1

Jonathan Homrighausen
SCTR 157
Research Paper Outline
March 7, 2013

The Life of Issa: Alternative Lives of Jesus in the Light of Orientalism

Controversial producer Paul Davids latest film, Jesus In India, gets a glowing

review on Amazon:

The idea at first seems far fetched - Jesus in India? Yet, as we look in to the
legends and traditions we find out that it is accepted by most people, including the
Catholic Church, that one of Jesus' disciples - Thomas - founded a Church in
India - so could Jesus have gone there?1

Despite its total lack of historical proof, many people entertain the theory that Jesus lived

outside Judea, before or after his crucifixion: India, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, Greece, even

Tibet. Though the guild of biblical scholarship denies the historicity of these theories,2

they continue to create controversy in the public eye. The sources of these theories are

manifold: beliefs of some Hindu groups, the Islamic sect Ahmaddiyas tomb of Jesus in

Kashmir,3 and two gospels discovered around the turn of the twentieth century in the

West. These pseudo-gospels, The Life of Saint Issa and The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus

the Christ, are often seen as New Age, portraying a Jesus who seems to endorse a

pantheist eclecticism. But we can shed much light on these texts by looking at them

through a postcolonial lens. These texts partake of the Orientalist views of Buddhism in

Western academia and pop culture of the time. They reinforce the alterity of the

mystical Orient, its simultaneous inferiority and fascination, rejection and assimilation,

1
Review of Jesus in India,
http://www.amazon.com/review/R17G79LLQDKLQY/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R17G79LLQDKLQY
2
Per Beskow, Modern Mystifications of Jesus, in The Blackwell Companion to Jesus (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2011) 461-463; Robert M. Price, Jesus in Tibet: A Modern Myth, The Fourth R 14 (2001).
3
Simon J. Joseph, Jesus in India? Transgressing Social and Religious Boundaries, JAAR 80 (2012) 169;
Beskow, Strange New Tales, 462.
 2

while replicating the textualization of Buddhism and participating in the mapping of

Western others Jews and Catholics onto Eastern cultures.

Notovitch and Dowling are characters who do not show up in the historical record

much. Dowling, who lived from 1844 to 1911, wrote his Aquarian Gospel in 1907. He

was a preacher (no denomination mentioned) and a chaplain in the Civil War. He

describes the writing of his book:

With avidity he entered into the deeper studies of etheric vibration, determined to
solve the great mysteries of the heavens for himself. Forty years he spent in study
and silent meditation, and then he found himself in that stage of spiritual
consciousness that permitted him to enter the domain of these superfine ehters and
become familiar with their mysteries. He then learned that the imaginings of his
boyhood days were founded upon veritable facts, and that every thought of every
living thing is there recorded.4

The term Aquarian comes from Dowlings belief that the world was on the edge of a

new astrological age, the transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age.5 Dowling does

not claim to have a discovered manuscript, but Notovitch does. Notovitch, a Russian

journalist and spy, claims that he found this manuscript in a Tibetan monastery in 1887.

The manuscript was orally translated to him and he later wrote down what he was told

not a promising start for a manuscript discovery. He published his work, along with a

diary of his journals in India and Tibet, in 1894. Soon after his manuscript discovery

was questioned by the scholars of the day, including famed Orientalist Max Muller who

accused Notovitch of a fabrication.6 Both gospels enjoy a popular following even today,

particularly Dowlings which has inspired the Aquarian Christine Church.7 Although

both men were from countries that participated in colonialism, neither was known to be

4
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 14.
5
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 10.
6
Per Beskow, Strange New Tales about Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1983) 57-65.
7
One can even watch the Easter Liturgy of the Aquarian Christine Church on their YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AquarianChurch.
 3

actively involved in the colonial project, although Notovitchs work as a Russian spy

might qualify him. Yet their gospels echo streams of thought in Europe and America at

the time. It is these streams of thought which I wish to explore.

