Holger Kersten

Holger Kersten (* 1951 in Magdeburg ) is a German author who has written several books about Jesus of Nazareth . He has been studying religious education in Freiburg im Breisgau since 1975 and worked as a religion teacher at a vocational school in southern Baden in the 1980s. Historical research on Jesus ignores his theses or rejects them as untenable.

Jesus in India

Kersten and Elmar R. Gruber were of the opinion that Jesus had survived his crucifixion before 1980 , then wandered to Kashmir and died not in Palestine , but at the age of over 100 in northern India and was buried in Srinagar . In 1981, with his book Jesus lived in India , he elaborated on this view and linked several individual theses into what he claims to be a "complete chain of evidence":

• Although Jesus was executed under Pontius Pilate , he could not have died on the cross in Jerusalem.
• After his recovery, Jesus must have wandered to India , where a Jewish minority - the descendants of the "10 lost tribes" ( Beni Israel ) who have disappeared since the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel - had lived for centuries.
• Jesus also worked there as an itinerant preacher and gained respect through healing and teaching.
• His grave is identical to the burial house of Yuz Asaf (a Bodhisattva ), which is still used as a temple today . Kersten referred to notches on the grave slab, which are supposed to remind of crucifixion wounds on hands and feet. This corresponds to the belief of the Islamic Ahmadiyya . Some of their followers are still guarding his alleged grave in Kashmir.

Johannine statements

For his chain of evidence, Kersten, like his predecessors, also referred to individual verses about Jesus' crucifixion and burial, which only the Gospel of John has handed down in the New Testament . According to Jn 19 : 31-37  EU , Roman soldiers broke the legs of those crucified with Jesus. This was a Roman custom to shorten the agony of the hanged. Since Jesus was already dead, they would not have done this to him, but only checked his death with a prick of a lance. Blood and water flowed from his “side” (Greek pleura ) (v. 32ff).

Kersten interpreted this information as historical facts and concluded that a death throes lasting several days at a crucifixion is common. Since blood flow is impossible with a dead person, Jesus must have been alive by then. The fact that the soldiers did not break Jesus' legs saved his life.

New Testament scholars point out that the Gospel of John wants to proclaim Jesus as the true Passover Lamb who died according to prophecies of the Holy Scriptures (v. 36). The fatal wound was supposed to convince the doubting Thomas that the risen Jesus was really the same as the one crucified before, that is, to confirm his death ( John 20:27  EU ).

According to Jn 19 : 39-42  EU , the Pharisee who was friends with Nicodemus brought 100 pounds of myrrh and aloe vera . He and the councilor Joseph von Arimathia would have used this ointment to drink sheets in which they would have wrapped Jesus' body. Then they would have placed him in an unused rock grave. This procedure corresponded to the Jewish custom of caring for corpses.

Kersten interpreted this Johannine special information as a secret attempt at healing: It was about medicinal herbs . The crowd already refers to that. In addition, the embalming of corpses among Palestinian Jews was unusual and frowned upon at the time. Since Jesus was by no means a Hellenized Jew, there must have been another reason.

Kersten did not take into account that this did not have to be the case for distinguished members of the Sanhedrin and Jerusalem Pharisees, who were probably educated in Greek. For him Nicodemus was a member of the Essenes , a supposed special group at the time. This is nowhere mentioned in the New Testament and is otherwise only attested to in literature.

Turin shroud

In a further step Kersten related this information to the shroud of Turin . Traces on it should refer to residues of medicinal herbs. To support this, Kersten and Gruber embalmed a test person with an emulsion of oil, aloe and myrrh. They assessed the resulting imprint of the linen cloth as a reproduction of some properties of the Turin shroud. This shows clear traces of such treatment. Kersten did not doubt that the Turin shroud depicts Jesus and is identical to the several shrouds mentioned in the NT.

Forerunner of the Indian thesis

The thesis of Jesus' stay in India or Tibet before or after his crucifixion is based on popular travel reports from the 19th century and has been constantly reissued since then. The thesis is popular in esotericism because it represents a syncretism that tries to combine religious motifs from Gnosticism of the apparent death of the Savior with elements of Hinduism , Buddhism and Islam . By 2006, 18 books and six film documentaries as well as some newspaper articles had been published worldwide, including:

