Although I've been aware for a while that Dennis Price at Eternal Idol had embarked upon writing a book, it is only this past week that official confirmation has been made public, so without further ado, here's an introductory word or two from the author himself...
Jesus is the single most famous human being ever to have lived and he has been known to us for around 2,000 years, increasing in fame all the while. He is the central figure in Christianity and the second most revered prophet in Islam, while his name is instantly recognizable to countless other people around the globe who do not subscribe to these faiths.
As such, literally billions of people are familiar with the details of his homeland, his birth, his early years, his ministry and his crucifixion, but there is a spectacular and seemingly inexplicable void in our knowledge of this man. The New Testament describes his life up until the age of 12, but the accounts fall mysteriously silent until Jesus reappears at the age of 30. As Jesus lived until he was 33, then this gap of 18 years constitutes over half his entire lifetime, leaving us with no knowledge whatsoever of his teenage years or his early adulthood, a period that we would describe in most other people as being their formative years.
I'd be the first to admit that I'm not entirely convinced that Jesus as recorded in the Bible ever existed, particularly as there is almost no contemporary reference to him from other sources, such as Roman or Greek writers of the time. And like many, I've occasionally wondered how someone who would arguably have been the most important human being of historic times could simply have gone missing for the middle 20 years of a life that ended in its early thirties; back to the linked article...
There’s a highly specific reason why I became consciously aware of these “missing years”, but I’ll go into it shortly. In the meantime, I’ve read all manner of speculation about this mysterious period, but to my very great surprise, I’ve never been able to find a sustained and serious investigation into where Jesus was during his teenage years and early adulthood. There’s no question that he physically “went” somewhere during this time, because the New Testament makes it unmistakably clear that when he eventually reappeared at the age of 30, he was returning to his homeland as a stranger.
By virtue of the simple fact that Jesus is the most well-known person ever to have lived, then it seemed to me that his whereabouts, between the ages of 12 and 30, were by definition the greatest historical mystery of which we are aware. I assumed that a sizeable amount of people around the world would be interested in reading a genuine and meaningful investigation into these “missing years”, so because such a detailed study didn’t seem to exist, I decided to compose one.
To cut a very long and separate story short, the end result of all this is the book whose cover is reproduced above, which will be published worldwide in March 2009 by Hay House.
So we'll have to wait until March to see how the author has gone about his endeavour to provide evidence that not only did Jesus physically exist, but moreover that he made an appearance in England during the course of his travels abroad. Another word from Dennis Price...
I ended up focusing on a region in the West of Britain, while this much is probably obvious to most people after a glance at the cover of my book. However, I’m well aware that this in itself will undoubtedly come as a surprise to many people around the world who are completely unaware of the many legends and traditions that place Jesus in the West of Britain in the early years of the first century.
There are of course those who cast doubt on the reliability or veracity of such legends and I’ve gone into these arguments in great depth, but I should also point out that these tantalising stories were certainly not the only avenues that led me to the West of England. I would happily go so far as to say that even if these legends did not exist, then many other substantial trails lead inexorably to the West of Britain from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, and I’ve taken care to follow them extremely carefully...
...Nor is any of this material hidden away in some secret archive, in the pages of an apocryphal gospel, in some insanely complex Bible Code, in the diaries of some nineteenth century traveller to Tibet, in a “lost” Dead Sea Scroll or on some mystical plane of existence accessible only to initiates - on the contrary, it is all from highly reputable or “officially endorsed” sources that are squarely in the public domain, so it only remains for us to find it, evaluate its worth, then see if we can discern some meaningful and credible pattern from the scattered pieces.
On a related note, I recently became aware of the work of two authors who have undertaken to prove that the same Jesus visited India during his travels, and to that end they have produced a film, described in detail at their website.
In the meantime, suffice it to say that this blog wishes every success for 'The Greatest Story Never Told', more details of which can be read at the linked post, and doubtless will be covered in greater depth on this blog in the future.
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3 comments:
I suspect that he may be re-interpreting the material about Joseph of Arithmea. In any event, there is a bit of a problem with the concept. It took a LOT of money to travel that extensively. Moreover, I doubt that Jesus would have decided, while in Galilee, to visit Britain -- the odds of him even knowing of its existence seem low. More likely would be a random wandering around the Mediterranean, through Gaul, and across the Channel. At that time, however, Gaul was a Roman province and Britain was unconquered. The Roman conquest did not begin until ten years after Jesus died. There was considered contact between the northern Gallic peoples and the Brittanic Celts, but still, why Britain? Why not Germania, or Scythia. or subSaharan Africa?
