The following quoted passage is taken verbatim from The Lost Years of Jesus, pp. 7-11, by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Livingston, Montana, 1987.

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The search for the historical Jesus began at the end of the eighteenth century when scholars and theologians began to examine critically the principal sources for Jesus' life -- the Gospels. The intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, combined with the development of historiography and the historical sense (that is, the recognition that it was both possible and desirable to find out what actually happened at a particular point in time), spurred "the quest of the historical Jesus" -- a quest which has dominated the critical theology of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries.

Scholars discussed whether Jesus was a man or a myth or some of each; whether he came to establish a new religion or if he was an eschatological figure -- a herald announcing the end of the world. They debated whether there was a rational explanation for the miracles, whether Jesus was necessary to the development of Christianity, whether the synoptic Gospels were historically more relevant than the Gospel of John, and even if there was anything to be gained by further study. The scholarship was so intense and the writings so profuse that entire libraries on the subject of the historical Jesus could be assembled.

Scholars are now virtually in agreement that Jesus did in fact exist, but because of a scarcity of historical information no biography of his life, in the modern sense of the word, can be drawn.

The earliest writings about Jesus fall into two categories : Christian and non-Christian. The non-Christian records, written by Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius about sixty to ninety years after the crucifixion, are so brief that they do little more than help establish his historicity.

The Gospels, probably written between A.D. 60 and 100, are the principal source of information about Jesus. Although of immense historical value, scholars contend they were never intended to be biographies -- a judgment that must be reconsidered in light of the fact that we do not necessarily have the writings of the Evangelists and the apostles in their original, unedited form.

With the exception of a few papyrus fragments from the second century, the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospels are from the fourth century. Furthermore, the texts of the Gospels were in a fluid state -- that is, subject to change by copyists for theological or other reasons -- until they were standardized in about the middle of the fourth century. As a result, we have no way of telling whether we have received the Gospels intact or to what degree they have been edited, interpolated, subjected to scribal errors, or otherwise altered to meet the needs of orthodoxy as the Church struggled to curb so-called heresies, such as Gnosticism.

The discoveries of a Gnostic library at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, by Muhammad Ali al-Samman, an Arab peasant, in 1945 and a fragment of a "Secret Gospel" of Mark in the Judean desert at Mar Saba by Morton Smith in 1958 strongly suggest that early Christians possessed a larger, markedly more diverse body of writings and traditions on the life and teachings of Jesus than appears in what has been handed down to us as the New Testament.

While contemporary profiles of the famous abound in purely personal detail -- we can learn how many cigars Winston Churchill smoked daily and what Mahatma Gandhi ate at any number of meals -- the Gospels do not say what Jesus looked like, provide only the vaguest of geographic and chronological data, and even leave a question about his exact occupation.

Scholars believe that Jesus was a carpenter. Joseph was a carpenter, and at that time it was customary for a boy to carry on his father's occupation. The language of carpenters, fishermen, and other common people is embedded in Jesus' words as recorded in the Gospels. But there is no definitive proof that Jesus was a carpenter. In fact, Origen objected to the entire notion on the grounds that "Jesus himself is not described as a carpenter anywhere in the Gospels accepted by the churches."

Apocryphal writings say that while Jesus was growing up in Egypt and Palestine, he performed many healings and other miracles. In one instance, he commanded a serpent that had bitten a youth, Simon the Canaanite, to "suck out all the poison which thou hast infused into that boy." The serpent obeyed, whereupon Jesus cursed the serpent and it "immediately burst asunder and died." Jesus then touched Simon and restored his health. In other passages, Jesus healed the foot of a boy, carried water in his cloak, made a short wooden beam longer to help Joseph with his carpentry, and fashioned twelve sparrows out of clay, bringing them to life with a clap of his hands.

These accounts provide somewhat of a record of the early Christian traditions concerning Jesus' childhood, whereas only four of the eighty-nine chapters of the Gospels, two each in Matthew and Luke, describe Jesus' life prior to his ministry. Known as the infancy narratives, they dwell on Jesus' genealogy, conception and birth, and a number of familiar events, such as the annunciation, the coming of the wise men from the East, the manger visit of the shepherds, the circumcision, the presentation in the Temple at Jerusalem, the flight into Egypt where the family remained until the death of Herod in 4 B.C., and the return to Nazareth.

