This is a recurrent theme I’ve seen periodically over the years. It was the major plot point of the novel The Word (or rather the novel revolved around a document purporting to this). It was featured in the Preacher graphic novels as the source of the ultimate world-wide centuries-old conspiracy, the Grail. And now it’s reappeared in The DaVinci Code.
Is this just a popular fictional theme, or is it based on true life speculation? Is it an actual heresy dating back to ancient times, or a relatively modern invention?
Well, I gave up on the The DaVinci Code after about fifty pages because of its lumpen language, so I can’t tell you about that…but I can tell you the very brief details of what you could call the ‘Buddhist Jesus’ theory.
Element 1 - the Magi / Wise Men / Three Kings were Buddhists searching for their new Lama, who is always selected as a young child. Once he reaches maturity, he will be taken away, to receive religious training. After many years of this, he will be free to return to his homeland should he wish, to pass on the knowledge he has received.
(The New Testament jumps from Jesus’ mid-teens to early thirties, which correlates with this)
Element 2 - Many of Jesus’ teachings (IIRC ones such as “He who is without sin cast the first stone”, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to say) have little relation to Judaism or to other philosophies he would have found in the middle east, but have strong parallels with Buddhism.
Element 3 - The worst criminals were crucified with nothing other than nails in the hand and feet. This would result in an incredibly painful and slow death from asphixiation as the muscles in the chest give out - but also the increased chance of rescue.
Element 4 - Escape away from the Romans was easy. The same route, from the Red Sea all the way to India, is followed today by many Dhows (sp?). St Thomas travelled the same route (something not contested by the churches).
Element 5 - There’s a tomb in Kashmir which is reputed to be the final resting place of Jesus. There’s a carving (which if it has a date I don’t know) of feet, with marks in the places which the nails would have been placed.
(Caveat - I’m not going to defend any of this, I’m just presenting what I know I’ve heard, or what I remember hearing )
The Cathars, a sect stamped out in the twelvth century by the Catholic Church, apparently believed that Christ did not die on the cross, but hopped down, grabbed his wife Mary Magdalene and headed to southern France to start the Cathar faith. It seems that they believed that Christ was not human enough to die-- that his death and resurection were merely symbolic.
This belief shows up in a couple of other sects as well. It seems that death and resurrection were a bit too much for some to swallow, and so ways were found around that particular bit of the gospel.
RE the Cathars believing that Mary Mag was Mrs JC, that’s total HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL speculation with no basis in Cathar history. JC was not human enough to die & but was human enough to marry & reproduce?
Cathar thought was radically dualistic- spirit was good & matter was bad. The material world was not directly created by the Good God but by the Demiurge, the God of the Old Testament. JC as Agent of the Good God could not be REALLY material incarnate but only appeared to be human, die & rise. Also, such dualistic groups tended to go in either extreme- that since spirit was good & matter was evil, some adherents radically forsook marriage, family, property, luxury or any material pleasure; while others indulged freely in fleashly pleasures, believing that materialistic sins had no affect on spiritual goodness. Cathar groups also had a rite which one partook near the end of life that would seal one’s salvation upon death, and when one went through that rite & seemed to recover, sometimes that person was deprived of food & drink & care so that they would not jeapordize their salvation by sinning after they’d recovered.
There was a fairly early (c. 3rd century, IIRC) anti-Christian tradition about the disciples stealing Jesus’ body and the Koran says that a body double was crucified in Jesus’ place.
These kinds of stories and theories arise largely from a false perception that Jesus’ missing body must be accounted for (by natural means). This is based on an erroneous assumption that the empty tomb narratives ever had any historicity.
Contemporary scholarship is now largely of the opinion (and for some good reasons) that the empty tomb was a Markan invention, a fiction. The most likely scenario is that Jesus was buried in a shallow, communal criminals’ grave after the crucifixion, that none of his followers knew where he was buried and that the empty tomb was a necessary device created to save Jesus from the embarassment of an ignoble burial (as well as to save Christians the embarassment of not knowing where Jesus’ body was).
The first “resurrection” appearances were probably based on visionary (or fabricated) experiences of Peter in Galilee several years after the crucifixion.
People have invented theories to explain an empty tomb which never existed in the first place.
157: They haven’t killed him and they haven’t crucified him, but it appeared/was suggested to them. Those who disagree about this are in doubt about it; except from trusting on suspicions, they have no knowledge of it. They surely did not kill him.
158: However, God has has lifted him up unto Him. God is powerfull and wise.
A strange confirmation to this statement in Al Qur’an can be found in the testimony of Ireneüs, in the first book of his “Contra Haereses”.
There he describes the vieuw of some people (whom he describes as heretics) on the events:
-Quote- (in a try to translate this more or less correctly)
*" So Jesus should not have suffered the Passion himself, but a certain Simon from Cyrene was ordered to carry the cross in his place. And it is that Simon who was crucified, by mistake or by ignorance, after he had been trough a transformation so they should take him for Jesus (…)"
" So people should not have been worshipping the crucified, but the one who had come in human form, and of whom people thought he was being crucified, and who was called Jesus ". *
-/Quote-
The analogy between the Arabic wording “sjubbiha lahum” = appeared/was suggested to them and the Latin used by Ireneüs " putatus est crucifixus" * they thought* (him being crucified) is in my opinion something to reflect on.
The return of Jesus, who is in Al Qur’an described as being lifted up to God while not being put to death on the cross, is only mentioned in the traditions. Not in Al Qur’an itself.
