Transcription
Did teenage Jesus travel to Asia and study as a Buddhist guru? That's a really weird question, but let's talk about it.
It is one of the world's great mysteries, a biblical conundrum that has baffled scholars for years. Between the ages of 12 and 30, the life of Jesus Christ is unaccounted for. Could Jesus have been familiar with the teachings of Buddha? Is it possible, as some believe, that he traveled to India during his last years?
While others believe he traveled to India in the late 19th century, a Russian traveler claimed to have discovered such texts in a monastery in India. Which, along with other documents, revealed that Jesus traveled to India and taught there and elsewhere in the East during his missing years.
In the archives of an ancient Tibetan monastery, there are said to be records originally written in India in the ancient Pali language and later translated into Tibetan, dealing with the life of an extraordinary saint known to the Buddhists as Isa. The life story of Saint Isa closely resembles the life of Jesus Christ, revealing what may well be the last years of Jesus. The texts describe the travels and studies in India of a man called Isa, who could have only been the biblical Jesus.
That's just a snippet, a taste of what you'll get in the Wave documentaries online in terms of the so-called lost years of Jesus. And believe me, because I just spent far too long wading through it, you'll get a lot of different, often conflicting, so-called truths about what Jesus was like as a teenager.
Why so much speculation? Well, if you've read through the biblical Gospels, you'll notice that very little to nothing about what Jesus was like as a child, an adolescent, and a teenager is even mentioned. Matthew and Luke have the story of Jesus's birth, and then the next time we pick up with Jesus, it's in Luke chapter 2, telling us a story about the 12-year-old Jesus on a trip with his family to Jerusalem. That story ends up simply saying that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man, and then it ends. That's it. After that, we skip right to Jesus's ministry in his 30s.
This fact has left a lot of people wondering, what was Jesus like between the ages of 12 and being an adult? And this is not a modern question. In fact, there are a number of texts written in the decades and centuries after the writings of the New Testament that try to fill in those gaps. There's a category of literature we refer to as infancy Gospels, and in these infancy Gospels, we have all sorts of stories of Jesus correcting and chastising his school teachers, bumping into kids while they're playing and striking them dead, only to rise them back from the dead. Jesus is even performing miracles where he's turning clay birds he makes for fun from clay into real birds.
If you're looking for sensationalism about the kid Jesus and what he was like, you don't have to look any further than the infancy narratives we find in the following centuries after Jesus's death. The reality is, though, that these writings were written long, long after anyone who knew Jesus was dead. They're not historically reliable, and they often have the theological agenda of later cultish groups that broke off of historical Christianity.
The most reliable source for Jesus have people from Jesus's hometown of Nazareth surprised when he starts teaching and performing miracles. They say, "Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary? And aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Aren't all his sisters with us? Where then did this man learn all these things?" Matthew writes in his Gospel at chapter 13, verse 56. The earliest source material for Jesus's life have people surprised at his skills as a prophet when he goes back to his hometown. If child Jesus was performing miracles all around and having people running terrified of his divine power, like we see in the infancy Gospels, then we wouldn't see people from his home village, specifically people who knew his family personally, expressing such surprise when he shows up and then starts teaching like he is. So, we can almost certainly rule out any of these sensationalized, fanciful stories that come much later.
But what about the idea of Jesus traveling to the other side of the ancient world, that some of these documentaries claim has merit to it? Did Jesus really travel as a teenager and encounter worldviews like Buddhism and Hinduism? Were these types of teachings a big influence on his later adult life? Now, that's a popular theory among modern New Agers, Buddhists, and Ahmadiyya Muslims. But if we really look at the Gospels, do we see more of a guru peeking out than a rabbi?
This type of theory of Jesus's pilgrimage to the East finds its origin with a Russian journalist named Nicholas Notovich, who in 1894 claimed to have found a document in a Buddhist monastery, which he said talked about Jesus's journey from Galilee to India, and even potentially as far as Nepal to learn Hinduism and Buddhism before returning to Israel as an adult to teach these divine truths.
Do these types of theories hold any water? After all, Nepal is only 5,000 kilometers away from Galilee, which would mean that if Jesus did pull off this journey, he would have been the greatest traveler in the first century, and potentially even the entire ancient world at that time. Such a journey would not have been impossible, but would have been incredibly unlikely. Alexander the Great didn't even make it as far as this theory claims Jesus did. And when we look at the writings and teachings of Jesus from the earliest and most reliable sources, we don't see a multi-worldview cosmopolitan individual. As far as the sources are concerned, Jesus didn't even teach in gentile areas north of Galilee all that often.
When we look at the teachings of Jesus, what we see is a first-century Jew. The ideas, concepts, scriptural quotations, methodologies, and interactions are all what we would expect if we were reading the teachings of an exploits of an itinerant, traveling Jewish rabbi. What we do know about Jesus's teaching would actually have directly contradicted the central tenets of religious worldviews like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. Jesus's central message of repentance because the kingdom of God was imminent would have made no sense in context to his teaching of the self being an illusion. The purpose of life, Buddha said, was not to worship God, but to remove all desire for self and realize that you don't exist, and that's when you'll reach enlightenment. This is how one escapes this illusory existence and fleeting false reality and attains Nirvana.
Jesus, on the other hand, said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord to God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus taught, in contrast to the Buddha, that this is what people should desire.
On top of all that, if you press into Notovich's own claims, you find out pretty quickly that his story was a complete hoax. Shortly after the claims emerged in print, the head of the Buddhist monastery Notovich claimed to have visited put out a public statement that actually no Russian individual had ever visited that location, and that there was no such writing chronicling as Saint Isa that existed there.
One of the biggest holes in Notovich's entire narrative is the fact that he says Jesus made it as far as Nepal, where he studied Buddhism. The problem is, Buddhism didn't even reach Nepal until the 7th century, a little over 600 years after Jesus's own earthly life and ministry. If Jesus had made it that far, he wouldn't have been taught Buddhism; he would have been instructed in local animist religions that were the staples in in northeastern India and Nepal at that time.
Despite that, and not to mention every ancient historian who looked into it declaring its nonsense, the story of Jesus's East to West journey makes its rounds every now and again. Actress Shirley MacLaine wrote about it in her book, a number of TV documentaries, some of which you heard previewed at the beginning of this video, talk about it as if there's something of substance, and countless articles and magazines mention it. However, all of the evidence we have, and I really do mean all, are against these types of theories.
What we can ask is, why the early sources, the four Gospels that ended up in our Bibles, tell us anything about Jesus's youth? Why don't they do that? Well, the reality is that the earliest chroniclers of Jesus's life were interested in his public ministry. In fact, when we look at other ancient biography accounts, it's unusual to see any mention of one's childhood unless there was something particularly noteworthy of mentioning, like we see concerning Jesus's birth.
The stories we find about the child Jesus in the the most reliable sources make sense in the fact that they set the stage for what his later adult ministry ends up being like. The ancient writer is trying to answer the question, "Who is this Jesus guy?" Since the details of his childhood and adolescence don't necessarily contribute to that end, they don't include it. And this would be entirely consistent with how other ancient writers would have written about the lives of noteworthy individuals like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar.
If you want to learn more about the history, reliable content, and facts within the Gospel stories from the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, then make sure to hit that subscribe button and check out the other videos on my channel.