Hi
God bless you. You are a Catholic; have a little patience for reading only some excerpts from Holger Kerston, a German research scholar.
Please Google for< Mary: Holger Kerston> .
Perhaps you don’t have much time so I give it here.
sol.com.au/kor/7_01.htm
Jesus Lived in India- Holger Kersten
Thus begins Holger Kersten’s book “Jesus Lived in India”. This German book is a thorough, methodical and authoritative examination of the evidence of Christ’s life beyond the Middle East before the Crucifixion and in India and elsewhere after it.
This article is a summary of Kersten’s exhaustive research into
Christ’s travels after the Crucifixion, his arrival in India with the Mother Mary and finally his death and entombment in Kashmir. Kersten notes the many parallels of Christ’s teachings with other religious and cultural traditions and suggests that at least some of these figures may have been one and the same personality. It is not possible, Kersten asserts, to disprove that Christ went to India.
The current information documenting Christ’s life is restricted to the gospels and the work of Church theologians. One can hardly trust these sources to be objective considering their obvious interest in maintaining the authority of their Church and its grip on the masses.
The Russian scholar, Nicolai Notovich, was the first to suggest that Christ may have gone to India. In 1887, Notovich, a Russian scholar and Orientalist, arrived in Kashmir during one of several journeys to the Orient. At the Zoji-la pass Notovich was a guest in a Buddhist monastery, where a monk told him of the bhodisattva saint called “Issa”. Notovich was stunned by the remarkable parallels of Issa’s teachings and martyrdom with that of Christ’s life, teachings and crucifixion.
For about sixteen years, Christ travelled through Turkey, Persia, Western Europe and possibly England. He finally arrived with Mary to a place near Kashmir, where she died. After many years in Kashmir, teaching to an appreciative population, who venerated him as a great prophet, reformer and saint, he died and was buried in a tomb in Kashmir itself.
The many Islamic and Hindu historical works recording local history and legends of kings, noblemen and saints of the areas thought to be travelled by Jesus also give evidence of a Christ like man; the Koran, for example, refers to Christ as “Issar”. Further east, the Kurdish tribes of Eastern Anatolia have several stories describing Christ’s stay in Eastern Turkey after his resurrection. These traditional legends have been ignored by the theological community.
The Apocryphal ‘Acts of Thomas’, for example, tell how Christ met Thomas several times after the Crucifixion. In fact they tell us how Christ sent Thomas to teach his spirituality in India. This is corroborated by evidence found in the form of stone inscriptions at Fatehpur Sikri, near the Taj Mahal, in Northern India.
They include “Agrapha”, which are sayings of Christ that don’t exist in the mainstream Bible. Their grammatical form is most similar to that of the Apocryphal gospel of Thomas. This is but one example giving credibility to the idea that texts not recognised by the Church hold important clues about Christ’s true life and his teachings.
It is at Andrapolis that Christ entreated Thomas to go to India to begin spreading his teachings. It seems that Christ and Mary then moved along the West coast of Turkey, proof of this could be an old stopping place for travellers called the “Home of Mary”, found along the ancient silk route.
In his travels through Persia (today’s Iran) Christ became known as Yuz Asaf (leader of the Healed). We know this because a Kashmiri historical document confirms that Isa (the Koranic name for Christ) was in fact also known as Yuz Asaf. The Jami - uf - Tamarik, Volume II, tells that Yuz Asaf visited Masslige, where he attended the grave of Shem, Noah’s son. There are various other accounts such as Agha Mustafa’s “Awhali Shahaii-i-paras” that tell of Yuz Asaf’s travels and teachings all over Persia. It seems that Yuz Asaf blessed Afghanistan and Pakistan with his presence also.
There are for example two plains in Eastern Afghanistan near Gazni and Galalabad, bearing the name of the prophet Yuz Asaf. Again in the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Thomas says that he and Christ attended the Court of King Gundafor of Taxila (now Pakistan), in about 47AD, and that eventually both the King and his brother accepted Christ’s teachings.
continued on the next post