• La Bible dans l'Inde. Vie de Jezeus Christna (1875) by Louis Jacolliot . After his return from India, this French district judge pretended to be an Indologist and wanted to have discovered original Jesus quotes, writings and miracle reports in ancient religious writings from India, which were supposed to prove Jesus' stay there. But as early as 1888 respected Indologists proved to him that he did not speak Sanskrit and had falsified the quotations.
• La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ (“The Gap in the Life of Jesus”, 1894) by Nikolai Notowitsch . This Russian journalist claimed that he was shown ancient writings in the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh , in which Jesus' arrival and sojourn in Tibet was mentioned between the ages of 12 and 30. The Indologist Friedrich Max Müller and the English historian John Archibald Douglas refuted this in 1894 and 1895: Notowitsch had not been to Hemis or other monasteries in the region, and the Buddhists there - who had no bound books - had only met European missionaries heard from Jesus.
• Redemption from Jesus Christ and Von neuem Trug for the salvation of Christianity (from 1930) by Mathilde Ludendorff . This co-founder of a fascist sect of Ariosophy appealed to Jacolliot to claim an " Aryan " descent of Jesus.
• The tomb of Jesus Christ in India (1939) by JD Shams , then imam of the London mosque . He relied on Mirza Ghulam Ahmad .
• Jesus did not die on the cross (1957) by Kurt Berna . This journalist with many pseudonyms such as "Hans Naber" or "John Reban" again referred to Jacolliot and in 1984 led a "research group" to Kashmir. This also visited the Islam professor Fida Mohammed Hassnain in Srinagar, who tries to underpin the belief of the Ahmadiyya pseudo-scientifically. The Illustrierte Bunte reported on this in the article Where did Jesus really die?
• Jesus died in India (1973), an article in the German magazine Stern . Hassnain was cited as an authority.
• Did Jesus Die in Kashmir? The secret of his life and work in India (1983) by Siegfried Obermeier .
• Jesus died in Kashmir (1976) by Andreas Faber-Kaiser . He also relied on JD Shams and Hassnain.
• Journey to Kiribati (1981) by Erich von Däniken . He interviewed Hassnain personally and quoted him as saying: “The chain of evidence is seamless. It can stand before any court. "(P. 219)
• In 1983 Kersten's book Jesus Lived in India was finally published . He also referred to Hassnain in it and, like him, claimed a "complete" chain of evidence for Jesus' life in India.

Scientific criticism

In 1985, the German Indologist and Tibetologist Günter Grönbold published a comprehensive scientific study of the Indian theses: He traced the arguments of the authors mentioned back to a few repeatedly repeated speculations and showed them contradictions, dependencies and errors. Kersten also cited Notowitsch's book as an allegedly reliable report, although it had already proven to be a forgery in 1894. Kersten also concealed the fact that Notowitsch had set Jesus' journey to Tibet not after, but before his crucifixion, and that Hassnain had announced the return of the Messiah on March 21, 1983 (before his book was published). The name Yuz Asaf , whom many of the authors mentioned identified with the name Jesus, was explained by Grönbold from an Islamized version of the Buddhist term bodhisattva .

Further actions by Kerstens

In 1984 Kersten claims to have convinced the governor of Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah , to have the grave of Yuz Asaf opened in order to find further evidence of his identity with Jesus. On the day before the planned opening, however, violent political clashes broke out. In order not to aggravate this, the police chief Srinagars Abdullah advised against opening the grave.

In 2005 Kersten went on an expedition to Eastern Anatolia to Mount Nemrut Dağı and Arsameia . There he wants to discover the birth cave of historical Mithras and find out his exact date of birth - July 29th of the year 7 BC. Chr. - have determined. To do this, he referred to the so-called Leo horoscope and an artificial shaft that made the exact time of birth predictable through the incidence of sunlight.

In 2006, Kersten traveled to Gandhara in Kashmir, Taxila in Pakistan and Harwan near Srinagar to a. a. to look for a final resting place for Jesus here too.

Single receipts

1. ↑ z. B. Gerald O'Collins, Daniel Kendall: Focus on Jesus, Essays in Christology and soteriology. Gracewing 1996, p. 169.
   Robert E. Van Voorst: Jesus outside the New Testament: an introduction to the ancient evidence , Eerdmans 2000, p. 79.
   Reinhard Feldmeier, Hermann Spieckermann: The Bible, emergence - message - effect. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2004, p. 164.
   Paul Rhodes, James K. Beilby: The Quest for the Historical Jesus. An Introduction. In: Same (ed.): The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity 2009, 10.
2. ↑ Celebrating festivals: Easter: What is Easter? Retrieved on March 29, 2018 (German). 
3. ↑ Gerd Theißen , Annette Merz : The historical Jesus , Göttingen 2011, p. 153
4. ↑ cf. Dr. Tahir Ijaz and Qamar Ijaz Ph.D .: Jesus in India: A Review of the World Literature (1899-1999) (List of Jesus in India literature in The Muslim Sunrise - A Journal of the Islamic Renaissance in America ; PDF File; 865 kB)
5. ↑ Issue 47/1984
6. ↑ Issue 16/1973
7. ↑ Günter Grönbold: Jesus in India - The end of a legend. Kösel-Verlag, Munich 1985.
8. ↑ Armin Risi: Did Jesus go to India? An examination of the sources and motives of this theory ( memento of the original from February 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Works

• Jesus lived in India - His secret life before and after the crucifixion . Ullstein-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-548-35490-4 , (1st edition: Droemer Knaur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-426-03712-2 ).
• The Jesus Plot: The Truth About the Turin Shroud . Heyne-Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-12307-7 .
• The Ur-Jesus - The Buddhist Sources of Early Christianity . Langen-Müller Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-7844-2504-6 .
• Jesus did not die on the cross - the message of the Turin shroud . Langen-Müller Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7844-2688-3 , (with Elmar R. Gruber).

Web links

• Literature by and about Holger Kersten in the catalog of the German National Library