After these extraordinary events, Jesus' life is cloaked in obscurity until the start of his mission. In fact, only two other things are recorded in the Gospel of Luke -- his physical and spiritual growth and his visit at the age of twelve to the Temple in Jerusalem on the occasion of Passover.

In a short but powerful vignette, Luke records that on their way back to Nazareth after attending the Passover feast, Joseph and Mary suddenly realized that Jesus was missing from their company, returned to the city and "found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers." When reproached by Mary, Jesus replied, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

Jesus then departed for Nazareth with his parents, "subject unto them." Once again the veil descends, obscuring all of Jesus' activities for the next seventeen or so years, until he is baptized by John in the Jordan River at about the age of thirty.

The Gospel of Luke has only one transitional verse: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." When all is said and done, as Christian scholar Kenneth S. Latourette points out, "The authentic records of his life and teachings are so brief that they could easily be printed in a single issue of one of our larger daily papers, and in these a substantial proportion of the space [would be] devoted to the last few days of his life."

Why didn't anyone make a more complete record of Jesus' life? Scholars have given considerable thought to that question.

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Elizabeth Clare Prophet's book then continues on for about 450 pages. It is primarily devoted to an investigation into the discovery during the last century by a Russian explorer named Nicolas Notovitch of hitherto unknown or secret Tibetan documents about the life of a Middle Eastern holy man known to the ancient Tibetan priests only as "Saint Issa." The life of this Saint Issa, it is concluded, reflects the life of Jesus during the so-called "lost years," that Jesus spent those seventeen "lost years" travelling and studying mysticism in Tibet, Nepal, India and Kashmir.

In 1894, Nicolas Notovitch published The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ based upon what he had seen and heard in Tibet a few years earlier. This book set off a theological firestorm of a debate, which has apparently continued until the present day. It is not within the purview of this current book to delve further into the matter of this Saint Issa controversy. I can only refer the reader to Ms. Prophet's excellent "detective story" in which she has provided a complete reprinting of the work by Nicolas Notovitch.

Several immediate observations come to mind, however. Elsewhere in this book, in connection with the life of Philostratus, it is stated that The Life of Apollonius of Tyana was not translated from the Greek into other European languages until the year 1502 when it was first translated into Latin in Venice. Over the next 200 years it was translated also into French and English, but in 1693 its further publication in England was banned by the church.

Thus, when Ms. Prophet states that the search for the historical Jesus began in earnest at the end of the Eighteenth Century, that is, the 1700s, it is obvious at once that this search had been spurred, at least in part, by the earlier publications of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana in Europe and the contemporaneous "heresies" that it engendered amongst the European Christian clergy. Since Notovitch did not publish his material on Saint Issa until 1894, the existence of this Saint Issa was still hidden knowledge when this earlier search for the historical Jesus had been undertaken.

Today, we encounter a most peculiar enigma. We have little information on the life of Jesus, but his life is assumed by most scholars and clerics to have had a basis in fact. And we have the account by Philostratus of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, whose life can also be documented independently of Philostratus. In fact, in the Museum of Naples, Italy, there is actually a marble bust of Apollonius of Tyana, a bust that not only greatly resembles subsequent artistic representations of Jesus but also has an eerie similarity to the image that is found on the mysterious Shroud of Turin. And finally, we have the life of this Saint Issa of the Tibetans.

It is well known that Apollonius of Tyana, like Saint Issa, visited Tibet and India. And as will be shown in this book, the life and works of Apollonius have been compared countless times to the life of Jesus and bear many similarities, and thus have provoked many theological controversies about whether Apollonius was indeed the "real Jesus."

Could there possibly have been three of these great holy men travelling to and from the region of Greater India at the same exact point in history and that they never heard of one another or did not encounter one another at any point in their respective journeys? In fact, in the lives of each of these three men, not one word at all is mentioned about the existences of the others. If all of these men supposedly had such a great impact upon the events of their time, then why do no other historians of the period (or, men like Philostratus, a century later) mention these three great men as being contemporaries of one another?

