The post-truth Gospel
In the spring of 1894, a small brown quarto hardback arrived in the bookshops of Paris from the publishing house of Paul Ollendorff. It was called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ and it contained evidence for an astonishing claim: during the lost years of Jesus’s life – the gap in the Bible between his childhood and the beginning of his ministry in Palestine – Jesus visited India and trained as a Buddhist monk.
The book’s author was a Russian-born resident of Paris called Nicolas Notovitch. In a foreword that comprised more than half of the volume, Notovitch gave an account of a visit to India that he’d made seven years earlier, illustrated with ethnographic photographs of the people and places he’d encountered. He explained that during the trip, he had broken his leg, and was forced to recuperate in a remote monastery in the highlands of Ladakh. While convalescing, Notovitch was shown a mysterious document about which he’d previously heard rumours. It was written in the ancient language of Pali in “two big volumes in cardboard covers, with leaves yellowed by the lapse of time” and it told of the travels and studies in India of a man called Issa, who was recognizably the Jesus of the Gospels.
In this Pali version of Jesus’s life, the adolescent Jesus travels to India to avoid being pressed into marriage. He spends years there, studying both Hinduism and Buddhism before returning to Palestine. The second section of Notovitch’s book contained a full translation of this text into French, made by Notovitch with the help of one of the monks.
The publication of The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ was a global news story. “Ancient Life of Christ: Found by a Russian in a Thibet monastery” declared the New York Times, making Notovitch sound like a precursor to Indiana Jones. The book went through eleven French editions that year, and two months after its publication the New York Times commended the translators of the book’s English edition, expressing confidence in its authenticity. “There need be no doubt about the records”, the paper declared bullishly.
Today Notovitch’s book is barely remembered and Notovitch himself is a mysterious footnote to history. Yet the influence of The Unknown Life lingers. Like many unverifiable but seductive claims, the theory that Jesus was a Buddhist has thrived in the glassy twilight of the internet and resurfaces in books such as Holger Kersten’s loopy and unreliable Jesus Lived in India. Like Nazca lines and alien sightings, there’s something weirdly compelling about Notovitch’s tale. It answers a need in all of us to smooth the rough edges of our reality: in this case, to turn the biblical Christian Jesus into a more unifying figure.
Hemis monastery, where Notovitch was laid up with his broken leg, stands on a rocky mountainside, tucked into a gap in the astonishing Zanskar range of the Himalayas. I arrived there one January morning, after a two- hour flight to Leh from New Delhi. In Notovitch’s era, the long journey by horse into the Himalayas would give travellers time to acclimatize to the thin air. Nowadays, the abrupt arrival from nearly sea level is wrenching. My hotel had an oxygen tank in the lobby for travellers struggling with the altitude.
In preparation for the trip, I’d read a guide to Ladakh by the scholar Janet Rizvi which contained a brief description of every monastery in the area. And yet in her pages on Hemis, she didn’t even mention Notovitch. I wrote to Dr Rizvi to ask her about him. She replied briefly to say that she knew the story of Notovitch and his lost gospel, but had always found it far-fetched and had never bothered following it up.
The exterior of Hemis monastery is austere, like a 1960s housing development, but its inner courtyards are garishly painted. I was taken to see the deputy lama, Nawang Otsab, who wore an orange woollen beanie hat and a shiny windcheater. He led us into an upper room heated by a wood-burning stove. We sat cross-legged around a low table eating dried apricots and cashew nuts while Geltsen, my driver, translated for me.
Nawang Otsab said I wasn’t the first to ask him about Notovitch’s book. I got the feeling that he didn’t want to disappoint me, or discourage future visitors; but he was too honest to offer false hope. Behind his polite hospitality, it was clear he thought Notovitch’s tale was suspect. The monastery’s books, he said, were divided into only two sections: Buddha’s teachings and commentaries on Buddha’s teachings. And none of them was in Pali. In their different ways, Dr Rizvi and Nawang Otsab represent the consensus that Notovitch’s discovery was somehow bogus. Over the years this has become the dominant view.
Soon after the initial excitement more sober voices began to express doubts about Notovitch’s book. one possibility, raised first in the New York Times, was that the document had been forged by unscrupulous Buddhist monks to fool their unwary visitor. Quickly, however, a new theory emerged, one that turned Notovitch from being the victim of an alleged hoax to its perpetrator.
Notovitch’s most eminent attacker was a philologist called Max Müller, an Oxford professor, who wrote a long article expressing objections to the gospel. Müller pointed out inconsistencies in the text and raised questions about its absence from any previous inventory of Buddhist scriptures. Subsequent visitors to the monastery could find no evidence that a Russian with a broken leg had ever been there. The abbot of the monastery gave an interview through an interpreter to a British official in which he vehemently denied Notovitch’s claims: “Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!” Müller felt emboldened to write an afterword to his article and denounce Notovitch as a charlatan, describing the new evidence as “a complete refutation, or, I should rather say, annihilation” of the Russian’s story. Despite Notovitch’s defiant claim that he was going to return to Ladakh and bring back the original gospel, nothing more was heard from him on the subject.