Both Buchari and Muslim and also other sources mention the return of Isa as " a just judge; but he shall destroy the cross and put to death the swine; he shall put an end to the war".
The use of the symbols “cross” and “swine” can be taken as a reference to the idea that for both Muslims and Jews the Christians are in transgression of what is forbidden. (According to Muslims the Christians commit an eror in their religion). Hence there is a suggestion -or prediction, if you will- that Jesus himself shall bring an end to Christianity.
Some traditions add to this that the son of Mary then shall lead all Muslims in prayer and that he shall concur Dadjjaal, something you can can compare with the anti-christ.
Salaam. A
I don’t have a lot of time to go into detail at the moment but I can do so later. For now I’ll just summarize some of the reasons as follows:
[ul][li]The implausibility of crucifixion victims being given over for burial by the Romans (and I can elaborate on this if requested).[/li]
[li]The silence of Paul in the Epistles about an empty tomb.[/li]
[li]The lack of any empty tomb tradition before Mark.[/li]
[li]The lack of a site of veneration by early Christians.[/li]
[li]Circumstancial evidence (including in Paul) that the “resurrection” originated with Peter in Galilee rather than in Jerusalem.[/ul][/li]I can post in more detail later tonight (with links).
Diogenes while that’s an interesting topic, I wasn’t asking about whether Jesus died and was never resurrected. I was asking about claims that he never died on the cross at all, and that he had a secret “post-crucifixion” life.
Ok, speculation about (as you call it) a “secret, post-crucifixion life” I think is fairly recent. I’m unaware of any ancient traditions. The earliest instance of this kind of think that I’m aware of would be Nicholas Notovitch’s Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, written in the 1890’s. Notovitch claimed to have found some ancient texts which claimed that Jesus had gone to Tibet after surviving the crucifixion, that he was known as “St. Issa” or “Issa the Buddha” there and the he was even entombed there. This vein of fancy was also mined more recently by Holger Kersten in Jesus Lived in India (which was the basis of a special on the Discovery Channel…or maybe it was the History Channel. I forget). Google on “Jesus” and “India” and you will find all kinds of websites propounding this theory. There is even an alleged Tomb of Jesus that they will show you pictures of.
Notovitch was thoroughly destroyed by scholars at the time (notably by Edgar Goodspeed) and his story completely fell apart under scrutiny but it’s still seems to have its fans.
I think that Notovitch was probably the pioneer in this genre of spurious post-crucifixion biography for Jesus but there is precedent in fabricating stories about the “lost years” of Jesus, starting with infancy narratives in the 2nd century.
The idea that Jesus might not have really died on the cross was probably too hot a button to push until fairly recently, but I guess the novelty (as well as the moderate sacrilige) of it makes it an attractive subject for fiction and speculation.
Notovitch never claimed that Jesus survived the crucifixion. In fact, he was an early proponent of the-disciples-made-up-the-story-of-the-Resurrection-because-they-didn’t-know-where-the-body-was theory. According to him, Jesus’s visit to the East had taken place earlier. As he wanted to argue that Jesus’s teachings were derived from Eastern mysticism, his theory would not have made much sense otherwise. The text he claimed to have discovered, the Life of Saint Issa, went on to state that Pilate had the body removed in secret from the tomb and that it was then buried elsewhere. As there is no real evidence that this document ever existed anywhere other than in Notovitch’s imagination, this proves nothing.
The theory about Jesus surviving the crucifixion and then going to India derives instead from the work of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. He first published it in 1899, five years after Notovitch had made his claims. Despite his assertions that he was drawing on local traditions, it is not at all obvious that anyone had believed this before then.
I thought that Notovitch was a proponent of the “swoon” theory (or more specifically that Jesus was in state of samadhi on the cross which only made him look dead) but it’s likely that I’m conflating a couple of different Jesus in India theories. I confess that I have not given the subject much more than a cursory examination.
You are correct that Notovitch fabricated his documents. Not only that but the monostary where he claim to have discovered them while recuperationg from an injury claimed that Notovitch had never been there and that no such documents existed.
The text of the Life of Saint Issa, which is very brief, can be found [url=]here. The final chapter deals with the crucifixion. Despite the flowery language, the clear implication is that Jesus died on the cross and stayed dead.
Assuming that Notovitch believed that Jesus survived the crucifixion is easily done, as those who tout the Jesus-died-in-India idea invariably throw him into the mix without mentioning the inconvenient detail that his ‘evidence’ actually says the opposite.
I have to say that I find it amusing the way that any SDMB thread about the crucifixion is always dominated by variations on Jesus-didn’t-really-die-on-the-cross theories, when oh-yes-he-did-and-they-just-invented-the-bit-about-the-Resurrection ones are so much simpler.
I haven’t really noticed anyone seriously propounding such a theory and I’m usually an active participant in any crucifixion thread.
In this thread, I didn’t get the impression that the OP actually believed in any survival theory, he was just asking about when and where the theories originated.
I actually haven’t seen much discussion at all about survival theories, it seems to me like the debates tend either towards the reasons for the crucifixion, the theology of it or the historicity of the resurrection. The issue of whether Jesus actually died on the cross is just generally assumed from what I’ve seen.
And just in case I haven’t made it clear in my previous posts, I have no doubt whatever that Jesus dies on the cross, that survival theories are spurious and that the resurrection is…well…I won’t say “made up” exactly, I’ll just say I think it’s allegorical, not literal history.
)