The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ

The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is a classic biography of Jesus Christ that is taken from the original text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 discovery. Shulim or Nikolai Notovich, known in the West as Nicolas Notovitch, was a Crimean Jewish adventurer who claimed to be a Russian aristocrat, spy 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 there 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, but he later confessed to having fabricated his evidence. Notovitch claimed that he broke his leg in India and while recovering from it at the Hemis monastery in Ladakh, he learned of the "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men" – Isa being the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam. Notovitch's story, with the text of the "Life," was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ. It was translated into English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Notovitch claimed that the chief lama at Hemis told him of the existence of the work, which was read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the "Life of Issa," which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses "in accordance with the requirements of the narrative." As published by Notovitch, the work consists of 244 short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. The otherwise undocumented name "Issa" resembles the Arabic name Isa used in the Koran to refer to Jesus and the Sanskrit "isa", the Lord. The "Life of Issa" begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, its deliverance by Moses, its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. At the age of thirteen the divine youth, rather than take a wife, leaves his home to wander with a caravan of merchants to India, to study the laws of the great Buddhas. Issa is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend time among the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. Issa spent six years studying and teaching at Jaganath, Rajagriha, and other holy cities. At twenty-nine, Issa returns to his own country and begins to preach. He visits Jerusalem, where Pilate is apprehensive about him. The Jewish leaders, however, are also apprehensive about his teachings yet he continues his work for three years. He is finally arrested and put to death for blasphemy, for claiming to be the son of God. His followers are persecuted, but his disciples carry his message to the world. Although Notovitch had been discredited in Europe, Swami Abhedananda, a contemporary and colleague of Swami Vivekananda, visited the Hemis monastery in 1922 to verify the reports of Notovich that he had heard the previous year in the USA. The lamas at the monastery confirmed to him that Notovich was indeed 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 manuscript on Jesus Christ was shown to Notovich and contents interpreted so that he could translate them into Russian. The original manuscript was said to be in Pali in the monastery of Marbour near Lhasa. The manuscript preserved at Hemis was in Tibetan. Swami Abhedananda himself was shown the manuscript, which had 14 chapters containing 223 couplets. The Swami got some portions of the manuscript translated with the help of a lama, about 40 verses appearing in the Swami's travelogue. The lamas told Swami that Jesus Christ came secretly to Kashmir after his resurrection 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.