I’ve always been inclined to give Notovitch the benefit of the doubt. But as I reread his book in my empty hotel, I was struck by its air of implausibility. There’s no positive evidence that Notovitch is lying, but we might expect stronger evidence to support his enormous claim: a photograph of the Pali manuscript would be a start. In a startling PS to the preface, Notvitch baldly explains why none is offered. “In the course of my travels”, he says, “I took many curious photographs, but when I came to examine the negatives on my return to India I was dismayed to find that they were absolutely destroyed.” It’s a palpably thin excuse. Other things don’t stack up. The methodology he describes for his translation and reordering of the verses sounds flaky, to say the least. And there’s a long gap between the discovery of the manuscript – 1887 – and its publication. Even in the nineteenth century, seven years is a long time to sit on a revelation of this magnitude. Regretfully, I found myself letting go of the possibility that Notovitch was telling the truth and wondering about another mystery: why would he lie?
Notovitch is himself a shadowy figure. There is scant biographical information and while sources give his birth date as 1858, the date of his death is a matter of conjecture. However, he does crop up, Zelig-like, in the accounts of his contemporaries. In 1887, at the time Notovitch was travelling in India, Sir Francis Younghusband, the redoubtable Victorian explorer and soldier, was making an expedition across the Himalayas. The two men bumped into each other in the mountains, an encounter Younghusband recorded in his book The Heart of a Continent, published in 1896. Since Notovitch was Russian and Younghusband a British officer at a time when the Russian and British Empires were jockeying for political control of Central Asia, it would not be surprising for the two men to be a little chilly with each other. But Younghusband’s brief account of their meeting positively drips with contempt. “He announced himself as M. Nicolas Notovitch”, Younghusband wrote, “an adventurer who had, I subsequently found, made a not very favourable reputation in India.”
This same M. Notovitch has recently published what he calls a new Life of Christ, which he professes to have found in a monastery in Ladak, after he had parted with me. No one, however, who knows M Notovitch’s reputation, or who has the slightest knowledge of the subject, will give any reliance whatever to this pretentious volume.
This is not even the most venomous account of Notovitch’s dealings in India. That accolade goes to a report I came across in the archives of the British Library written by a Russian-speaking British official named Donald Mackenzie Wallace after a series of meetings with Notovitch in Simla at the end of July 1887. According to Mackenzie Wallace, Notovitch volunteered his services as a spy for the British government in India. But Mackenzie Wallace describes him as “an unscrupulous adventurer”. “He talks too much and too recklessly to be a really clever intriguer, and is a good specimen of what is called in Russian slang a Yerundist”. Mackenzie Wallace tries to parse this word politely, but a Yerundist is what in English slang we’d call a bullshitter. And Mackenzie Wallace had prior experience of Notovitch forging a document: “an attempt to pass off to the world, as a telegram from the Emperor of Russia to the Prince of Bulgaria, a composition of his own, and I had openly taxed him with committing an act bordering on forgery”.
Mackenzie Wallace’s final assessment of Notovitch was weirdly prophetic.
If he fails in getting into the regular service, he may hope at least for irregular employment and will in any case have a certain success in the literary world. His chances of success in both directions would be considerably increased if he could pose at the same time as a Central Asian explorer.
Notovitch left the meeting claiming that he was heading back to Russia via an overland route through Central Asia. In fact, a few months later, he would make the journey to Ladakh.
A forger, a bounder, an unscrupulous chancer: it’s easy to feel that history’s verdict on Nicolas Notovitch has been delivered and that there’s nothing more to detain us. And yet there’s a wrinkle in Notovitch’s story.
Notovitch published almost a dozen books in his life, but only one in his native language, Russian. It came out in Moscow in 1889, two years after he supposedly discovered the lost gospel. It was also a book about religion, but it enjoyed nothing like the success of The Unknown Life. It is barely available today. After many false leads, I was able to track down a copy in Russian archives, where it’s filed as anti-Semitic literature. It’s got the ominous title Pravda ob evreyakh or The Truth About the Jews.
I was fearful that the The Truth About the Jews was going to be a hate-filled screed. The book is certainly a polemic, urging the Jewish population of Russia to cast off the baleful influence of their rabbis and convert to Christianity. But there’s no hostility to Jews as Jews. Notovitch is making a more sophisticated argument about rabbinic Judaism, attacking in particular what he calls the “oral laws” laid down in the Talmud.
