Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk at the opening of the International Symposium of New Testament Researchers on September 26 noted that numerous alternative biographies of Jesus Christ are having a detrimental effect on the general public, undermining trust in the Gospels. The most incredible versions are considered: that Jesus escaped death on the cross and died in Indian Kashmir at the age of 120, or that he was married to Mary Magdalene, or that he was the leader of the militant Jewish nationalists and many others.
- For the last ten years, such literature, revealing outright falsifications under the guise of ultimate truth, has simply flooded the Russian book market. In contrast to serious academic works on biblical studies, these populist expositions are very popular among the reading public, ” Priest Alexei Andreev, a graduate of the theological faculty of the Orthodox St. Tikhon University for the Humanities, told Life. - This is an honest call for the separation of the wheat from the chaff - an invention of a sick imagination from real history.
Jesus Christ is a radical extremist, rebel
A non-fiction sensation in 2013 was a new biography of Christ - "The Fanatic: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" - written by a religious scholar of Iranian origin Reza Aslan. The book, originally called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (the Zealots are a socio-political, religious movement in Judea that emerged in the second half of the 1st century BC), even surpassed works in the Amazon Internet service bestseller rating Joanne Rowling.
Producer of Potter and Gravity, Englishman David Heyman is already preparing a screen version of Aslan's sensational bestseller. The film will be written by James Seamus, best known for his work on Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Ice Storm.
Aslan writes in his book that to understand the real historical Jesus it is necessary to understand the turbulent era in which he lived. He paints a portrait of an ardent rebel, a Jewish nationalist, "a zealous revolutionary who, like all Jews of that era, was swept by a wave of religious and political turmoil in first century Palestine."
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The author warns that this idea will be a real shock for many Christian readers. The real Jesus, writes Aslan, "bears little resemblance to the image of a good shepherd, cultivated by the early Christian community."
Jesus was a charismatic leader who played on Jewish grievances to create a mass movement, the author says. However, as the leader of the rebel movement, he failed: the hated regime was not overthrown, but he himself was captured along with two other rebels and executed.
“The new world order that he drew in his imagination,” writes Aslan, “was so radical, dangerous and revolutionary that the only possible reaction on the part of Rome could be the arrest and execution of [his followers] for inciting a riot.
But shortly thereafter, Jesus' followers came to the conviction that their leader had risen from the dead and that his work still did not end in failure. Unlike other Zealot movements that ceased after the death of their leaders, the Jesus movement not only continued to exist despite strong opposition, but flourished, soon absorbing many non-Jews.
As the TV presenter of the American television channel CBS John Dickerson noted, the book written by Aslan is not a historical description of the life of Jesus, but the opinion of an educated Muslim about the founder of Christianity.
“The Fanatic is devastating to the teachings about Jesus that Christianity has offered for 2,000 years,” Dickerson said emotionally. - For many centuries, there have been the conclusions of the supporters of Islam that Jesus was a fanatical prophet who was not God, that Christians did not understand him, that the Christian Gospels are not actual events, and the life of Jesus is just a myth.
In turn, the world famous American biblical scholar Craig Evans says that Reza Aslan's book "is replete with mistakes, flaws and exaggerations."
The Fanatic: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth revives the theory that the preaching and death of Jesus is best explained when we consider the contemporary Jewish Zealots movement at the turn of the century. This is not much new, writes Evans. - The most complete presentation of this idea was given by the British researcher Brandon in 1967. I strongly doubt Aslan's fresh take on this idea will win substantial support - at least not among researchers.
The book does cause a lot of controversy regarding the various claims of the author: for example, that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem and was not the son of God.
However, Aslan is confident that, having a doctoral (Ph. D. - rather adequate to the Russian degree of candidate of sciences) degree in sociology of religion, he has the necessary qualifications to write works on the history of religion.
“I am a scientist, a specialist in religion who has been studying Christianity for two decades and who is also a Muslim,” Aslan says. - I am not a Muslim who writes about Jesus. I am an expert with a degree in the history of religion.
Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene
Moreover, he allegedly had two children from this New Testament heroine. This is what the book "The Lost Gospel" by English professor Barry Wilson and documentary filmmaker Simchi Yakubovich, published in England in 2014, says. In an effort to replicate the success of one of the best-selling books of the past decade, The Da Vinci Code, the authors of The Lost Gospel claim to have found evidence of the love relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene in an ancient manuscript from the British Library.
- What the Vatican was afraid of, and what Dan Brown only suspected has come true, - states at the very beginning of the book. - Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and they had children together.
The Lost Gospel is written from an ancient manuscript in a Near Eastern language akin to Aramaic. The manuscript is in 29 chapters and dates back to around 570 AD. The ancient document was kept in the archives of the British Library for about 170 years, where it ended up after the British Museum bought it in 1847 from a vendor who claimed to have found the manuscript at the Monastery of St. Macarius in Egypt.
