Bbc Documentary Concludes That Jesus Studied Buddhism In India

[camerata]

This has been mentioned before, but now a BBC documentary concludes that Jesus studied Buddhism in India:

The Lost Years of Jesus BBC documentary:

http://krishnatube.com/video/293/Jesus-in-...BBC-Documentary

[mauGR1]

Yes,this is an old story,when i was in Kashmir in '81,close to the place where a Christian tomb is,one local Brahmin confirmed that Christian pilgrims have visited that tomb since 2000 years.For some reasons Catholic priests are reluctant to talk about it,while in India Jesus is regarded to be a Vishnu Avatar,same as Buddha Sakyamuni.

Thanks for posting,i'm going to watch it right now.

[Xangsamhua]

There in fact appears to be no BBC documentary about Jesus going to India or studying Buddhism, either in the unknown years before his ministry or following his crucifixion. The Jesus in India thing is just a YouTube mock-up from an unnamed source waxing lyrically about the work of Holger Kersten & Elmer Gruber.

The BBC reference to Jesus in India comes from an interview on BBC4 with Richard Denton, a television producer who was for a while with the Religion program. This is the relevant bit:

BBC 4 documentary “Did Jesus Die? (11 July, 2003)

Interview with Richard Denton

RD: One story is that he gets out and goes to the South of France with Mary Magdalene, there is a certain amount of evidence that she went there. And the other is that he goes to India and there are a number of versions of this. One of which suggests that in fact he had already been to India during the missing years between 12 and 29.

BBC Four: It was very interesting the parallel between the story of the three kings and the search for a reincarnated Lama…
RD: Absolutely, we explore that and the similarities between the miracles and the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus in the programme. And of course Buddha pre-dates Jesus by about 500 years, so it's not unreasonable that he may have gone to India, learned Buddhist teaching and brought it back. Then when he returns to India after the crucifixion he carries on the ministry in Kashmir until he dies at the age of 80.

You get the idea - not exactly hard data nor cutting-edge scholarship. There are heaps of these stories around, as you would expect when a religious founder steps into pages of history from complete obscurity and disappears after having apparently died from the effects of crucifixion.

I enjoyed Holger Kersten's books when I read them in the early 90s. He seems to have been a thorough researcher and a good literary detective. His books are persuasive and thought-provoking. But that's all. His speculations, like those of the conspiracy genre, are based on circumstantial evidence and inferences that can be neither verified nor falsified. Having said that, he may well be onto something, but we just don't know and probably never will. I don't think he has any standing in the academic community of Jesus scholars, though there are plenty among them who would be quite happy to accept his conclusions if there were sufficient evidence for them. Many liberal Christians now do not accept the Resurrection as a physical event, able to be video-recorded had that been possible at the time, but they can't go on to assert that Jesus went to India or went to France with Mary Magdalen and Jesus Junior or joined up with the Essenes or whatever one might claim of him.

To keep this topic Buddhism-related, let's not forget that Jesus lived on a busy trade route and 4 kilometres from a new city being built, Sepphoris, where he and his father possibly worked in the construction projects. It would have been very easy for a thoughtful and curious young man to have come in contact with traders and tradesmen from the East and to have learned something of the teachings of the Buddha. He wouldn't have had to go to India. The former Lutheran, now Episcopalian, Marcus Borg, has written a popular book in which sayings of the Buddha and of Jesus are placed side by side as a demonstration of their similarity, but this does not tell us that Jesus learnt these principles from a Buddhist teacher, just that they have a certain amount in common.

Edited August 20, 2009 by Xangsamhua

[camerata]

There in fact appears to be no BBC documentary about Jesus going to India or studying Buddhism, either in the unknown years before his ministry or following his crucifixion. The Jesus in India thing is just a YouTube mock-up from an unnamed source waxing lyrically about the work of Holger Kersten & Elmer Gruber.

The BBC reference to Jesus in India comes from an interview on BBC4 with Richard Denton, a television producer who was for a while with the Religion program. This is the relevant bit:

OK, mea culpa. I was rocketing through news items and didn't check into it very thoroughly befiore posting. Since we've had topics on this subject before, I'll close this one.

See topic The Theory that Christ had Buddhist Teachers.