Edgar Goodspeed exposed a fraudulent account of Jesus visiting Tibet.
It generated a little heat from people who weren’t particularly interested in reading the professor’s examination of a forged text, but who were exercised at the suggestion at the beginning of the post that Jesus did not spend time in India or Tibet.
- [Are we to ignore the discovery of Nicolas Notovitch, confirmed by Swami Abhedananda, and all the subsequent research by Holger Kersten and others confirming that the "lost years" of Jesus were spent in Tibet, India, Ladakh, some of that time at Hemis Gompa Himalayan Buddhist Lamasery, as the BBC confirmed in its documentary Jesus Was a Buddhist Monk?]
(BBC) Jesus Was a Buddhist Monk
One pointed to Marcus Borg’s delightful Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings as if it were proof, not necessarily of Jesus studying in Tibet, but certainly of Buddhist influence on Jesus.
Of course, the railway theory of religious thought, the assumption that if the spiritual teachings of two different religions are similar, the later teaching must in fact come from the earlier one is pretty common. But it often turns out that there is no connection. These things are examples of parallel evolution.
While it is possible that some of the gymnosophists [naked Jain ascetic philosophers] who appear to have made their way to the Roman Empire could have been Buddhist monks.
Or rather they may have been radical in the sense that they went against the grain of the day. Then as now they were also very much mainstream Jewish teachings.
Bottom line, there is no need to appeal to influence from elsewhere to come up with Jesus. So why multiply assumptions?
That said, among the things that are fascinating for me are the actual provable contacts between early Christianity and Buddhism. The connections that have documentary evidence that is true and wasn’t made up. More
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