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.
Nicolas Notovitch

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, and
īśa meaning 'the Lord' in Sanskrit.
Notovitch's account, with the text of the
Life, was published in French in 1894 as
La vie inconnue de Jesus 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][a]
The original Pali manuscript—allegedly
composed after Christ's resurrection[a]—
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 England. 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

a. 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. 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. 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"
 . 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. La Russie et l'alliance anglaise: étude
historique et politique. Paris, Plon-Nourrit,
1906.
. L'Europe à la veille de la guerre. Paris A.
Savine, 1890
9. Virchand R. Gandhi (translator) (2003)
[1894]. The Unknown Life of Jesus
Christ . Kessinger Publishing.
ISBN 0766138984.
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. 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
Edition. 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.
1 . 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 .
1 . 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.
2 . 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)
2 . Prophet, Elizabeth Clare. The Lost Years
of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of
Jesus' 17-Year Journey to the East.
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 1571746803.
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.

External links
Works by Nicolas Notovitch at Project
Gutenberg
Works by or about Nicolas Notovitch
at Internet Archive
Works by Nicolas Notovitch at
LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ
(original, in French), Internet Archive
 The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ by
Nicolas Notovitch , audio book,
YouTube.

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