Jesus' foreign travels
                                                      by Robert M. Bowman jr and others

 Jesus' foreign travels  There are stories told that Jesus visited other parts of the world, either to learn their wisdom and knowledge or to teach his message to them. We can classify these various stories according to the period of time in Jesus’s life in which they are set: (1) between the ages of 12 and 30; (2) after escaping Jerusalem and dying years later in another country; and (3) shortly after his resurrection from the dead.

 

The Missing Years
     The Gospels tell us nothing about Jesus’ youth or young adult years. Therefore the period from age twelve to age thirty is often called the “missing years” of Jesus.  Many stories about Jesus traveling are set in this very period. The two best known of these stories suggest that during those years Jesus traveled either to Britain or to India (or some region near India).

Jesus in Britain.
According to The Gospel of Nicodemus and popular legend, Joseph of Arimathea.—a member of the Sanhedrin—travelled to Britain. Specifically, Joseph is claimed as the founder of the church in Glastonbury, a town in southwest England.  One of the many popular books that proposes this was written by Lionel Smithell Lewis, vicar of Glastonbury, who thought there might be “some truth in the strange tradition” that Joseph took Jesus as a youth to England with him during one of his business trips there as a tin merchant. Quite a few other books have been written defending the claim.
     It is rather difficult to take the legend of Jesus accompanying Joseph of Arimatheo England seriously when “the earliest mention of Joseph at Glastonbury dates to around 1247.”The tradition of Joseph traveling anywhere to Britain cannot be traced back before about 1200. The earliest versions had Joseph going to England years after Jesus’ death and resurrection in a story that was entwined with lore about the Holy Grail, King Arthur, and other elements of medieval English legend.Not even John of Glastonbury’s account of the church’s history written a century later (ca. 1342) mentioned the story of the boy Jesus accompanying Joseph to England. William Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” in 1811 asked:
     And did those feet in ancient time,
     Walk upon England’s mountain green:
     And was the Holy Lamb of God,
     On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
     Given that there is little evidence that Jesus literally walked in England prior to Blake, his poem may actually have contributed to that belief, which first emerged as an historical claim later in the nineteenth century. The notion has usually functioned  as the basis for some “bragging rights” about England’s Christian heritage.

 Jesus in India.
A far more influential and significant myth is the claim that Jesus spent years in India prior to his public ministry in Galilee and Judea. The point of this story is to suggest that what Jesus taught was closer to Buddhism than to traditional Christianity.
     The book responsible for the popularity of this claim is The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ by Nicholas Notovitch, first published in Paris in 1894 and quickly translated into several other languages including English. The book is Notovitch’s account of visiting a Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Hemis in the Himalayans in the northernmost part of India, where he says a monk read to him from ancient manuscripts an account about “Issa” (Jesus). An interpreter translated the oral reading and Notovitch took notes from what he heard. On the basis of this he wrote The Life of Saint Issa.
      After scholars challenged the truth of Notovitch’s story, three individuals claimed to have made the journey to the Hemis monastery in the 1920s and 1930s and to have confirmed the existence of the Issa manuscripts. Yet no one ever managed to come back with photographs of the manuscripts, handwritten copies of them, or any other hard documentary evidence. Nor has anyone else produced such evidence in more than the century since, despite the appearance of numerous books defending his claims

Dying in Another Country

     Another popular view is that Jesus did not actually die on the crosst, but instead escaped and traveled to another country. The most popular of these claims is that Jesus died in Kashmir, the northernmost part of India, some 2,500 miles east of Jerusalem. Unlike Notovitch's story, this one claims that he went there after his public teaching ministry in Galilee and Judea, not before it. The claim was put forth originally in the writings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, an Islamic sect that regards Ghulam Ahmad as the Messiah and Mahdi. German author Holger Kersten argued in his book, Jesus lived in India, that both Notovitch and Ghulam Ahmad were correct and that Jesus had lived in Kashmir both before and after his public years in Israel. In assessing these stories about Jesus going to India, we should know that such a journey was quite possible. Sean McDowell, an evangelical Christian scholar, has pointed out that there is significant evidence for contact between India and the people of the Roman Empire in the first century:India may have been more open to direct communication with the West during the first two hundred years of the Common Era than during any other period before the coming of the Portuguese in the seventeenth century…. Many Roman coins dating from the time of Tiberius (AD 14–37) to Nero (AD 54–68) have been found in southern India.
      However, the best historical evidence suggests that India’s first contact with Christianity most likely came through Thomas, one of Jesus’ original twelve apostles. Various lines of evidence support the tradition that Thomas evangelized India in the first century and was killed with a spear and buried there. This evidence includes The Acts of Thomas, written in the early third century and containing a mix of legendary and likely historical elements. It also includes references to Thomas in the writings of the early church fathers and the traditions of Christians in India. While such  evidence is not absolute proof, it is  better than any supposed evidence for Jesus living in India provided by writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

      There are still other legends about Jesus visiting other countries late in his life. One such theory is that Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalene traveled to France, a journey of roughly 3,000 miles to the west.There is even a story of Jesus traveling all the way to Japan to live out his days some 6000 miles to the east. Some authors have combined elements of these stories to weave a grand narrative of Jesus as a world traveler.  According to the book,The Explosive Story of the 30 Lost Years by Tricia McCannon, Jesus spent substantial numbers of years in Egypt, in England, and in India and Tibet before returning to Galilee to teach his own people.

Appearances after His Resurrection
     The third category of travels does not involve Jesus “traveling” in any conventional sense such as walking, riding an animal, or sailing in a ship. In these stories, Jesus appeared in more distant lands after his resurrection in order to reveal himself. By far the best known story of this sort is found in The Book of Mormon, which says Jesus appeared somewhere in the Americas about AD 34 to a society of people called Nephites who were descended from Israelites who had been living there for over millennium.
      As is the case with the stories of Jesus traveling to India, the earliest known source claiming that Jesus visited the Nephites in the Americas dates from the nineteenth century, namely, The Book of Mormon. Which is also the only source referring to the existence of the Nephites. To suppport their claims, Mormons have a large number of scholars and other intellectuals