The first thing to notice about this book is how much familiarity Notovitch demonstrates with Jewish tradition. What’s more, like a crusading ex-smoker, Notovich presents his arguments with a force that suggests the zeal of a convert. More tellingly still, there is another Notovitch who is active in Russian journalism at this time, a man some believe to have been Notovitch’s brother or cousin. This is Osip Notovich, a playwright and the Editor of the liberal Petersburg newspaper, Novosti. Osip was born in Kerch, Crimea, in 1857, and was the son of a rabbi.
I’ve only found secondary sources that connect Osip and Nicolas – primarily Norbert Klatt’s Jesus in Indien (1988). I also think that the claim that they were brothers may be a misunderstanding of the Russian phrase dvoinoi brat, literally “second brother”, but actually, a cousin. Still it seems highly likely that the two men were related and that Nicolas, like Osip, was Jewish by birth. It’s significant, too, that Notovitch’s arguments in The Truth About the Jews turn on the rejection of the “oral laws” of the Talmud. A rare sect of Karaite Jews share this belief, which is based on their ideas about the primacy of the Torah, the Old Testament books that Christianity and Judaism have in common. The Karaites have existed since the ninth century, but in the modern era, one of the most significant Karaite communities was located in Crimea.
To be born a Jew anywhere in nineteenth-century Russia was to be the inheritor of a bleak legacy of poverty and exclusion. Notoriously, Jews were confined by law to live west of a demarcation line known as the Pale of Settlement. Even within the Pale, Jews were forbidden to live in certain cities, restricted from entering certain professions and debarred from universities. Some Jews – like Osip, and presumably, Nicolas – chose to evade these restrictions by converting to Orthodox Christianity. Not surprisingly, Jews were also disproportionately represented among the various revolutionary movements which aimed to overthrow the country’s autocratic government. In 1881, after the assassination of Alexander II by the violent revolutionary organization Peoples’ Will, the backlash took the form of a series of pogroms that erupted intermittently across the country from 1881 until the Revolution itself. The constant threat of violence was one of the reasons that Russian Jews were enthusiastic champions of a return to the historic Palestinian homeland, even before the word “Zionism” was invented. By the time Notovitch showed up in India, there was no trace of the shtetl on him. Mackenzie Wallace assumed that he was a Russian nationalist. But strangely, I think the forged gospel shows where his deepest sympathies lie.
The comedian Jerry Sadowitz used to do a sketch about growing up Jewish in a rough part of Glasgow. According to Sadowitz, a regular feature of his childhood was being beaten up because, according to the bullies, “you killed Jesus!”. With no hope of overcoming the superior numbers of his tormentors, Sadowitz accepted the beatings with fatalism and humour. “‘Hey, big-nose, you killed Jesus!’ ‘What can I tell you? He was looking at me funny’.”
The idea that the Jews bear special responsibility for the death of Christ dates to the Synoptic Gospels. It is present, in particular, in the Gospel of Matthew, where the crowd bay for Jesus’s execution and tell a wavering Pilate, “his blood be on us and on our children”. These unfortunate words were elaborated into a doctrine by Christian clerics like John Chrysostom in the fourth century who declared the Jews, as a race, guilty of an unpardonable offence. There would be “no expiation possible, no indulgence, no pardon”. Jews would live “under the yoke of servitude without end”. In his landmark study of anti-Semitism, The Anguish of the Jews, the Catholic scholar Edward H. Flannery concluded that the so-called “deicide accusation” “was the theological construct that provided the cornerstone of Christian anti-semitism and the foundation upon which all subsequent anti-semitism would in one way or another build”. It’s a charge that remains strangely tenacious. In March, 2016, at a high school basketball game in Boston, pupils of a Catholic school chanted “You killed Jesus!” at members of a predominantly Jewish school.
Notovitch’s claim that Jesus was a Buddhist is only one of many ways in which his version of biblical history differs from the authorized accounts. His Jesus is also an attractively undogmatic character, shocked by the injustice of the Hindu caste system and interested in women’s rights. There are no miracles in The Unknown Life, no Judas, and no Resurrection. A further departure from the biblical story comes in the trial of Jesus before Pilate. Pilate, depicted in the Gospels as a wavering figure, swayed by the implacability of the mob, is simply bad in Notovitch’s telling. While the Jewish elders urge forgiveness, it’s Pilate who decides Jesus must be put to death. Notovitch reapportions the responsibility for the crucifixion: “The judges, having deliberated among themselves, said to Pilate: ‘We will not take upon our heads the great sin of condemning an innocent man’”. He even gives the Jewish judges the symbolic gesture that the scriptures attribute to Pilate. “Having thus spoken, the priests and wise men went out and washed their hands in a sacred vessel, saying: ‘We are innocent of the death of a just man’.” It seems to me that this is the true purpose of Notovitch’s gospel. He misdirected his reader with the headline claim that Jesus was a Buddhist, while just out of sight, he smuggled in the real message of his text: an assertion that would vindicate the Jewish people of a charge that had dogged them for centuries.
