Since then a small and rather profitable industry has developed around the myth. There are more than two dozen books dedicated entirely to the subject, many others allude to it as fact and there are literally hundreds of articles about it. There are several pseudo-documentaries about it too. We even have authentic pictures of Jesus during his Indian sojourn - meditating, backpacking through the Himalayas and on the cover of Elizabeth Clare prophet's book staring wistfully at Lamyuru Monastery in Ladakh, founded in the 10th century CE, a thousand years after Jesus. Recently a Jesus Thanka, a Tibetan painted scroll, has been 'found' (it was only a matter of time I suppose). A quick examination of this thanka, particularly the careless and hasty brush strokes on the outlines and the use of chemical pigments, shows that it was painted by one of those artists from Katmandu who knock out fake thankas for tourists. I would date it circa 2000.
With each new publication more 'facts' come to light, more details are 'discovered' and more sayings of Jesus emerge, so that now the account of his life in India is longer and more well-documented than his life in Palestine. Here are some of the more popular books on the subject. King of Travelers - Jesus Lost Years in India by Edward Martin, The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed by Charles H Potter, Jesus Lived in India by Halgen Kersten, Jesus In India by H. N.G. Ahmed, Jesus of India by Maury Lee, Jesus in India by James Deardorff (by this stage authors are struggling to think of titles that do not contain the words 'Jesus,' 'lived' and 'India'), The Mystery of Israel's Ten Lost Tribes and the Legend of Jesus in India by J. M. Benjamin, A Search for the Historical Jesus by Fida Hassnain, Jesus in Heaven on Earth by K. N. Ahmad and Christ in Kashmir by Aziz Kashmiri.
Now you have to admit, this is rather fascinating. More fascinating still is that there is not an iota, not a shred, not an atom of evidence that Jesus ever left Palestine. Not one inscription, not one fragment of ancient parchment and not one 'legend' or 'account' that can be traced back before the late 19th century. There isn’t even a puff of smoke and a few mirrors.
Indeed, the evidence that Jesus even lived in Palestine is scarce enough. Nearly all historians accept that there was a person called Yehoshua (Joshua) of Nazareth (Jesus is an Anglicized pronunciation of the Greek attempt to say Joshua. An equivalent of this is if the English had gone to Thailand in the 17th century and had attempted to say the Thai pronunciation for 'Buddha' which is something like Putowar, and we today were calling the Buddha Putohyouare) who attracted attention sometime between around 29-35 CE. But curiously, the earliest documents to mention Jesus, the letters of St Paul, (a man who never met Jesus and whose letters make up nearly half the New Testament) contain hardly a single quotation of Jesus. The four Gospels date from between 35 and 70 years after the death of Jesus and no scholars consider them to be written by the direct disciples of Jesus or to be eyewitness accounts. That somebody named Jesus lived, taught and attracted attention there is little doubt, that he went to India there is no more evidence than that he went to Newfoundland, Outer Mongolia or Polynesia.
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