Jesus in India

The view that Jesus survived crucifixion, married, had children, lived to be 120, and is buried in Kashmir is mostly propagated by Ahmadiyya Muslims, a rationalist Islamic sect established in the late 19th century in India by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The sect is regarded as unorthodox by both Shia and Sunni Muslims. A recent Orthodox Christian analysis of this tradition is Paul Pappas 1991 book Jesus' Tomb in India: Debate on His Death and Resurrection. The whole idea depends to some extent upon the swoon theory which was popular at the time of composition.

The first book to gain widespread attention for the view that Jesus spent time in India (and Persia and Tibet) during his early life was Nicolas Notovitch's 1894 work The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ. The author claimed to have discovered monastery texts showing that Jesus had travelled through India and Tibet during his teens and early twenties. This view has recently been taken up by Holger Kersten in Jesus Lived in India. Notovitch's book itself in still in print.

Edgar Goodspeed's 1931 book Strange Gospels described the rise and fall of Notovich's claims in the decade following the publication of his book. He outlines some discrepancies which were found in Notovich's account, and its rejection by the academic community at the time. A more up-to-date analysis can be found in Per Beskow's 1983 book Strange Tales about Jesus: A survey of unfamiliar gospels.

Ostensibly psychic variations on the Jesus-in-India theme have been advanced by Levi H. Dowling, Edgar Cayce and Rudolph Steiner. Their views of Jesus' travels to India were allegedly transcribed from the Akashic Records, a telepathically accessed universal library of ideas, thoughts and events. Arild Romarheim gave one recent assessment of these ideas in his 1992 book The Aquarian Christ: Jesus Christ as Portrayed by New Religious Movements.