Tuesday, November 08, 2005

HERE'S A JESUS MOVIE that places him in India during the years of his life which are not covered in the four gospels, and maybe after the crucifixion too:
Kolkata filmmaker traces Christ's 'India trail' (NewKerala.com)

By Sujoy Dhar, Kolkata: Where was Jesus Christ between the age of 12 and 30 years? He supposedly visited India during this period, according to a theory, and a filmmaker here has tried to follow Christ's yet unexplored trail in his new movie.

Though the Bible does not give credence to such theories, engineer-turned filmmaker Subhrajit Mitra's "The Unknown Stories of the Messiah" focuses on the unexplored life of Christ and his unaccounted years in the Bible.

Did Christ visit India after his crucifixion? Is a tomb in the Kashmir Valley that of Christ? These are some of the controversial questions Mitra raises in his film.

[...]

"Neither the Bible nor the mainstream gospels give credence to such theories but the scrolls found in caves near the Dead Sea or at Nag Hammadi (in Egypt), believed to be the first drafts of the Bible, corroborate the alternative theory about Christ," Mitra told IANS.

[...]

This alternative theory was strengthened after some scrolls (dating back to between 200 BC and 100 AD) were discovered in 1947 in a group of caves near Khirbat Qumran in Jordan at the northwestern end of the Dead Sea.

Two years before that, in 1945, some scrolls dating back to 350 AD were found tucked into a large jar at Nag Hammadi village in upper Egypt.

[...]

Maybe it will be an entertaining movie, but this historical rationale is bogus. The Dead Sea Scrolls never mention Jesus and I'm pretty sure they never mention India either. The Nag Hammadi library has a number of noncanonical gospels and apocalypses, but they do not mention India and certainly do not place Jesus there.

I'm not an expert in this area, but as far as I know, the earliest text to connect a first-generation Christian figure with India is the third-century Syriac Acts of Thomas, which has Thomas (not Jesus) evangelizing India. As far as I know, claims about Jesus himself going to India are modern. Here's a site that claims to collect the information, but I can't speak for its accuracy or completeness.

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