Edward Said, one of the first postcolonial theorists, coined the term Orientalism

to describe past research into Eastern cultures. Orientalism refers to scholarship about

the Orient, often strongly reified, that was written by Western scholars under the

privilege of colonialism. These scholars were not objectively commenting on the

cultures and civilizations they wrote volumes on, but did so with certain biases and

degrading viewpoints characteristic of a hegemon. One of these biases was alterity, a

strong othering of the colonized. Said, examining scholarship on Arab peoples, notes

how British and French scholars characterized Arab peoples as hypersexual and

tribalistic, in contrast to the sexually controlled and civilized European colonizers. The

dynamic of alterity always creates false dualisms, dualisms which always place the

colonized on the negative pole.

Said, as a Palestinian, focused on Orientalism in the Arab world. But Orientalist

scholarship was also applied to the Buddhist world. For example, the effete, mystical

Orient is contrasted with the muscular, rational West. The pessimistic doctrines of

Buddhism, with its emphasis on the pervasiveness of suffering and the annihilation of

nirvana, are contrasted with Christianity, a religion of hope. Sometimes alterity can paint

the Other in a positive light, as some Westerners saw the East as more spiritual and

somehow better. This often leads not to an appreciation of Eastern religions on their own

terms, but instead to a Western assimilation or eclectic borrowing from the religions.

Assimilation is also a colonial act because it purports to take the best of the other culture
 4

and bring it into the hegemons culture. By taking what is fascinating from another

culture and bringing it into theirs, the hegemon can reduce the threat to their dualisms

created by the disjunct between reality and colonial theory. And even if the subaltern

culture is appreciated, they never have any agency in the process. So the mystical East

can threaten claims of Christian uniqueness.8 In the specific construction of Victorian

Buddhism by British scholars, alterity is what Almond refers to as the polarity of

assimilation and rejection.9 British scholars would accept Buddhism, but only what fit

their terms of Buddhism, or only in the way that made sense to them. Buddhism was

even construed as Indias preparation for Christianity in the way Greek philosophy

prepared Greeks and Romans to accept Christ.10

The pseudo-Gospels about Jesus reflect this polarity of assimilation and rejection,

this alterity. They subsume the good aspects of the East into Jesus, the primary symbol

of the religion of the West. For example, Dowlings work has Mary, Elizabeth, John, and

Jesus being taught by two teachers named Elihu and Salome. One day, Salome teaches:

In early ages of the world the dwellers in the farther East said, Tao is the name of
Universal Breath; and in the ancient books we read,
No manifesting form has Tao Great, and yet he made and keeps the heavens and
earth.
No passion has our Tao Great, and yet he causes sun and moon and all the stars to
rise and set.
No name has Tao Great, and yet he makes all things to grow; he brings in season
both the seed time and the harvest time.11

Dowling not only interjects the term Tao into his story of Jesus, but has Jesus learning

about Taoism in terms evocative of the Dao de jing. This is an example of the kind of

Oriental pastiche Dowling and Notovitch engage in, using Eastern-sounding names and

8
Simon J. Joseph, Jesus in India?, 184.
9
Philip Almond,. The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 132.
10
Almond, British Discovery, 137.
11
Levi Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (Santa Monica, CA: DeCorss & Co., 1972) 42.
 5

terms, often incorrectly, simply to evoke the veneer of the mystical East. Jesus even

learns and seems to accept doctrines of Eastern religions, such as his discussion with

his friend Barata Arabo, a Buddhist monk:

Do you remember, Arabo, when you were ape, or bird, or worm? Now, if you
have no better proving of your plea than that the priests have told you so, you do
not know; you simply guess. Regard not, then, what any man has said; let us
forget the flesh, and go with mind into the land of fleshless things; mind never
does forget. And backward through the ages master minds can trace them-selves;
and thus they know.12

For Dowling and his audience of people curious about the mystical East, a belief that

Jesus discovered and espoused a teaching of the East would move them not to

Buddhism or Hinduism, but to Dowlings Jesus. This Jesus, along with Notovitchs, does

not just study Eastern religions. Notovitchs Jesus masters Buddhist teaching: Issa,

whom the Buddha had elected to spread his holy word, had become a perfect expositor of

the sacred writings.13 Jesus, or Issa, becomes such a good expositor of Buddhist

teachings that the Buddhist priests are at a loss to counter his later refutation of them.

