England and lived in the village of Priddy, in Somerset. Although this is obviously just a touching manifestation of medieval piety, there are people who seriously defend this theory, but in Russia it is little known.
Better known are the theories that Jesus traveled to the East at this time - to Tibet or India, they are still quite popular, and we should pay attention to them.
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The first idea that Hinduism influenced the Lord Jesus and Christianity was expressed by the French writer Louis Jacolliot, better known here as the author of adventure novels. In his work The Indian Bible, or the Life of Jesse Kristna, Jacolliot wrote that there is a deep similarity between the Indian legends of the deity Krishna and the Gospel, and believed that the Gospel itself is a myth, which is a processing of Indian material. Jacolliot believed that the word "Christ" comes from the word "Krishna" - an idea, then happily picked up by the Society for Krishna Consciousness, and saw in the name "Jesus" the Sanskrit word "Jeseus", meaning "pure essence." True, at about the same time, the outstanding German orientalist and linguist Max Müller noticed that such a Sanskrit word does not exist, and the term was simply invented by Jacolliot. Jacolliot did not claimthat Jesus was in India - but he should be noted as the originator of the myth of Indian influence.
The idea was developed in the book "The Tibetan Gospel" by the Russian officer Nikolai Notovich, which was published in French in 1894. In this book, he claimed that in 1887 he visited the Buddhist monastery Himis, located in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, where he said he heard about a document called "the life of Saint Isa, the best of the sons of men."
According to the Tibetan Gospel, at the age of 15, Jesus went east to, as the text states, “improve in the divine word and study the laws of the great Buddha,” arriving at the place and “Having studied the Pali language perfectly there, the righteous Issa devoted himself to studying sacred scrolls of Sutras. After six years, Issa, whom the Buddha chose to spread his holy word, was able to explain the sacred scrolls perfectly. Then he, leaving Nepal and the Himalayan mountains, went down to the valley of Rajputan and headed west, preaching to various nations about the highest perfection of man."
Almost immediately after the publication of this text, he was sharply criticized by experts - the same Max Müller said that either the monks joked about Notovich, or he simply forged the text. Müller wrote to the abbot of the monastery, and he replied that over the past fifteen years not a single European had been to the monastery and that he had no idea about the documents that Notovich was referring to. James Archibald Douglas, professor of English at the State College in the Indian city of Agra, visited the monastery that Notovich spoke of in 1895, and found that the abbot had never seen anyone like Notovich, and characterizes all his statements as “Lies and nothing except for lies!"
All these revelations, however, did not hinder the popularity of the Tibetan Gospel. Against the background of a general interest in "Eastern spirituality" and various projects of unification of religions, voices have emerged in defense of its authenticity. A follower of Ramakrishna Swami Abhedananda in 1922 decided to independently find the sources of Notovich in Himis and declared that he had succeeded, as he described it in his book Travel to Kashmir and Tibet. The famous Russian artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich declared in 1925 that “in Khemi there is a really old Tibetan translation from a manuscript written in Pali and located in a famous monastery near Lhasa. Finally we learned the continuity of eyewitnesses. The tales of forgery have been destroyed."
It should be noted that both Blavatsky and the Roerichs enjoyed immense popularity among our spiritually seeking intelligentsia of the last Soviet and early post-Soviet years, and, mainly thanks to them, the version about "Jesus who was in India" went to the masses.
The reason for the stability of this concept is understandable - it is a passion for "Eastern spirituality", which gives a vaguely pleasant feeling of belonging to some secrets, to a high spiritual experience, without requiring any spiritual discipline and repentance, and a desire to somehow fit into this "spirituality" of all the significant religious figures of humanity - and first of all, of course, Jesus.
However, the very theory that Jesus was in India does not appear until the last quarter of the 19th century, finds no confirmation and, in fact, contradicts the content of the New Testament - in which it is very difficult to find any parallels with Indian spirituality.
For example, in the Gospel of Mark we read: “From there He went out and came to His own country; His disciples followed Him. When Saturday came, He began teaching in the synagogue; and many who heard with amazement said, Where did this come from him? what wisdom was given to him, and how such miracles are performed by his hands? Isn't He the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of Jacob, Josiah, Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here between us? And they were tempted about Him. Jesus said to them: there is no prophet without honor, unless in his own country and with his relatives and in his house (Mark 6: 1-4) It sounds as if people knew Jesus perfectly well from his previous life - He grew up next door to them, and it seemed incredible to them that someone so great had been revealed in him.
For the Church, this period of silence is also important - because it shows the humility of God, who became a man who spent a simple life in obscurity, doing hard and not prestigious work. In this, He raised the dignity of ordinary people, and showed the height of simple daily work.