The authors of the book assure that the manuscript telling about the life of the Old Testament Joseph the Beautiful and his wife Asenefa is in fact talking about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The encryption for the Old Testament history was allegedly needed in order to hide the "true Gospel" from the persecution of Christians at the beginning of our era.
To prove the idea that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, Yakubovich refers to the New Testament. He describes her decision to come to his body on the Sunday after the crucifixion.
“The Gospels say that she went there to wash and anoint his body,” he writes. - But she is just one of his followers and is still going to work with his naked body? The women did not wash the rabbis or men's bodies in general. Only men did it, of women, only wives.
Two years before the book was written, Harvard University professor Karen King said that she had found a small fragment of papyrus, presumably also from Egypt, called "The Gospel of the Wife of Jesus." However, in 2016 it turned out that this document was a fake.
The London public received the book ambiguously, and the official Anglican Church also reacted to the publication.
- Church representatives claim that this is nothing more than a clever marketing ploy. In their opinion, by releasing the book on the eve of Christmas, the authors hope that it will repeat the success of the legendary "Da Vinci Code", - according to the Internet edition seeker.com. - The priests of the Anglican Church have already rushed to name the "Lost Gospel" as another source of misinformation about the chronicle of biblical events and the life of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ lived in India
The idea of Christ's wanderings to the East still attracts lovers of esotericism and mysticism of all stripes, including in our country. German writer Holger Kersten is the most famous author of books on the Indian footprint of Christ. His book "Jesus Lived in India", published in 1983 in Germany, was wildly popular not only in the author's homeland, but also abroad. The Russian translation of the book was published in 2007, but interest in it is still alive, it can be found on the shelves of bookstores in the country.
Jesus Lived in India is a popular science book that presents an impressive (typical of the Germanic school) study of the testimony of Christ's life in the Middle East before the crucifixion, as well as in India. The text contains many Christian apocrypha, references to the works of Helena Blavatsky and Nicholas Roerich (the creators of their own religious concept, allegedly uniting all world religions and at the same time rejecting them as having now lost their original knowledge).
The author relies on the "Tibetan Gospel" published at the beginning of the 20th century by the Russian journalist Nikolai Notovich, as well as on the book "Jesus in India" by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya religious movement. Ahmadism also claims to be a synthesis of Christianity and Islam, with Ghulam Ahmad himself being declared the last and final prophet.
Holger Kersten largely echoes Ahmad's hypothesis that Jesus survived the execution due to a conspiracy between members of the Jewish Essenes with whom he was associated and Pilate. It was dangerous for him to remain in Palestine, so he went east, to the ten "lost" Jewish tribes ("tribes of Israel"), taken prisoner by the Assyrian king Sargon II in 722 BC. and then reached India. In a foreign land, many of them fell into idolatry, and Jesus supposedly faced the task of returning their faith in one God.
Having traveled from Judea through modern Syria, Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Christ reached Indian Kashmir. Wherever he went, he visited the communities of the Jews, preaching and healing. Jesus was called the prophet Yuzu Asaf, or "the leader of the purified," because he healed many lepers. After a long life on earth, he allegedly died in Kashmir as an ordinary person.
This statement poses a serious challenge to both Christianity and Islam. Many Kashmiris and Ahmadis still believe that the tomb of the Prophet Yuza, known as Rosa Bal, is located in the Indian city of Srinagar.
- The mausoleum is a small one-story brick building topped with a pointed peak. On the fence hangs a wooden plaque with the inscription: “Ziyarat of Saint Yuzu Asaf and Said Nasir-u-Din” (another righteous man buried in the same place), Vlad Sokhin, a traveler and journalist, who visited Srinagar recently described this building.
- Inside the mausoleum is divided into two rooms: a small vestibule and a large hall. Between them is a grate and a door locked with a large padlock, writes Sokhin. - In the center of it is the tomb itself. It is fenced in with a timber frame with windows through which you can see a long gravestone covered with cloth. According to the testimony of scientists who studied the history of this burial, there is a stone slab under the shrine.
Researchers' repeated attempts to find out what was under the stove were unsuccessful. To this day, their requests with a request to open the grave and conduct a DNA analysis on the buried remains of the authorities of Srinagar have refused.
In 1985, German Indologist and Tibetan scholar Gunther Grönbold published an extensive scholarly study, Jesus in India: The End of a Legend, in which he criticized Kersten's position. He pointed out that he used the work of Notovich, which already in 1894 was recognized as a forgery. Kersten also kept silent about the fact that Notovich had Jesus in Tibet and India before, not after the crucifixion.
Ekaterina Korostichenko