Dowlings more developed gospel takes this theme and runs with it, as when Jesus goes

to India:

And Jesus was accepted as a pupil in the temple Jagannath; and here he learned
the Vedas and the Manic laws. The Brahmic masters wondered at the clear
conceptions of the child, and often were amazed when he explained to them the
meaning of the laws.14

This tale of Jesus precociousness echoes Lukes Jesus astonishing the rabbis at the

temple when he was twelve (Lk 2:46-49).15 Jesus catches on to the other religions, taking

12
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 69.
13
Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, in The Lost Years of Jesus (ed. Elizabeth Clare
Prophet; Malibu, CA: Summit University Press, 1984) 200.
14
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 57.
15
Michael D. Coogan, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
 6

in the wisdom of the East prodigiously. Westerners who wished to bring that wisdom

into their spirituality are now offered a Jesus who has gone to the East and brought its

wisdom back for the Western disciple.

But there is a dark side to this seemingly simple appreciation of Oriental wisdom.

Jesus is also able to assimilate it because, as he states, all religions speak the same

primordial truth:

The nations of the earth see God from different points of view, and so he does not
seem the same to every one. Man names the part of God he sees, and this to him
is all of God; and every nation sees a part of God, and every nation has a name for
God. You Brahmans call him Parabrahm; in Egypt he is Thoth; and Zeus is his
name in Greece; Jehovah is his Hebrew name; but every-where he is the causeless
Cause, the rootless Root from which all things have grown.16

If all religions worship the same God, then a Jesus who integrates all different cultures

insights on different parts of God would be the most enlightened figure of all. Through

Jesus, the Aquarian disciple can access all the worlds religious truth. Jesus is actually

the best Hindu, the best Buddhist:

It was a gala day a throng of Buddhist worshippers had met to celebrate

And priests and masters from all parts of India were there; they taught; but they
embellished little truth with many words. And Jesus went into an ancient plaza
and he taught; he spoke of Father-Mother-God; he told about the brotherhood of
life. The priests and all the people were astounded at his words and said, Is this
not Buddha come again in flesh? No other one could speak with such simplicity
and power. 17

Here Dowlings Jesus is contrasted with the Buddhist priests, who understand little of the

Buddhas teachings. By making Jesus the true arbiter of the wisdom of the East,

Dowling perhaps unwittingly sets up the same dualism as before: the West has the

truth about God, and anything unique the East has to offer is in fact already in the Wests

main religious figure. A follower of Dowlings Aquarian Church need not take any

16
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 65.
17
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 72.
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living Buddhist tradition seriously; the Aquarian Jesus already distilled the insights of the

Buddha into his own teachings.

There is another dark side to the polarities of assimilation and rejection: Jesus

does not just take in the wisdom of the Orient. He rejects much of it. It is key to

examine which religions and nations he rebukes the most, or what aspects of each

religion he rejects. Both Notovitch and Dowling portray Jesus rebuking Hindus harshly.

