The Rozabal Line (17 page)

Next, Martha pored over the photocopies that she had made of the research done by Karl Venturini.126 Venturini had suggested that Jesus's fellow members of the secret society had heard groaning from inside the tomb where Jesus had been placed after his crucifixion. They had succeeded in scaring away the guards and eventually rescued Jesus. A scholarly paper by Heinrich Paulus seemed to show that Jesus had merely fallen into a temporary coma and was revived without any external help in the tomb.

A story seemed to be emerging. Martha was yet to read the Nathanamavali, a book on the Nath yogis of India.

In western India, there existed an extremely austere band of wandering ascetics in white robes. They were known as the Nath yogis. The Nath yogis hailed from a line of historical gurus. Among several others was one called Issa Nath. A book on the history of the Nath yogis, called Nathanamavali127stated the following: Issa Nath came to India at the age of fourteen. After this he returned to his own 103

country and began preaching. Soon after, his brutish and materialistic countrymen conspired against him and had him crucified. After crucifixion, or perhaps even before it, Issa Nath entered samadhi by means of yoga.

Samadhi, according to the proponents of yoga, was the final stage of the discipline. Samadhi literally means to 'bring together'. It was the bringing together of the conscious mind and the divine, a union of one's soul with Brahman.

Seeing him thus, the Jews presumed he was dead, and buried him in a tomb. When Issa Nath's guru arrived, he took the body of Issa Nath from the tomb, woke him from his samadhi, and later led him to the sacred land of the Aryans. Issa Nath then established an ashram in the lower regions of the Himalayas.

Martha recalled Vincent's words when he was under the trance of regression: 'I am hiding behind some bushes. I don't know why I am unable to tear myself away from here. Night has fallen. In the middle of the night, there was a visitor. He looked like an angel because of his white robes . . . I think he was an Essene monk. He rolled away the stone. The guards collapsed with terror. The Sabbath is over, and the two Marys have come here to roll away the stone to the tomb, but they are rather surprised to see it open. They are going inside. I'm following at a discreet distance. There are two men in white robes. They look like Essenes. They are saying that Jesus is alive, not dead!'

Were they Nath yogis? Could it also be that the great prophet 'Nathan'

mentioned in the Old Testament had actually been a proponent of the 'Nathanamavali'?

Not completely satisfied with the progress she had made with her research on behalf of Vincent, Martha decided to look up Holger Kersten, the leading authority on the subject of Jesus in India.

In 1983, the book Jesus Lived in India had created a mild storm when it had expanded the scope of Russian traveller Nicholas Notovich's experiences in Ladakh.

Kersten had set out on the path ten years previously when he had first come across the theory that Jesus had lived in India.

Kersten had found that the Persian scholar F. Mohammed's historical work Jami-ut-tuwarik, which spoke of Jesus's visit to Nisibis, Turkey, by royal invitation, had been ignored by Western theology. Kersten discovered that in Turkey, as well as Persia, there were stories of a great saviour by the name of Yuz Asaf, 'Leader of the Healed', who shared several similarities with Jesus in terms of character, lessons and life incidents.

Kersten also drew from the Apocrypha, which were texts written by the Apostles but were not officially accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. The Apocryphal Acta Thomae, or The Acts of Judas Thomas, spoke of the several meetings that had taken place between Jesus and Thomas on several occasions after Christ's crucifixion. The Acta further spoke of Christ specifically sending Thomas to preach in India.

Holger Kersten had found that stone inscriptions at Fatehpur Sikri, near the Taj Mahal, included 'Agrapha', or 'sayings of Christ', that were completely absent in the Bible. Their grammar resembled the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

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Kersten had cited this fact to drive home the point that texts deleted by the Church contained extremely important information about Jesus and his life and that this information, while having been ruthlessly obliterated by the Church, had not been erased from the Indian stone inscriptions.

Martha decided that she needed to trace the Tarikh-Issa-Massih that had been photocopied by Terry Acton and given to Vincent. In the published Tarikh-Issa-Massih that she found in the library, the final paragraph said: Issa and Mary had a child by the name of Sara, who was born to them in India, but was later sent to Gaul with her mother. Issa remained in India, where he married a woman from the Sakya clan on the persistence of King Gopadatta, and had a son, Benissa.

