Jesus would have studied Buddhism in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas

Jesus would have studied Buddhism in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas

In Jesus' time Buddhism was already five hundred years old and had spread from India, east to southeast Asia, north to central Asia. Jesus would also been a Buddhist, and not all scholars are convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem. Only two of the four Gospels mention his birth, and they provide diverging accounts: the traditional manger and shepherds in Luke. 

During Jesus' time, Judea was a Roman dominion and most of the trade was Roman; non-Jewish political and cultural influences permeated Judea, which was an important shipping center for trade between India and the West and the military gateway to invade Egypt via land. 

In 1887, a Russian war correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, claimed that while at the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh, he had learned of the document "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men" – Isa being the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam.

However , Donald Lopez, professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Michigan, describes dozens of factual errors in Notovitch’s book. Lopez believes the development of now-discredited race theories forced bigoted Christians to confront the fact that Jesus was a Semite. Placing Christ in Asia was a nifty anti-Semitic loophole, in which Lopez  said that Jesus, as a young man, wasn’t “in a synagogue,”, “but in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas.”

The Jesus Seminar  had voted that Jesus was an itinerant sage who shared meals with social outcasts.

Bill 

Jesus Was A Buddhist Monk (BBC Documentary)

https://youtu.be/xY0Ib3aPG6Y

Unknown years of Jesus - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_years_of_Jesus

It is said that Jesus was also a Buddhist, especially during his so-called "lost years." 

During Jesus' time, Judea was a Roman dominion and most of the trade was Roman; non-Jewish political and cultural influences permeated Judea, which was an important shipping center for trade between India and the West and the military gateway to invade Egypt via land. Both land and sea trade routes had run through Jerusalem for centuries. Overland routes extending to Persia and western India were especially active after Alexander's invasion of western India 360 years earlier; most of the routes, whether connecting to wealthy cities in Egypt or in Greece and Rome, came through Jerusalem, where goods for Greece and Rome were shipped via the Mediterranean Sea.

In Jesus' time Buddhism was already five hundred years old and had spread from India, east to southeast Asia, north to central Asia, and west to the Middle East.  After Alexander's eastern conquests, the great India ruler Ashoka, according to Will Durant's account, "sent Buddhist missionaries to all parts of India and Ceylon, even to Syria, Egypt and Greece, where, perhaps, they helped prepare for the ethics of Christ." (1) Furthermore, Max Muller stated that missionaries also were sent more than thirty years prior to Ashoka's reign: "That remarkable missionary movement, beginning in 300 BCE, sent forth a succession of devoted men who spent their lives in spreading the faith of the Buddha over all parts of Asia." (2) Philo noted the presence of Buddhists in Alexandria, Egypt. (3) 

The Bible makes no mention of where the young Jesus lived. In Matthew (2:23) and Mark (1:23), Jesus is called a "Nazarene" and in other documents a "Nazoraean." But the town of Nazarene was not mentioned in the Bible-related texts until some four hundred years CE. Nazarene probably refers to another Jewish sect, also known as the "Nazirites," involving John the Baptist and Jesus' brother James. In Acts 24:5, Paul is referred to as "the leader of the sect of Nazarenes." (8) 

Most accounts of Jesus in India derive from a book titled The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, written by Nicholas Notovitch, a Russian doctor who claimed to visit the monastery of Himmis near Leh, Ladakh (Kashmir) in 1888. (10) Notovitch said that, in visiting the monastery, he reviewed written verses that described the presence there of Jesus known as "Issa." Other passages elaborate on Jesus' travels in India, his teachings, his acceptance of the Shudras and other untouchables, and his conflicts with the Brahmans and the Zoroastrian priests of Persia. Jesus supposedly arrived in India at the age of fourteen and returned to Judea at the age of twenty-nine. (11) 

When appearing in 1894, Notovitch's account became immediately and widely controversial. Christian churches denounced it as a hoax. The British Church Mission in India employed a professor to find and bury the documents described by Notovitch. The Anglican Church commissioned the services of F. Max Muller, the great German scholar who taught at Oxford. Muller dismissed it, largely by challenging the two main sources, namely a book of fourteen chapters and another document titled Nath Namavali preserved by the Saddhus of Yoga Nath. Muller also cited an interview of the Himmis monastery's abbot who insisted that no documents about Jesus existed and that Notovitch never visited there. (12) 

thezensite: Was Jesus a Buddhist?

http://www.thezensite.com/non_Zen/Was_Jesus_Buddhist.html

 If Jesus did not go to India, then at least went to Judea. The real historical question is not if he studied Buddhism, but where and how much he studied Buddhism,

Was Jesus not Oriental ? 

Asians remade Jesus, at times appreciatively and at other times critically. R. S. Sugirtharajah demonstrates how Buddhist and Taoist thought, combined with Christian insights, led to the creation of the Chinese Jesus Sutras of late antiquity, and explains the importance of a biography of Jesus composed in the sixteenth-century court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He also brings to the fore the reconstructions of Jesus during the Chinese Taiping revolution, the Korean Minjung uprising, and the Indian and Sri Lankan anti-colonial movements.

Jesus in Asia — R. S. Sugirtharajah | Harvard University Press

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674051133

During the colonial period in India, Hindu reformers relentlessly reminded the missionaries that Jesus was, as Rammohun Roy put it, an “Asiatic.”  Keshub Chunder Sen in his Calcutta Town Hall lectures used to harangue the Europeans with his stirring oratory: "I am an Asiatic, was not Jesus an Asiatic?". Swami Vivekananda reminded the Western Christians that with all their "attempts to paint him with blue eyes and brown hair, the Nazarene was still an oriental."