Notovitch portrays Jesus denying the divine origin of the Vedas and denying the reality

of the theologically justified caste system: He inveighed against the act of a man

arrogating to himself the power to deprive his fellow beings of their rights of humanity;

"for," said he, "God the Father makes no difference between his children; all to him are

equally dear."18 Dowling repeats many of these anti-caste allegations, and the Hindu

priests have no response other than a murder attempt.19 But Buddhism comes off more

lightly in both texts. There is no preaching in either text specifically against Buddhism,

other than a chapter in Dowling where Jesus disagrees with reincarnation.20 This

dynamic of being easy on Buddhism and hard on Hinduism is a familiar part of

Western scholarship in the late nineteenth century. Hinduism was seen as a decadent,

superstitious, ignorant, hierarchal religion which was reformed by the Buddhas teaching

on human equality.21 Siddartha Gautama was even explicitly compared to Martin

Luther.22 This is the ambivalence of the colonizers appropriation of the Other: the

colonizer both integrates and explicitly excludes the Other from their belief system.

Jesus is Buddhist and Hindu but not. An apt comparison would be Jesuit Ippolito

18
Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, 198.
19
Almond, British Discovery, 60.
20
Almond, British Discovery, 70.
21
Almond, British Discovery, 70.
22
Almond, British Discovery, 73.
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Desideri, who studied Tibetan Buddhism under lamas for many years for the main

purpose of disproving those teachings.23 The Orientalist both rejects and appropriates,

loves and hates, the object of study. The Orientalist uses these techniques to take over

the terms of indigenous cultural discourse on religion. There is no need to listen to

Buddhists and Hindus if Jesus already learned and rejected their religions!

One key dynamic of Orientalist or Victorian studies of Buddhism is its

textualization. British scholars went to places where Buddhist texts were found, such as

India and Sri Lanka, where they would learn the languages and take the Buddhist texts.

They would bring this textual expertise home with them to Britain, where they

reconstructed (and refashioned) the beliefs of the historical Buddha. In much the same

way the historical Jesus was being uncovered from layers of tradition and myth,

scholars sought to demythologize early Buddhist sutras to find the historical Buddha.24

And they liked what they found. Victorian Britain was fascinated with the person of

Siddhartha Gautama: as a proponent of social equality against Hinduism,25 as a

compassionate and loving man,26 as an ideal Victorian gentleman.27 But this love for the

Buddha, combined with a compete and total disregard for the living Buddhist traditions

of their day, led to a belief that the true Buddha, the true Dharma, was being re-

established by textual scholars in England.28 This textualization of Buddhism, formed

by the scholars Protestant presupposition that the core of any religion is to be found in

the written word, allowed scholars to define and assimilate Buddhism on their own terms

23
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Foreigner at the Lamas Feet, in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism
Under Colonialism (ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 254.
24
Almond, British Discovery, 66.
25
Almond, British Discovery, 72-3
26
Almond, British Discovery, 78
27
Almond, British Discovery, 79.
28
Almond, British Discovery, 124.
 9

without being confronted by living traditions such as ritual and oral teachings. As

Donald Lopez writes, Very few of these scholars ever traveled to Asia during their

careers: it was not necessary since they had Buddhism in their libraries.29

In these false gospels, Jesus functions as a textualizing colonial scholar. When

Notovitch has him study Buddhism, he is clear which aspect of Buddhism: After having

perfected himself in the Pali language, the just Issa applied himself to the study of the

sacred writings of the Sutras.30 With the Hindus: They taught him to read and

understand the Vedas, to cure by aid of prayer, to teach, to explain the holy scriptures to

the people, and to drive out evil spirits from the bodies of men, restoring unto them their

sanity.31 When the Aquarian Jesus studies with Buddhists, he does not practice

meditation, but he does read the Jewish Psalms and Proph-ets; read the Vedas, the

Avesta and the wisdom of Guatama with his Buddhist monk friend Barata.32 The same

happens in Tibet:

In Lassa of Tibet there was a masters temple, rich in manuscripts of ancient lore.
The Indian sage had read these manuscripts, and he revealed to Jesus many of the
secret lessons they contained; but Jesus wished to read them for himself.
And Jesus had access to all the sacred manuscripts, and, with the help of Meng-ste
[the Indian sage], read them all.33

