JESUS CHRIST'S MISSING YEARS

Shakespeare disappeared for four years and people have been speculating about this Houdini act for 500 years. But someone even more important than Shakespeare disappeared at twelve and suddenly reappeared, eighteen years later, in one sentence: ‘And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature.’ What is so incredible about this long disappearance is that many of us accept this stunning omission in the New Testament without too much thought. One of the most famous people in the world disappeared for eighteen years and we don’t question it! Isn’t that amazing? What is even more amazing is how similar Christianity is to Buddhism. How is this possible when Buddhism came into life later than Christianity? So many questions and not enough answers.

A number of years ago, I was asked to write a screenplay about Jesus Christ’s missing years by a film producer who had already commissioned me to write previous scripts for him. I was, as you can imagine, completely overwhelmed by such a request. I am not an expert on religious matters so how could I write about such an icon? The film producer told me that he liked my writing and would I do it? I admit I was flattered to be offered such a prodigious commission and so I accepted. I wish I hadn’t.

My brief was that Jesus had gone to India during those missing years and I was given an enormous pile of notes. How did the producer know? I asked. He waved a hand airily in the air ‘oh there are scrolls... you’ll have to do the research’. I did. Masses of it and discovered the producer’s idea came from a book called ‘The Life of Issa.’ In 1887, Nicolas Notovitch - a Russian war correspondent - went on a journey through India. While en route to Leh, the capital of Ladakh (in Northern India along the Tibetan border), he heard a Tibetan Lama in a monastery refer to a Grand Lama named Issa (the Tibetan form of ‘Jesus’). Notovitch inquired further, and discovered that a chronicle of the life of Issa existed with other sacred scrolls at the Convent of Himis [ about 25 miles from Leh].

Notovitch visited this convent and was told by the Chief Lama that a scroll did in fact exist which provided details about the Prophet Issa. This holy man allegedly preached the same doctrines in Israel as he earlier did in India. The original scroll, the Lama said, was written in the Pali language and later translated into Tibetan. The Convent of Himis possessed the Tibetan translation, while the original was said to be in the library of Lhassa (the traditional capital of Tibet).

Notovitch eventually persuaded the Lama to read the scroll to him, [so the story goes] and had it translated from Tibetan by an interpreter. According to Notovitch, the literal translation of the scroll was disconnected and mingled with accounts of other contemporaneous events to which they bear no relation, and so he arranged ‘all the fragments concerning the life of Issa in chronological order.’ From the scroll, Notovitch learned that ‘Jesus had wandered to India and to Tibet as a young man before he began his work in Palestine.’  

“In The Lost Years of Jesus”, Elizabeth Clare Prophet documented other supporters of Notovitch's work, the most prominent of which was Nicholas Roerich. Roerich, a Theosophist, claimed that from 1924 to 1928 he travelled throughout Central Asia and discovered that legends about Issa were widespread.  Roerich allegedly recorded independently in his own travel diary the same legend of Issa that Notovitch had seen earlier.

But how on earth do we know if any of this is true? I couldn’t find any more convincing evidence in spite of all my research . And yet, I was supposed to base my script on the fact that Jesus had definitely gone to India and was called Issa.

Then I met Peter Owen-Jones, who was the religious adviser on the project. After a few minutes he said. ‘I don’t think Jesus ever went to India.’  Peter had travelled there extensively for his T.V. series called “Around The World in 80 Religions.” So how was I to write a script mainly located in India when the religious adviser thought that Jesus had never been there? The project was becoming surreal.

However, I’d signed a contract and had to write the first draft which I did by working 8 hours a day for months. By now, there were three producers on board and all of them had different ideas about Jesus and told me in copious detail. Then, after months of incredibly hard work researching and writing the first draft, I gave it to them and they said they wanted lots of changes and they gave me even more notes for the second draft. Again I worked for hours each day and wrote, what I still believe is a powerful and poignant script in spite of all the conflict surrounding the project. However, even before they had read the second draft, they said they had some new ideas and I realised, far too late, that their demands were impossible to satisfy. So after researching and writing for months and months on a project which had become very close to my heart, I  reluctantly said that it was impossible to continue working for them and backed out having fulfilled my contract. I was incredibly sad about it as I had become so involved with my research into this incredible man.

But the saddest irony of all was the knowledge that these producers were arguing about an inspirational man who simply wanted peace in the world.