More important, I see nothing in the New Testament that reflects the philosophy of the Celts. It would appear that, if Jesus really did travel through Gaul and into Britain, nothing he saw or head affected his thinking. That's unlikely.
If one really wants to speculate about travels, I'd be more sympathetic to a sojourn to India. There are some similarities between Christ's teachings and the Buddha's.
But the hypothesis I'll still plunk my money on is the simplest: if Jesus even existed, whatever he was doing in those years was so unremarkable that neither he nor anybody else ever bothered talking about it.
Hi Chris - it does seem very odd that someone so important should go missing for most of their life, so I´ll be keen to read the book. According to Dennis Price, he´ll be covering a lot of ground in his book which I´m hoping will include a detailed look at this era of prehistoric England, in addition to the main thrust of the book.
But as said before, I´m by no means convinced - as yet - that such a person as described in the NT actually existed, and I´m not entirely sure why so many millions of people take the whole thing as gospel, as it were. I think the Cathars had their own doubts on this very matter, and were duly persecuted by Europe´s first known genocide, at the behest of Papal Rome, as I recall.
It took a LOT of money to travel that extensively. Moreover, I doubt that Jesus would have decided, while in Galilee, to visit Britain -- the odds of him even knowing of its existence seem low.
This counter-argument seems weak to me (I'm acting as devil's advocate here, because I don't really think this theory is plausible but the counter-arguent is weak). Jesus was after all the heir of David, a Jewish prince, THE Jewish presumptive heir to a long-vanished crown but still not the mere carpenter that some claim (as well as the apostles were not fishermen but in a metaphorical sense).
Jews, along with other Eastern Meiterranean peoples (Phoenicians, Greeks) were very active traders. Already in Jesus' time most Jews did not live in Palestine anymore but in other parts of the Mediterranean and West Asia, specially in Asia Minor (from where both Christianity and most of the Jewish diaspora actually sprung).
SW Britain was then a major exporter of tin, a mineral seldom found elsewhere in the Greco-Roman Oeacumene (except not too distant NW Iberia). Phoenicians had been very active in Atlantic tin trade before the Roman victory over Carthage and it's likely that they were still the main traders, though by then they were known as "Syrians", a term that included Jews and Arameans as well.
So a possibly rich trader prince from "Syria", the birthright leader of a major Jewish sect, could well have been in Atlantic Europe trading tin and other minerals, maybe even slaves. He could have been anywhere else. He could perfectly have remained in Galilee all the time too or been studying in some Hellenistic academy or whatever.
In fact I imagine him living a dissolute life of sex, drugs and whatever was the equivalent of rock 'n roll then. There' surely no other reason why his teens and 20s have been silenced. Would he have been a saint in that time his life would be known to us - so he was surely a sinner instead.
More important, I see nothing in the New Testament that reflects the philosophy of the Celts.
That is surely true. Though we really know too little about actual Druidism and the early spread of Christiniaty into Ireland is rather anomalous. Certainly evolved Christianity had gone a long way to adapt to European and other polytheistic cultures but that's not in Jesus' nor even in Paul's preachings. It's later doctrine.
if Jesus even existed, whatever he was doing in those years was so unremarkable that neither he nor anybody else ever bothered talking about it.
Rather than just unremarkable, I'd say his life was, for this or that reason, shameful and therefore erased.
If he was not a dissolute youngster, he may well have been a political-militar fanatic activist. In fact, there are some passages of the gospels that can be interpretated easily on this light: both his massive reception as "King of the Jews" in Jerusalem and then the metaphorical popular choice between Jesus bar Abbas (i.e. "son of the Father") and Jesus the Christ, between the "terrorist" Zealot and the idealized love-peace-and-flowers proto-hippy prophet, suggest that before the late (and surely re-defined a posteriori) Jesus of the gospels, there was a militant Jewsih nationalist leader, probably one that did not snub violence (the case of the temple merchants may only be the tip of the iceberg).
As you say, we don't really know who this Jesus guy actually was. But we can investigate and the zealot Jesus is high probability. This genuine and maye contradictory version of him was later expurged specially as Christianity is one of the various ways in which diaspora Jews approached the era after the Roman genocide in Palestine. Christianity therefore wanted to present itself as a doctrine of peace, in order to be tolerated, and not anymore as one of extremist ethnic nationalism.
Of course, maybe Jesus himself had reached that evolutionary point himself even before the massacre. We just don't know. In fact we don't know for sure that he was actually killed and some argue that he survived the crucifixion (hence the resurrection myth) and that he actually dictated personally (his hands were not usable anymore) the gospel of John.
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