Benissa had a son, Yushua, who fathered Akkub. Akkub's son was Jashub. Abihud was the son of Jashub. Jashub's grandson was Elnaam. Elnaam sired Harsha, who sired Jabal, who sired Shalman. Shalman's son Zabbud embraced Islam. Zabbud fathered Abdul, who sired Haaroon. His child was Hamza. Omar was Hamza's son and he produced Rashid. Rashid's offspring was Khaleel.

The problem, of course, was that even if one considered the sixteen generations after Jesus that were specifically mentioned in the book, and putting a forty-year lifespan to each generation, the book only had information for around 640 years after Jesus. Where was the lineage after Khaleel?

Martha was now pretty sure that some sort of cover-up was going on. She needed to see the original Urdu work and not the translated version. The library had the original Urdu version--it was a third edition, published in 1862.

The lucky break was that having lived in India for many years, Martha understood Urdu perfectly.

She started reading the work in Urdu. She began by reading each line, first in Urdu, and then translating it into English:

Issa and Mary had a child by the name of Sara, who was born to them in India, but was later sent to Gaul with her mother. Issa remained in India, where he married a woman from the Sakya clan on the persistence of King Gopadatta, and had a son, Benissa.

Benissa had a son, Yushua, who fathered Akkub. Akkub's son was Jashub. Abihud was the son of Jashub. Jashub's grandson was Elnaam. Elnaam sired Harsha, who sired Jabal, who sired Shalman. Shalman's son Zabbud embraced Islam.Zabbud's son was Abdul, and Abdul's son was Haaroon. Haaroon's son was Hamza and Hamza's son was Omar. Rashid's father was Omar and Khaleel's father was Rashid. Rashid had two more children, a son and a daughter. The boy's name was Muhammad and the girl was named Sultana. Muhammad died before his marriage, but Sultana produced a son. The name of her son was Salim. Salim had a son called Ikram. Ikram got married to Raziya and they had a daughter called Bano. Bano produced a son called Ali. Ali had a son, Ghulam, and Ghulam also had a son, Mustafa. Mustafa's son's name was Humayun.

Humayun's son's name was Abbas. Abbas had a son called Faiz. Faiz had a son called Javed. Javed had a son, Gulzar. Gulzar had a daughter. The daughter's name was Nasreen. Nasreen had a son called Akbar. Akbar produced a son called Yusuf. Yusuf's 105

son's name was Mansoor. Mansoor's son's name was Zain. Zain had a son, Faisal. Faisal produced a daughter called Sharmeen. Sharmeen had a son called Ibrahim. Ibrahim's son's name was Alam. Alam's son's name was Mehdi. Mehdi had a son called Bismillah.

Bismillah had a son called Hassan. Hassan had a son called Shabbir.

Martha wasstunned. Here was a passage that took the lineage almost twenty-five generations further! How could this have been mistakenly omitted from the English translation?

She thought to herself, 'Max Muller is admired all over the world for his translation of many historic Sanskrit works. Unfortunately, his motives are rarely discussed. It was Max Muller who wrote that, "India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again . . . the ancient religion is doomed and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?"'

Martha was clear. English scholars had been reluctant to expose any historical Indian works that seemed to portray Indian culture or religions as being older or more advanced than Western Christian thought. Any work that showed Jesus or Christianity as having learned from India, from Buddhism or from Hinduism, would have made the work of Christian missionaries extremely difficult. Indians would have questioned why they needed to convert to Christianity if Christian thought in itself had been derived from ancient Buddhist or Hindu wisdom.

'So the omissions in the English translations were deliberate?' thought Martha to herself. 'There is only one way to tell,' she replied to herself equally quickly. 'We must take up the challenge posed by the Bom Jesus document that Terry gave Vincent.'

Time to visit Goa. Had Vincent arrived in Mumbai yet? Martha pondered over her research and considered the implications of what it meant for her personally.

There were many ways of getting from Mumbai to Goa. The boring way was to take a forty-five-minute flight. The exhausting way was to board an overnight bus. The economical way was by the super-fast Konkan Railways express train that got there in seven hours. The dignified way was called the Deccan Odyssey.

