RELIGION : Gospel According to German Author Links Jesus to Buddha

This weekend, Christians by the hundreds of millions the world over mark one of the most joyous events in the ecclesiastical year. But what became of the infant whose birth is celebrated at Christmas?

The Bible, of course, tells the story. But a German dissenter with a diploma in theology is offering his own in a controversial book now for sale in bookstores in India and elsewhere.

The title of Holger Kersten’s work, amplified and republished this year after selling 1.5 million copies worldwide, says it all: “Jesus Lived in India.”

In a nutshell, he proposes that the son of Joseph and Mary traveled to India when young, imbibed the Buddhist philosophy and world view at the feet of Buddhist monks, then returned to propagate his findings among his people in Palestine.

Marshaling his argument on such materials as the now-discredited shroud of Turin, etymology, the writings of a 19th-Century Russian adventurer and sermons preached by Jesus as he tramped through the Holy Land, Kersten asserts that Christ did not die on the cross but survived and returned to India.

In the remote Himalayan land of Kashmir, Jesus (known then as Issa) lived to a ripe old age as a Buddhist monk, according to Kersten. His tomb, he says, appears to be situated in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar.

“Jesus was a Buddhist,” Kersten, 43, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from his home in Freiburg, Germany. “I think it’s wonderful to show how these great religions are connected and what they have in common.”

Though his work offers a theory that many will find dubious at best, the book is a reminder of the extraordinary importance India has exerted through the centuries on the human spirit. Ritual baptism and monastic asceticism are among its exports. According to Kersten, even Jesus’ parable of the widow’s mite, cited in the Gospel according to St. Mark, seems to be a reworking of an older Buddhist story.

Another work of Kersten’s, to be published in English next March, inventories the parallels between the teachings of Jesus and the man known as Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince and ascetic who founded Buddhism. Kersten contends that Jesus’ original message was appropriated by St. Paul the Apostle, who introduced new elements, including misogyny and the concept that Christ’s death absolved others of their sins.

“I am a follower of Jesus but not a Christian in its original meaning,” said Kersten, who used to teach the precepts of Christianity in state adult vocational school until his doubts sent him on a search that ended in India.

Mainstream Christians could rightly note that Kersten’s ideas are heresy. In its 264 pages, the book, published in the United States by Element Inc. of Rockport, Mass., denies the central tenet of Christianity: that the Son of God died to atone for humanity’s sins.

“There are so many kinds of books from this ‘New Age’ stream that the church doesn’t take any notice of them anymore,” Brother Jeffrey Gros, associate director of ecumenical and religious affairs at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, replied when asked his reaction.

“Besides, when it takes notice, sometimes it gets embarrassed,” Gros said.

Making a case for Christian-Buddhist syncretism, as Kersten does, is clearly out of favor in the Vatican. In his recent book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Pope John Paul II has criticized Buddhism sufficiently so that, in Sri Lanka, miffed Buddhist prelates have threatened to boycott a planned inter-religious meeting when the pontiff visits next month.

Kersten, whose work has been reviewed in publications here, admits that some of his assertions “may seem audacious . . . even improbable.” He lines up a range of materials--including the Turin shroud, which the church says has been proved a forgery through carbon dating, but which Kersten claimed was authentic in a previous book he co-authored, “The Jesus Conspiracy.”

He acknowledges that some of his conclusions or conjectures seem far-fetched--for instance, that the word Kashmir may be a deformation of kosher.

“This is just one of the hundreds of pieces of evidence, not a proof,” he says. “It’s all like a mosaic that fits together.”

And what of Christmas? Kersten insists that research shows it is the Christian reworking of the annual celebrations that used to mark the Dec. 25 birth of the ancient Persian sun deity, Mithras. He plans to celebrate it anyway: “I go to my parents’ because they like it,” he says.