But while Notovitch’s fake but well-intentioned gospel was being hounded into obscurity, forgers in his home city of Paris were putting together another bogus document bearing on religion. This one would not only outlive The Unknown Life, but would go on to have calamitous consequences for Jews worldwide.
In the aftermath of the Tsar’s assassination in 1881, the Russian Secret Service overseas was reorganized to deal more effectively with the threat from revolutionary movements. Many Russian radicals lived in exile. In Paris, the Russian Secret Police – known as the Third Section – was put under the charge of Pyotr Rachkovsky, a former radical who had been turned. Now he ran informers among the various revolutionary movements, planted news stories favourable to the Tsar in the international press, broke up underground presses, dabbled in forged documents, and even organized assassinations. As Notovitch lived through the painful fall-out of The Unknown Life, Rachkovsky was putting the finishing touches to his own masterwork. It’s not a document that bears his name, but most experts concur that it was created under his guidance.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is heavily plagiarized from the work of a French writer called Maurice Joly. It purports to be the account of a speech given by a sinister Machiavellian figure called the Chief Rabbi about Jewish plans to take over the world, manipulate the media and enslave gentiles. I use the word “Machiavellian” with justification. The speech given by the Chief Rabbi is largely taken from dialogue spoken by Machiavelli in Maurice Joly’s book. Rachkovsky repurposed the words, turning them into a calumny against Jewish people that became the forerunner to modern conspiracy theories. In its heyday, The Protocols enjoyed the support of senior figures in the Russian government, was published and given out in a print run of 500,000 copies by the American industrialist Henry Ford, and was championed by Hitler. To this day, it has its adherents.
Rachkovsky, himself a Jew, could never have had such great expectations for his work. It seems likely he put the book together to solve a more immediate problem. The autocracy and backwardness of the Russian Empire were condemned widely. In Russia, the fading legitimacy of the Tsar’s regime would lead first to the reforms of 1905 and then the conflagration of 1917. Rachkovsky’s object was to defame progressive politics, to prevent radical movements winning wavering moderates over to their cause. How to do this? Rachkovsky presented Russia’s would-be modernizers as tools in the hands of Russia’s most loathed minority: the Jews.
Norbert Klatt reports that the deviation from Orthodoxy in The Unknown Life earned its author a reprimand from the Russian government and a brief exile in Siberia. Klatt holds out the possibility that while Notovitch was faking the gospel, it was based on some pre-existing story that supports the idea of Jesus’s travels in India. The notion of Jesus in India – either before his ministry, or after a lucky escape from crucifixion – is too attractive ever to die. I’m firmly convinced that Notovitch was a liar. But it’s time to look more kindly on this quixotic forger of documents. If his Unknown Life could have mitigated any of the terrible ferocity with which Jews suffered through the Russian Revolution, the Civil War and after, woudn’t it have been justified? Thanks in part to The Protocols, that hypothesis was never tested.
I discovered the last dot that makes up the partial life of Nicolas Notovitch by accident on the shelves of the London Library, in a copy of one of his works of history. The book, published in French, is called La Russie et l’alliance anglaise. It appeared in 1906. The frontispiece boasts many new, dull-sounding volumes by the same author and several forthcoming works, few of which ever actually appeared. I’ll always regret never being able to enjoy Notovitch’s thoughts on “Womanhood Around the World: Studies, observations and aphorisms”.
But the really astonishing thing about this book is the inscription by Notovitch himself. In blue fountain pen, the old rogue has written a long dedication to the Duchess of Kent, who, judging by the tight pages of the book, never bothered reading it.
He has the smooth, legible hand and fluent French of a Parisian bourgeois as he wishes for the good fortune and health of the royal family. Then he signs, Nicolas Notovitch, January 1939, and he drops out of history. It strikes me as entirely Notovitchian that with his last flourish, he’s sucking up to foreign royalty. The signature is serendipitous evidence that Notovitch returned to Paris and lived far longer than anyone imagined. By the time he inscribed the book, he was an octogenarian. In a way, I hope he did not live to see Paris fall to the Germans less than two years later. French Jews like Notovitch would face the most virulent strain of anti-Semitism that had yet appeared on earth. Almost 80,000 would be dispatched to concentration camps. By the time he signed the book, Notovitch’s subtle attempt to defend the Jewish people from the deadly calumnies against them had been overwhelmed. Seen against the backdrop of what was about to hit Europe, his Unknown Life seems vain, audacious, whimsical and entirely noble