The author summarily and inextricably links Western missions and missionaries to the imposition of the colonising culture on indigenous people. Yet not a few missionaries, at least on the Indian subcontinent, continue to be held in high esteem for their study of indigenous language and culture, and for the integrity of their lives.

Further, some of Sugitharajah’s thinkers were themselves converts who fervently received and interpreted Jesus in their respective situations. If, as he argues, the quest for the historical Jesus “seems in a way to be a futile enterprise”, and Asian Christology must be taken as seriously as Western Christology, this entails recognising a confessional approach to spreading the gospel. But he rightly rejects any willingness to employ religion and mission as handmaids of the imperial power and sectarian interests.

Sugitharajah’s selection of subjects is open to the criticism that it is unrepresentative. Christians from India will miss a discussion of the repositories of thinking about Jesus over many centuries on the west coast of India, in particular, and any attention to Jesus as he finds voice in Dalit theology. Discussion of the latter would bring to the fore the wide experience of Jesus as the divine liberator who casts aside untouchability.

Jesus in Asia

R. S. Sugirtharajah

The Jesus Seminar was a group of about 50 critical Biblical scholars and 100 laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk that originated under the auspices of the Westar Institute.[1] [2]  The Jesus Seminar - the purpose to decide their collective view of the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The seminar was very active through the 1980s and 1990s, and into the early 21st century.

According to the Jesus Seminar:

• Jesus of Nazareth was born during the reign of Herod the Great.
• His mother's name was Mary, and he had a human father whose name may not have been Joseph.
• Jesus was born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem.
• Jesus was an itinerant sage who shared meals with social outcasts.
• Jesus practiced faith healing without the use of ancient medicine or magic, relieving afflictions we now consider psychosomatic.
• He did not walk on water, feed the multitude with loaves and fishes, change water into wine or raise Lazarus from the dead.
• Jesus was arrested in Jerusalem and crucified by the Romans.
• He was executed as a public nuisance, not for claiming to be the Son of God.
• The empty tomb is a fiction – Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead.
• Belief in the resurrection is based on the visionary experiences of Paul, Peter and Mary Magdalene.

Early in the 21st century, another group called the "Acts Seminar" was formed by some previous members to follow similar approaches to biblical research.[2]

In March 2006, the Jesus Seminar began work on a new description of the emergence of the Jesus traditions through the first two centuries of the common era (CE). In this new phase, fellows of the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins employ the methods and techniques pioneered by the original Jesus Seminar.[71]

Jesus Seminar - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar

The Church of the Nativity is the oldest Christian church still in daily use, but not all scholars are convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem. Only two of the four Gospels mention his birth, and they provide diverging accounts: the traditional manger and shepherds in Luke; the wise men, massacre of children, and flight to Egypt in Matthew. Some suspect that the Gospel writers located Jesus’ Nativity in Bethlehem to tie the Galilean peasant to the Judaean city prophesied in the Old Testament as the birthplace of the Messiah.

What Archaeology Is Telling Us About the Real Jesus

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/12/jesus-tomb-archaeology/一

Jesus the Man: New Interpretations from the Dead Sea Scrolls

Author  -  Barbara Thiering

The central thesis of the book is that "Jesus was the leader of a radical faction of Essene priests. He was not of virgin birth. He did not die on the Cross. He married Mary Magdalene, fathered a family, and later divorced. He died sometime after AD 64".[2] From the New Testament gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls, Thiering constructs a new history of early Christianity which she contends was hidden in pesher coding. Thiering finds that the biography of Jesus hidden in the New Testament shows him to have been born in Qumran, an Essene community beside the Dead Sea, in March, 7 BC.

Jesus the Man - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_the_Man

The Real Jesus—the first book to challenge the findings of the Jesus Seminar, the controversial group of two hundred scholars who claim Jesus only said 18 percent of what the Gospels attribute to him—"is at the center of the newest round in what has been called the Jesus Wars" (Peter Steinfels, New York Times). Drawing on the best biblical and historical scholarship, respected New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson demonstrates that the "real Jesus" is the one experienced in the present through faith rather than the one found in speculative historical reconstructions.

Review

"In the best of the recent flow of books [on Jesus]...Johnson offers a devastating critique of those scholars who prefer their own reconstructed Jesus to the one attested in the New Testament." -- Newsweek 

"Luke Timothy Johnson calls the bluff of the Jesus Seminar and other purveyors of trendy 'historical Jesus' marketing hype. This timely book offers an engaging account of what serious historical scholarship can--and cannot--say about the Jesus of history. Johnson refocuses the debate by posing fundamental questions about the relation between history, tradition, and faith." (Richard B. Hays, Duke Divinity School, author of The Moral Vision of the New Testament)

The Author - Luke Timothy Johnson is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. A Roman Catholic, Johnson was a Benedictine monk and priest before becoming a biblical scholar. He is the author of several scholarly books and has written for Commonwealth and Christian Century.

The Jesus Sutras are early Chinese language manuscripts blending Taoist, Buddhist, and Christian teachings. 

Sutra on the Origin of Origins (大秦景教宣元本經; Dàqín jǐng jiào xuānyuán běn jīng); now held in Osaka, Japan, by Kyōu Shooku library, Tonkō-Hikyū Collection, manuscript no. 431. An inscribed pillar discovered in Luoyang in 2006 supplements the incomplete version from Dunhuang. Kojima manuscript B (大秦景教宣元至本經, Dàqín jǐng jiào xuānyuán zhi běn jīng, last known to be in the Dōshisha University library, Kyoto, in 1963) was at one time thought to be the conclusion of this work; see below ref. to Kazuo Enoki, p.68.

Jesus Sutras - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Sutras