HISTORY, HERESY, CONSPIRACY
by Ashok Malik
Daily Pioneer, India
May 19 2006
In 1804, two centuries before Dan Brown found his way to bestseller
lists, the mystic and poet William Blake scripted his literary tour
de force, Jerusalem. To this day, Blake’s epic anthem moves, inspires
and reduces to tears those who read, repeat or chant it. Its opening
stanzas are among the most memorable in the English language:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
A deep, philosophical man, Blake was making multiple allusions. At
one level, he was disturbed by the creeping Industrial Age and the
changes smoke-filled chimneys were inflicting upon his pristine
English countryside (“… these dark Satanic mills”).
Yet the principal character being addressed was Christ. Had the “feet”
of the “Lamb of God” walked “upon England’s mountains green”?
Blake, like many contemporaries, cherished the belief that Jesus
had visited England, embracing one of competing legends prevalent at
the time.
One tradition held that Christ had come to England in his early youth
-when he was “training” for his calling -and had been taught by ancient
druids. Another view was that he had somehow escaped the Crucifixion.
Such sentiments and such stories are not unique to William Blake and
England. In the late 19th century a Russian writer, Nicolas Notovitch,
wrote a book apparently based on old Buddhist texts, arguing Jesus
had spent part of the period between age 14 and 30 – when he was away
from home – in India, as an apprentice under not Celtic druids but
Buddhist monks. Others have added to the theory, pointing to evidence
that insists Jesus the boy visited Puri and Varanasi.
The most famous India-centric Jesus story has him surviving the
Crucifixion and moving to Kashmir, where the Takht-e-Sulaiman – Seat
of Solomon, now the Shankaracharya Hill – is said to derive its name
from his presence.
A tomb in Srinagar’s Rozabad has long been held to be the final
resting place of a religious figure, one Yuz Asaf; was he Jesus?
Another grave in Murree – in Pakistani Punjab – is supposed to be that
of Mary, the mother of Christ. Murree, the idea goes, is a corruption
of her name. The choice of Kashmir as a refuge is itself explained
by the tradition that it was settled by the Kush (Kassite) people,
one of the “lost tribes” of Israel.
How much of all this is true? Perhaps very little; obviously, Christ
couldn’t have been both in England and India at the same time! Yet
as the silly controversy over The Da Vinci Code thankfully ends,
it would be sensible to accept that alternative histories of Christ
have been around for centuries.
Beyond fascinating trivia and conspiracy theories, there is a larger
point. Dan Brown’s book is, of course, fiction – but what if it
weren’t? Would protests by church groups then have been justified? Is
religion – and this is not true of merely Christianity – to be
sequestered from history, never have its historicity put to scrutiny?
Does that in any way take away from the importance of faith or of
The Faith?
These are important issues to ponder because India is a profoundly
religious country with an extremely shallow intellectual approach to
the study of religion. “Religious studies” is not merely a course on
rites and rituals and how they came about. It involves philosophy,
archaeology, history, sociology, perhaps even anthropology. In
the narrow and antiseptic confines of “secularism” – as India’s
state-directed intelligentsia defines it – this is often not
appreciated. This does not become enlightened societies.
Return to The Da Vinci Code. The charge against the book and the film
is that it contradicts the “received history” of Christianity. As the
deputy secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India put it,
“It (The Da Vinci Code) must begin and end with a bold and lingering
disclaimer stating that it’s a work of fiction and does not reflect
historical views and facts.”
Compelling questions flow from this. What are “historical views”?
Whose historical views? Who wrote Christianity’s history – or for
that matter Islam’s or Hinduism’s? If Christ survived the Crucifixion
and was, as many believe, not the Son of God but a great mortal,
does that detract from his life, his teachings, the wonder of the
religious movement he founded?
The more devout Christians are not alone in treating history as
heresy. An honest appraisal of the Prophet and his life and times,
one that treats him as human, is not going to go unchallenged either.
It never has.
One of the most famous cases of blasphemy in India was that of Sarmad
Shaheed (Sarmad the Martyr), an Armenian Jew who converted to Islam,
was drawn to mysticism and befriended Dara Shikoh. Asked to recite
the kalmah – “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his Prophet”,
Sarmad stopped at, “There is no God.” Aurangzeb executed him.
Of the major faiths, only Judaism and Hinduism approach history with
a relative open-mindedness. For the Jews, religion and history are a
continuum. Abraham and David are ancestors of Christ and near-divinity,
but they are also historical characters, as real, as flesh and blood
as David Ben-Gurion and Ariel Sharon. The Old Testament is a people’s
old history.
Hindus face a unique problem: The history in their faith is challenged
not by believers but by their “progressive” critics. As an example,
consider the average Hindu’s attitude to the Puranas. Yes, there is
apocryphal legend and exaggeration; nevertheless, there is a determined
acceptance that below this is a kernel of history.
Ram and Krishna are gods to be worshipped but – with the breathtaking
capacity to reconcile dualism – Hindus simultaneously accept them as
human, with human wants, human desires, and even human frailties.
Indeed, born of a singular self-assurance, Hinduism would welcome a
scientific or rigorous scholarly investigation into its past, almost
as much as organised Islam would repel it. As for Christianity, as
the Dan Brown episode reveals, the danger is from the new Pharisees
– those who think they “own” Jesus and have an exclusive, perhaps
jealous copyright on his biography.