All who try to find in the New Tes­ta­ment the story of what hap­pened in Jesus’ life between the ages of 12 and 30 are inevitably sorely dis­ap­pointed.  Those years are not cov­ered.  Two promi­nent Catholic schol­ars at George­town Uni­ver­sity con­firm this in JESUS IN INDIA. Catholics call that period of Jesus’ life “The Miss­ing Years” or “The Hid­den Years.”

New con­cepts of the his­toric per­son of Jesus of Nazareth are emerg­ing from stud­ies of ancient texts dis­cov­ered since the 1940’s in the Holy Land and Egypt.   Even Pope Bene­dict the 16th acknowl­edges this in his book JESUS OF NAZARETH.  How­ever, what the Pope does not talk about, which you will learn much about in this film, is that there is pur­port­edly an ancient text about Jesus, long believed to have been seen and stud­ied by a few select schol­ars and adven­tur­ers at a very remote monastery in Ladakh, India, high in the Himalayas, which may tell us true things about the his­toric Jesus not described in the New Tes­ta­ment.  That text has been trans­lated from Tibetan at least twice and was pub­lished in entirety about 100 years ago by a Russ­ian writer, Nicholas Notovitch, and then again in the 1920’s by Hindu Swami Abhedananda, a direct dis­ci­ple of Ramakr­ishna of impec­ca­ble rep­u­ta­tion.  The ques­tion today is where is the most ancient ver­sion of it (pur­port­edly orig­i­nally writ­ten in the Pali lan­guage) and how old is it?  Does it accu­rately fill in actual miss­ing details of the life of Jesus?