In traditional Tibetan Buddhism, a key aspect of teaching the Dharma is the relationship a

student has with her root guru, or her teacher. Yet that is not discussed here; the truth

is in the manuscripts. Dowlings Jesus also goes to Greece, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt,

but the dynamic of textualization is not mentioned when he is in those regions. So for

29
Lopez, Foreigner, 258.
30
Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, 200.
31
Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, 197.
32
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 69.
33
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 74. Meng-tse is here the Indian sage, but in reality Meng-tse, or Mencius,
was a fourth-century B.C. Confucian scholar!
 10

Hinduism and Buddhism, Jesus is a colonial scholar taking texts while prophetically

rebuking living traditions as worshipping idols, performing wicked animal sacrifices, and

being bastions of elitism and privilege for the priests. Purporting to take the best from

each religion and find its core truths, Jesus comes to understand them even better than his

teachers.

Another key feature of Orientalist scholarship is mapping ones prejudices onto

the object of study. The gospels of Dowling and Notovitch combine the prejudices

from two fields: the anti-Catholicism of Victorian Buddhist scholars and the anti-

Semitism of contemporary biblical scholars. The anti-Hindu dynamic of Jesus in India

has already been mentioned above. If the Buddha was Martin Luther, then Hinduism was

the corrupt and powerful Catholicism Martin Luther fought against.34 This exemplifies

the tendency of Orientalist scholarship toward obvious anachronisms, combining

geographically and temporally disparate objects of study into unchanging essences and

dualities. Here the Hinduism which Europeans observed in India during modern colonial

times is equated with the Vedic religion of the Buddhas fifth-century B.C. life.35 Not

only is the -ism of Hinduism already a colonial invention, but also this Hinduism is

viewed as the subaltern in Britain: the Catholics.

Much has been written on the de-Judaizing of Jesus in nineteenth-century

European biblical scholarship.36 Scholars who began looking at the historical Jesus

projected their European anti-Semitism onto their studies. In his 1863 Life of Jesus, Ernt

34
Almond, British Discovery, 74.
35
Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo
(London: Routledge, 2006) 34-46.
36
Susanna Heschel, Draining Jesus of Jewishness, in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the
Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 26-66; Shawn Kelley, Jesus and the
Myth of the West: Tubingen and the Construction of Early Christianity, in Racializing Jesus: Race,
Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (New York: Routledge, 2002) 64-88.
 11

Renan argued that Jesus greatness was in overcoming his Jewish background to become

an Aryan.37 In fact, Jesus was often aligned with figures from other world religions,

including the Buddha: Once Jesus was drained of his Jewish identity, his race could be

extrapolated from his religious faith, which, under romanticist influence, was variously

identified as Buddhist or Zoroastrian, both of which were viewed as Aryan.38 Although

there is no clear link between Dowling, Notovitch, and German racial theorists and anti-

Semitic biblical scholars, Dowling and Notovitch depict a very non-Jewish Jesus.

In fact, these Oriental Christs sharply criticize Judaism. In a chapter with the

heading [Jesus] criticizes the narrowness of Jewish thought, a young Jesus speaks to his

mom in distress:

The rabbi seems to think that God is partial in his treatment of the sons of men;
that Jews are favored and are blest above all other men. I do not see how God can
have his favorites and be just. Are not Samaritans and Greeks and Romans just as
much the children of the Holy One as are the Jews? I think the Jews have built a
wall about themselves, and they see nothing on the other side of it. They do not
know that flowers are blooming over there; that sowing times and reaping times
belong to anybody but the Jews. It surely would be well if we could break these
barriers down so that the Jews might see that God has other children that are just
as greatly blest. I want to go from Jewry land and meet my kin in other countries
of my Fatherland.39

Later in the Aquarian Gospel, Jesus repudiates Jewish temple sacrifice:

And Jesus watched the butchers kill the lambs and birds and burn them on the
altar in the name of God. His tender heart was shocked at this display of cruelty;
he asked the serving priest, What is the purpose of this slaughter of the beasts and
birds? Why do you burn their flesh before the Lord? The priest replied, This is
our sacrifice for sin. God has commanded us to do these things, and said that in
these sacrifices all our sins are blotted out.

