La Vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ par Nicolas Notovitch Cartes et illustrations. Sixième édition

8vo. pp. xii, 361, [5], maps and plates. Spine broken, text intact but loose in original printed wrappers. Original edition, one of eight ‘editions’ from a single setting of type, all issued by Ollendorff in 1894.

The French text is the first appearance of what Beskow calls ‘the best-known Gospel forgery of modern times’ (Strange Tales about Jesus (1983), pp. 57-65, 121-22 (notes)). In this work, the Jewish Crimean war-journalist and historian (claiming Russian aristocratic descent) Nicolas Notovitch (1858?-1916) attempted to fill in Jesus’s ‘missing years’ by claiming that at age thirteen Christ visited India, where he was known as ‘the Issa.’ The ‘vie inconnue’ is claimed by Notovitch to be based on a Tibetan manuscript. La Vie inconnue gained world-wide circulation and credit for several years but was demolished early on by Friedrich Max Müller (Last Essays: Second Series, Essays on the Science of Religion. London, 1901, Bib# 998932/Fr# 1489).

In the 1894 volume – its one and only exposition, although some back-stepping came later – his ‘Preface’ and introductory ‘Voyage au Thibet’ (pp. 1-151) recount his discovery, in a monastic library at Leh, in Ladakh, during a tour of northern India in 1877-78, of Buddhist scrolls preserving the sayings of the fourteen-year-old Jesus of Nazareth, wandering eastward from Palestine in search of spiritual enlightenment, which Notovitch recorded from an oral translation given him by a Tibetan interpreter, while he recovered there from an accidentally broken leg. All this narrative, save his own presence briefly in India, was later proved spurious, and the ‘translated’ material (‘La Vie de Saint Issa [the Tibetan name for Jesus]’, pp. 153-228) entirely fanciful. A ‘Resumé’ and ‘Notes Explicatives’ conclude the volume, which Notovitch claims to have delayed making public (after initially discouraging advice from high-church grandees) until the death in 1892 of Ernest Renan (author of ‘La Vie de Jésus,’ 1863), who had himself sought ‘la gloire de la publication’.

The ‘Issa’ myth has remained unshakeably popular, and has recently been restudied by H. Louis Fader (The Issa Tale that Will not Die. Lanham, 2003, Bib# 4103101/Fr# 1490).

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