Mom Said: Jesus in India

I ended up talking a lot about my late mother at a dinner recently, and one of the people at the table suggested that I write her biography. I don’t think I can do it; I’m too close. But I have decided to share some of her wisdom with you under the rubric Mom Said.

Mom believed, because her father believed, that Jesus’ lost years between 13 and 21 (the New Testament says nothing about this period) were spent in India, learning about Hinduism.

 During a recent discussion a friend suggested that Jesus spent those years in the desert getting in touch with the collective unconscious. Occam’s razor says the simpler explanation is much more likely; given the difficulty in getting from the Holy Land to India, maybe what we view as a Hindu influence on Jesus was just expression of fundamental human nature.

In a discussion of this topic, a Jungian surprised me with an influence going the other way: Gandhi disciplined himself to read daily from the Sermon on the Mount, and live according to those teachings.