Aboard India's answer to Europe's Orient Express and South Africa's Blue Train were Vincent and Martha. During his visit to Cochin, Vincent had befriended a senior superintendent of India's Western Railways. The two tickets on this super-luxury train were a heavily discounted gift from him.

The Deccan Odyssey was a dark blue train trimmed with gilded stripes. The decadent coaches were named after well-known forts, palaces and monuments of India, names that would become familiar on the leisurely journey from Mumbai to Goa.

The journey would also give the duo some time to review all their research.

The Deccan Odyssey travelled at a leisurely sixty miles anhour as it snaked its way through the western peninsula of India, stopping along the way at small towns and beaches.

It was delightful to be awakened in the morning by hot coffee and toast brought by a personal valet, to be served whisky-and-soda by white-gloved bearers in the evenings and to be offered cocoa and biscuits before falling asleep each night.

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On the third day they arrived at Sindhudurg, which was famous for its Hindu temples. It was also famous for the Fort of Sindhudurg, which had taken 6,000 workers three years of round-the-clock work to complete. The massive structure sat on forty-eight acres of land, a breathtaking goliath sitting in the water and surrounded by a pristine rocky coastline.

As aunt and nephew drank in the beauty of their surroundings, Vincent spoke.

During the train journey, he had been reading a novel called Guardian of the Dawn by Richard Zimler,128 which Martha had managed to procure from the library.

'Nana, do you know that the author of this book was recently interviewed in India? Do you know what he said?'129

'What?' asked Martha.

'He said that the Portuguese exported the Inquisition to Goa in the sixteenth century, and that many Indian Hindus were tortured and burnt at the stake for continuing to practise their religion. Muslim Indians were generally murdered right away or made to flee Goan territory.'

Vincent continued, 'Historians consider the Goa Inquisition to have been the most merciless and cruel ever. It was a machinery of death. A large number of Hindus were first made to convertand then persecuted from 1560 all the way to 1812! Over that period of 252 years, any man, woman or child living in Goa could be arrested and tortured for simply whispering a prayer or keeping a small idol at home. Many Hindus, Muslims and some former Jews as well, languished in special inquisitional prisons, some for four, five, or six years at a time.'

Vincent looked at Martha for reactions. None.

He continued, 'The author was horrified to learn about this, of course. He was quite shocked that his friends in Portugal knew nothing about it. The Portuguese tended to think of Goa as the glorious capital of the spice trade, and they believed, erroneously, that people of different ethnic backgrounds lived there in tolerance and tranquillity, but they knew nothing about the terror that the Portuguese had wrought inIndia. They knew nothing of how their fundamentalist religious leaders made so many suffer.'

'But Islam also spread itself by the sword, Vincent. Why only point the finger at Christianity?' asked Martha.

'Yes. My point exactly. Both Christianity and Islam are religions of peace; however, their mass following today is partly due to blood that was shed over many years of history. On the other hand, we do not see Buddhism or Hinduism having gone to war to spread their faith even though modern-day Hindu nationalists have been responsible for anti-minority riots, and Buddhist monks have taken to the streets in Myanmar.'

'So where exactly are we going with this conversation?' enquired Martha.

'Well, the aggressive competition between Islam and Christianity for converts could possibly have been handled better if they had cooperated rather than fought with each other.'

'It now seems entirely probable to me that Jesus, having survived the crucifixion 107

as seen by me in my past-life regressions, could have decided to come here to India to rediscover the ancient knowledge that he had been educated in,' commented Vincent as he put away his clothes in the suitcase in preparation for their arrival in Goa.

'Well, he might have come to India also because of the fact that the Lost Tribes had actually settled down in the Kashmir Valley. Various places in Kashmir have Israeli names, such as Har Nevo, Beit Peor, Pisga, Heshubon. These were all names in the land of the Ten Tribes of Israel. The same is true of the names of people. People in Kashmir perform a feast called Pasca in spring, when they adjust the difference of days between the lunar calendar and solar calendar, and the method of this adjustment is the same as the Jewish one. Hoon in Kashmiri means a dog, and a wife is called an aashen, the same as in Hebrew. Half-roasted fish called phar in Kashmir is a favourite dish of both the Israelis and the people of Kashmir. So Jesus may have come here because of this older connection. Right?'