poliphilo | Nas Asuf

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spirituality religion and the occult

Nas Asuf

Jesus survived the crucifixion, fled to Kashmir, lived to be 80 and is buried in Srinigar, where his tomb, under the same roof as the tomb of a much later Muslim holy man, is still venerated- though no-one seems to get terribly excited about it.

In Kashmir they remember him as Nas Asuf- meaning the Healer.

That's what they told me on TV last night. Wow.

So I Googled. The tomb is for real. And it contains a burial oriented east-west, which is the Jewish standard, rather than north-south, which is the Muslim standard.

It also contains an odd little carving of Nas Asuf's feet. The feet have marks on them which the easily-persuaded interpret as the scars of crucifixion.

So?

There the trail runs into the sand. We have traditions of Jesus (Isa) having visited India and studied Buddhism, but they are either oral or based on documents that have disappeared (rather in the manner of Joseph Smith's golden tablets.) The prime propagators of the legend were a nineteenth century Russian adventurer and a nineteenth century Muslim bloke who set himself up as the Messiah- dodgy characters, both of them.

I get a strong whiff of theosophical nuttiness.

But the story isn't utterly implausible. People did survive crucifixion, there were established trade routes between the eastern Roman Empire and Northern India, and there's a tradition that the people of Kashmir are descended from the Jews who were carted off into exile by the Assyrians- and didn't Jesus say he had a mission to preach to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel"?

A simple way forward would be to dig up Nas Asuf and have a look at his hands and feet. But that would be sacrilege. And consider all the vested interests...

It's not going to happen, is it?

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After 2000 years, wouldn't that pesky "dust to dust" thing have come into play anyway????

They can get a lot of information out of bones these days. And, depending on the conditions in which it's been kept, a 2,000 year old skeleton might still be in pretty good nick.

Jesus survived the crucifixion, fled to Kashmir, lived to be 80 and is buried in Srinigar

Oh, I'd love this to be true! Personally I'm quite convinced that Jesus survived the crucifixion, but that he died of his injuries shortly after, probably from infection.

On the other hand, it would also be rather nice to think of him being packed off to Britain by his family to get him safely out of the way and thus leading to the Glastonbury tradition.

I'd be happy for the mystery to be cleared up.

I've thought for a while that Jesus was a fictional construct, but this stuff is causing me to reconsider my position.

i feel like even if the mystery were cleared up, people would still bend the truth and manipulate it for their own ends. church and state have always been very good at that. maybe i'm overly cynical, but i don't see how finding jesus' body would change that.

I suppose I mean cleared up to my personal satisfaction....

You're right; church and state would carry on regardless. And of course one could never be absolutely sure that a 2,000 year old corpse belonged to Jesus- not even if it came in a box with his name written all over it.

Well, sadly for us, not soon anyway. You know it will eventually... and you also know that it matters not. We will all believe what we are comfortable believing... regardless of any "trivial" evidence. Who cares about the truth anyway? The legend is so much more palatable. *S*

The truth is just six feet and a taboo away. And we can't get to it. I find that really frustrating.

I am assuming that you have considered what the effects of this discovered truth might have on our civilization?

I will admit to sharing your fascination and frustration but still...

We could well be talking about the end of our world as we know it. It's more scary than anything else, methinks. *sigh*

I think our world would survive.

Of course I'm writing from an English perspective; most English people already put the resurrection in the same category as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

And even if the tomb was found to contain an ossuary labelled "Jesus of Nazareth" the true believers would be able to argue (quite rightly) that Jesus was a very common 1st century name...

Here, in Charismatic Christian country such a discovery could turn otherwise harmless fanatics into monstrous revolutionaries! I'm thinking the crusades here with state of the art technology!

I have always assumed that your experiences in religion have taken you into every variety of fanatic. It occurs to me today that you may not have met any of our grass roots Oral Roberts-Benny Hinn types. If they ever banded together and declared war on the truth... millions of otherwise sensible Americans would declare a jihad!

I know the Oral Roberts type only by reputation. I suppose I regard it as a kind of fabulous beast- like a unicorn or a yeti.

I have REAL neighbors who, if Oral Roberts said the sky was falling, would build a bomb shelter, no questions asked.

We do have charismatics and born-again fundamentalists- but they're a tiny minority- almost entirely without power. We find it hard to imagine what it'd be like if such quaint and cranky people were in a position to call the shots.

"such quaint and cranky people were in a position to call the shots."

You mean like our "Dubya"?

I suppose I might... :)

what is "our world"? very little (if any) of the fighting would happen in england, i think. i'm fairly certain the indian government doesn't want to do anything that will draw america's attention and religious fervor. we have a lot of fundamentalists and religious whackos over here, and a president who is so insane as to actually be looking forward to nuclear war with iran. i can't blame india for wanting to keep a low profile.

I see what you mean.

I sometimes forget that Britannia no longer rulkes the waves.

Dan Brown and others of his ilk would love for this to be something more than idle speculation, I'm sure. That whiff you get comes across as a stench to me.

It's a little more than idle speculation.

There really is an ancient, pre-muslim tomb in Srinigar which local tradition identifies as that of Jesus.

This is altogether more substantial than the flim-flam about the Magdalen that Brown plays about with in the Da Vinci Code.

I'm not convinced either way, but I think it would be nice if we could get the archaeologists to check it out.

As would I.

I saw the end of this, too. I liked the theory that Jesus was out in the East from 14-29, too, having been identified by the wise men (who followed stars) as the next Lama - I'm always happy about things that bring religions together, because the sheer number of different religions is part of my problem with the whole thing. And a lot of Jesus's views and teachings were kinda Buddhist in nature, even from what the bible says - they're closer to Buddhism than Judaism, certainly.

I was also interested in the people who pointed out that all the mentions of the Second Coming are very low-key, and could apply more to someone popping back over from Kashmir than to a miraculous return from the dead by the son of God.

Exactly. The story of Jesus's survival may be far-fetched, but it's a lot less far-fetched than what the Church would have us believe.

I find myself wanting to know more....

even if they dug up the body and proved conclusively, somehow, that it was Jesus, there would still be people who would steadfastly say that it was not him and that Jesus died, came back from the dead and floated up into the sky, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead etc.

I think personally that this is one of those things where the truth can never be known. I passed by an old guy in the street talking to himself out loud, saying in a puzzled way, "Jesus appear here, he appear there, he invisible everywhere." I think that is quite true. Jesus has dissolved into a million different Jesuses for a million different faiths, a haze of possible divinity that shimmers around Western civilization, appear here, appear there, invisible everywhere.

You're right, of course.

It's like Elvis. We know he's dead; there can really be no doubt about it; but millions believe or half-believe he's still alive (and in a sense he is).

in india they never dig anything up. there's a longstanding tradition of muslim conquerors knocking down hindu temples and building mosques on the foundation, and hindu conquerors knocking down mosques and building temples on the foundation, so that most old mosques and temples have been knocked down and rebuilt many times. the government never allows any investigation into what the sites originally were, because they don't want to give either side any more motivation to hate the other side. i imagine they'd feel similarly about this site.

That makes sense.

Digging up ancient Romans is one thing; digging up saints of a living (and touchy) faith is something rather different.

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It's not going to happen, is it?

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