BBC Documentary - Jesus was a Buddhist monk

[Lodestar]

Video - BBC

The unknown life of Jesus Christ
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unknown-Life-Jesus-Christ/dp/1604593660

[avebury]

1. Bookmark to watch later. nt

[Lodestar]

2. Perhaps a Dalai Lama n/t

[Lodestar]

3. Another documentary - a fundamentalist TX. raised guy goes to India to find out about

Last edited Thu Feb 13, 2014, 11:24 AM - Edit history (1)

Jesus's missing years and discovers so much more! Lots more detail about those manuscripts in India documenting "Issa's" life in India.

[struggle4progress]

4. OP title is misleading: the program is something of a jumble,

devoted to the question, whether Jesus actually died on the cross

This might have been an interesting attempt to understand various non-standard sects in Christian history

But instead we get a hodge-podge: medieval rumors that monks brought something valuable back to France from Jerusalem, perhaps fabulous treasure, or maybe the bones of Jesus! Well, they could have buried whatever it was in these wild mountains! Let's follow some crackpot, who's been busily trying for years to reconstruct a map to the treaure-trove, using some old parchments and some mysterious symbols on old paintings! He's found many old ruins! Look, there's a line between these two peaks we could follow! Somewhere along that line here, he found an old stone with a cross carved into it!

[Lodestar]

5. It was a pretty wide swath, but did you watch to the end?

The last 20 minutes or so gets into probing that question. Actually the second film I posted about the guy from TX going to India in search of some answers is much more thorough in looking into details, documents. Of course if you or anyone else is looking for definitive proof then you'll be disappointed. As with many mysteries, once you start down that trail you often wind up with even more questions than when you started out as well as new discoveries. I was not even aware that there was a whole contingent of Indians who insist Jesus spent years there studying amongst them both in his youth and after his apparent death. These are intriguing historically, and new pieces to the puzzle are always emerging in the most unexpected ways.

[struggle4progress]

6. I've seen it before. IMO it suffers considerably from being a mish-mash of different topics

I've read a number of works by Pagels, and back in the 1960s I read The Passover Plot that she references

Various "esoteric" Jesus-in-India theories appeared in Europe in the 19th century at the time Indian texts became available. Some of these ideas were taken up by anti-semitic race-theorists in the Nazi era, eager to provide an "Aryan" background for Jesus. Such theories enjoyed a revival in some "New Age" thinking in the 1960s

Sorting out such matters can be interesting but complicated: the medieval Christian St Joasaph seems to be a Christianization of an Islamic legend of Budasaf, which in turn seems to be a corruption of Buddha or Bodhisattva. So some tales of Buddha seem to have been gradually converted in the West into tales of a Christian saint; and it's entirely plausible that such processes can work in both directions. Christianity was first brought to India before the end of the second century

But this BBC video provides little clarification about anything

[Brettongarcia]

8. There has been some serious scholarship linking Christianity to early Buddhism, Hinduism

Among other things: the little story of the "widows' mite" or the "penny" she gives to the church, apparent finds an exact predecessor in Eastern lit. Rather as the stories of Noah and Daniel do as well, from the Old Testament.

More importantly, the major ideas attributed to the Buddha, fl. 500 BCE, seem quite like Christianity. Buddha is the son of a king or lord, he renounces the earthly throne, to live in poverty; and to speak of the renunciation of our "desires," as the way to a higher state.

The Anthropological study of cross-cultural diffusion of ideas, combines with the study of Comparative Religions, in fascinating ways. With the Buddha 550 years before Jesus, there would have been plenty of time for Eastern, Buddhist influences, to travel now and then to Jerusalem.

Generally I favor the thesis that Christianity represents largely, a kind of Greco-Roman Hellenization of Judaism; especially you can see quotes of Plato specifically, in Paul; Plato's theory of forms; the idea that things here on "earth" are just a pale "shadow" or imperfect "copy" of the ideal "forms" or "patterns" in "heaven."

But there is no doubt that a general impoverished, spiritual, "priestly" ethos, existed well before Jesus, all over the East. And likely influenced some in Jerusalem, and communities more northern (Galilee being closer to "the East&quot .

[MisterP]

7. naw, that's St. Barlaam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_and_Josaphat

[hrmjustin]

9. Interesting questions.

I don't believe it but certainly interesting questions.