Not getting a satisfactory answer, Jesus goes to Hillel [sic], chief of the Sanhedrin, and

blurts out:

37
Heschel, Draining, 35.
38
Heschel, Draining, 40.
39
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 52.
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Do you not hear the bleating of those lambs, the pleading of those doves that men
are killing over there? Do you not smell that awful stench that comes from
burning flesh? Can man be kind and just, and still be filled with cruelty? A God
that takes delight in sacrifice, in blood and burning flesh, is not my Father-God.40

The Jews are not only cruel to animals, but unthinking in their robotic obedience to Gods

law. The priest does not know why he does the sacrifice, only that he has been told to do

so. Not only is Jesus critical of the Jews, his ministry is not even framed in terms of

Jesus Jewishness, his Messianship, his prophetic calling. Jesus is the instigator of the

Piscean Age, one of the 2100-year astrological cycles our planet goes through.41 Jesus is

the Christ, but Christ only means the Master of Love: Christ is not a man. The

Christ is universal Love, and Love is King.42 Notovitch is also guilty on the count of

de-Judaizing Jesus. His pseudo-gospel opens with a description of Jesus mission:

The earth has trembled and the heavens have wept because of a great crime which
has been committed in the land of Israel. For they have tortured and there put to
death the great and just Issa, in whom dwelt the soul of the universe, which was
incarnate in a simple mortal in order to do good to men and to exterminate their
evil thoughts. And in order to bring back man degraded by his sins to a life of
peace, love, and happiness and to recall to him the one and indivisible Creator,
whose mercy is infinite and without bounds.43

Again, the only Jewish term here is sin. Even God is only a Creator. By de-

Judaizing Jesus, these gospels take part in the broader European project of

disenfranchising Jews. The relationship that Europeans had with Jews yes, our Lord

was one, but he saw its errors is projected into these texts. Again we see the

Orientalist tendency to equate disparate phenomena; the despised Jews of nineteenth-

century Europe and America share an eternal essence of Jewishness with the Jews of

40
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 52.
41
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 10.
42
Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 13-14.
43
Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, 191.
 13

first-century Judea. Redefining Jesus as non-Jewish allowed scholars to ignore any

insights on Jesus from contemporary Jews such as Amy-Jill Levine.

After this tour of Orientalism and colonial discourse in these pseudo-gospels,

there is only one surprise left: the afterlife of these texts. While some Hindus believe that

Jesus went to India, in the West these texts are very popular with practitioners of New

Age spiritualities. The irony is that New Agers, like the Jesus of these texts, claim to

believe in the perennial spiritual truths of all great religions, to respect all spiritual

traditions. Yet on a deeper examination, these texts depict Orientalist alterity and a desire

to co-opt other religions teachings in order to bolster Jesus uniqueness! This important

point is also missed by Christian apologists who take issue with Jesus being co-opted for

pantheistic or neo-Gnostic New Age worldviews.44 In one way, the New Agers who

appropriate Jesus are doing what colonial scholars of Buddhism did. Just as Victorian

Buddhism said yes to Buddha and no to contemporary Buddhist traditions, the New

Agers and other Jesus in India theorists say yes to Jesus and no to the churches. If

Victorian Buddhist scholars could only accept their reinterpretation of him, New Agers

can only accept an invention of Jesus. As tantalizing and fascinating as it would be if

Jesus had gone on the world tour Dowling puts him through, there is no evidence to

suggest he did. We must never lose sight of the particularity of the historical Jesus: his

identity and religious formation were entirely that of a first-century Jew.

44
Douglas Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Westmont, IL: IVP, 2007) 144-150; Ron Rhodes, The
Counterfeit Christ of the New Age Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1990) 117-167.