Jesus in India is the English version of Masih Hindustan Mein, an Urdu treatise written by the Holy Founder of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), the Promised Messiah and Mahdi. The main thesis expounded in this treatise is Jesus' deliverance from death on the Cross and his subsequent journey to India in quest of the lost tribes of Israel whom he had to gather into his fold as foretold by Jesus himself.
Starting his journey from Jerusalem and passing through Nasibus and Iran, Jesus is shown to have reached Afghanistan where he met the Jews who had settled there after their escape from the bonds of Nebuchadnezzar. From Afghanistan Jesus went to Kashmir where some Israelite tribes had also settled. He made this place his home and here he died and lies buried in Srinagar, Kashmir.
In this book, Hazrat Ahmad has solved another difficult problem which has for long confounded many a western writer, namely the problem of the resemblance between Christian and Buddhistic teachings and also between the life of Jesus and that of Buddha, as recorded in their respective Scriptures. Some of these writers hold that Buddhistic teachings must somehow have reached Palestine and were incorporated by Jesus in his own sermons. But there is absolutely no historical evidence to support this theory. A Russian traveller named Nicolas Notovitch stayed for quite some time with Lamas in Tibet and had their religious chronicles translated for him. He is of the opinion that Jesus must have been to Tibet before the Crucifixion and gone back to Palestine after having imbibed Buddhistic teachings.
Rejecting both these views, Hazrat Ahmad proves that Jesus came to India only after the Crucifixion and not before, and that it was not he who borrowed Buddha's teachings but the Buddhists who seem to have reproduced the Gospels in their books. Jesus also visited Tibet during his travels in India in search of the lost tribes of Israel. He preached his message to Buddhist monks, some of whom were originally Jews. They were deeply impressed by Jesus' teachings and accepted him as the manifestation of the Buddha, the Promised Teacher. With faith in him as their Master, they incorporated his teachings into the teachings of the Buddha himself.
Masih Hindustan Mein, was — it still is — an epoch-making and cataclysmic book. It transformed the theological landscape of Judaism, Pauline Christianity and conventional Islam. The catalyst it introduced was that Jesus — a true prophet of God that he was, was saved from death on the cross, lived long and lies buried in Srinagar Kashmir.
As stated in the Introduction and at the end, the book was to be divided into two parts, the first to comprise as many as ten chapters plus an epilogue, and the second part to contain additional proofs of Jesus' journey to India and a comparative evaluation of the teachings of Islam and Christianity establishing the truth of Islam as well as of his own claim to be the Promised Messiah. It seems he couldn’t find time for further research on this subject, but he made good his resolve by ushering in a spiritual rebirth of Islam in its pristine purity, founding the dynamic Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat worldwide and writing not one but more than eighty books concerning the truth of Islam, his own claim as the Promised Messiah and Mahdi and the life and death of Jesus.
Written in 1899, and partly serialized in Review of Religions in 1902 and 1903, the book itself was posthumously published on 20th November 1908. The first English translation, by the late Qazi Abdul Hamid, was published in 1944. On instructions from Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, Khalifat-ul-Masih IV, Imam of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat, the present edition has been thoroughly revised by Professor Muhammad Ali Chaudhry, Wakilut Tasnif, Rabwah.
As supporting evidence of the theses advanced in this book, relevant excerpts from different authors and researchers are given at the end as appendix. These excerpts do not form part of the original text which, in the course of translation, has been kept inviolate and even misprints, if any, have not been corrected. The correct version has, however, been given in footnotes only after permission by our august Imam, Hazrat Khalifa-tul-Masih IV.
Since different editions of the Bible differ in the serial numbers of verses, care has been taken to stick to the numbers quoted by the author. Biblical references have been quoted from the Authorized King James’ Version, published by the Zondervan Corporation, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530, USA.
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