The life story of the most famous person who has ever lived is, in fact, filled with a mysterious gaping hole. From the age of 13 to 29 there is no Biblical, Western, or Middle Eastern record of Jesus‘s whereabouts or activities in Palestine. Known as “The Lost Years,” this gaping hole remained a mystery until one explorer’s remarkable discovery in1887.
In the late 19th century a Russian doctor named Nicolas Notovitch traveled extensively throughout India, Tibet, and Afghanistan. He chronicled his experiences and discoveries in his 1894 book The Unknown Life of Christ. At one point during his voyage, Notovitch broke his leg in 1887 and recuperated at the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of Hemis in the city of Leh, at the very top of India. It was here where monks showed Notovitch two large yellowed volumes of a document written in Tibetan, entitled The Life of Saint Issa. During his time at the monastery, Notovitch translated the document which tells the true story of a child named Jesus (i.e. Issa = “son of God”) born in the first century to a poor family in Israel. Jesus was referred to as “the son of God” by the Vedic scholars who tutored him in the sacred Buddhist texts from the age of 13 to 29. Notovitch translated 200 of the 224 verses from the document.
During his time at the monastery in1887, one lama explained to Notovitch the full scope and extreme level of enlightenment that Jesus had reached. “Issa [Jesus] is a great prophet, one of the first after the twenty-two Buddhas,” the lama tells Notovitch. “He is greater than any one of all the Dalai Lamas, for he constitutes part of the spirituality of our Lord. It is he who has enlightened you, who has brought back within the pale of religion the souls of the frivolous, and who has allowed each human being to distinguish between good and evil. His name and his acts are recorded in or sacred writings. And in reading of his wondrous existence, passed in the midst of an erring and wayward people, we weep at the horrible sin of the pagans who, after having tortured him, put him to death.”
The discovery of Jesus’s time in India lines up perfectly with The Lost Years of Jesus, as well as with the degree of significance of his birth in the Middle East. When a great Buddhist, or Holy Man (i.e. Lama), dies, wise men consult the stars and other omens and set off often on extraordinarily long journeys to find the infant who is the reincarnation of the Lama. When the child is old enough he is taken away from his parents and educated in the Buddhist faith. Experts speculate that this is the foundational origin of the story of the Three Wise Men, and it is now believed Jesus was taken to India at 13 and taught as a Buddhist. At the time, Buddhism was already a 500-year-old religion and Christianity, of course, had not even begun.