Because they are one and the same man -- Apollonius of Tyana.

It might also be pointed out that linguistically the names IeSouS and ISSa are identical in the ISS character or sound sequence. Here, the initial vowel would need to be included along with all the consonants. Thus, there is no linguistic reason not to think that this "Saint Issa" was the same man as "the Jesus Christ."

In a letter to the publisher of the English translation of his The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, Nicolas Notovitch stated the following :

"Is it a new thing in the Christian world -- a book that aims at completing the New Testament and throwing light on hitherto obscure points? The works known as apocryphas were so numerous in the sixteenth century that the Latin Council of Trent was forced to curtail an immense number of them so as to avoid controversies that would have been hurtful to the interests of the public and to reduce the Book of Revelation to the minimum accessible to commonplace minds.

"Had not the Nicene Council, with the Emperor Constantine's consent, already proscribed many manuscripts in the hands of the faithful, which were regarded by them with a veneration almost equal to that which they professed for the four canonical Gospels? The Nicene Council, in common with that of Trent, also reduced to a minimum the sum of transcendental truths.

"Is it not on record that Stilicho, a general of Honorius, caused the Sibylline Books to be publicly burnt in the year 401? Can it be denied that these were full to overflowing of moral, historical, and prophetic truths of the highest order? That would be giving the lie to the whole of Roman history, whose most important events were determined by the decisions of the Sibylline Books.

"In the times of which we speak, there was every motive for establishing or supporting a badly consolidated or already tottering religion, and the spiritual and temporal authorities believed that this could not be done better than by organizing a vigorous watch and an implacable censorship over eternal truths."

To which Elizabeth Clare Prophet offers the following observation :

"With the exception of a few papyrus fragments from the second century, the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospels are from the fourth century. Furthermore, the texts of the Gospels were in a fluid state -- that is, subject to change by copyists for theological or other reasons -- until they were standardized in about the middle of the fourth century. As a result, we have no way of telling whether we have received the Gospels intact or to what degree they have been edited, interpolated, subjected to scribal errors, or otherwise altered to meet the needs of orthodoxy as the Church struggled to curb so-called heresies, such as Gnosticism."

The Nicene Council, otherwise known as the Council of Nicaea, met under the order of the Emperor Constantine in the year 325, as the middle of the fourth century approached. The council's purpose was to establish "the true Gospel" and put to rest all of the subcultish heresies that were causing so much philosophical dissension across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. It was also the desire of Emperor Constantine to embrace this new religion himself, with philosophical modifications to suit his own lifestyle and temperament, in order to legitimize the new philosophy and to provide an official means by which to silence its radical critics.

Of course, as always happens in the flow of human affairs, time passed; and the memories in question were forgotten by the people. One could think of this in terms of the present day. Between the date of 3 BCE, the year of the birth of both Jesus of Nazareth and Apollonius of Tyana, until the Council of Nicaea met in Bithynia in 325 CE, there was a span of approximately 330 years. Let us go back in time from 2000 CE by 330 years, to the year of 1670 CE, a hundred years before either the American or French Revolutions. If the invention of the printing press had not provided us with all the history books that we have at our disposal today, how many of us would actually retain accurate memories of that tumultuous time of revolutions? Even today, many of us believe in the more recent "myth" that George Washington confessed to cutting down his father's cherry tree because he could not tell a lie.

Thus, in a day and age when all recorded history was handwritten on parchment paper and was available only to the elite intelligentsia of the time, it would have been an easy chore to control officially the dissemination of information to the general public about the real identity of the "New Messiah." That The Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus has survived intact is most exceptional in this tide of historical censorship.

For additional information regarding the burning of the Sibylline Books by Stilicho and the contents of those books, even though those books do not bear exactly upon the subject-matter at hand, please see the Appendix titled "Libri Sibyllini." This material is included to demonstrate the recklessness with which these ancient documents were handled in general by the people of those times.