num_pages: 261
description: This truly extraordinary piece of scholarship contains decades of verifiable research performed by a distinguished seventy-three-year-old Indian Professor of History who drew the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth did not die on the cross as hundreds of millions of Christians are taught to believe. Instead, he spent the second half of his life studying and teaching in the East before he died in the Himalayan province now known as Kashmir. Professor Fida Hassnain is a scholar of the highest order who himself is a direct descendent of a grandson of Mohammed on his mother's side. He has left few stones unturned in his voluminous research on the life of Jesus Christ in the East, which as Director of Archives for the Jammu and Kashmir states in the 1960s, he was then in a rare position to do. If the theory that Christ lived to a ripe old age were proven, it would stand the entire Christian world on its head overnight, thanks to a millennium of emotional, spiritual, political and economic investment in his supposed martyrdom at the hands of the Roman conquerors of the Holy Land. But Professor Hassnain is not out to discredit modern Christianity, with which he says he has no axe to grind. Though a traditional Northern Indian Muslim by birth, over time he crossed over into Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, and therefore now believes that all religions should be honored equally as expressions of a divine oneness. Hassnain is careful to point out that Judaism, Christianity and Islam can all be traced to the same historical root: Abraham. He says that his motivation for spending so many years of his life researching the earthly existence of the flesh and blood Jesus owes itself to his reverence for one of humanity's great prophets and to his deeply-held desire to free up Christianity's monopoly on Him whom they call the Son of God. His hope in so doing is that at least some of the chasm of misunderstanding between the world's great religions might thereby be bridged.
language: English
title: A Search for the Historical Jesus
titlecomplete: A Search for the Historical Jesus
genres: Religion
ratings_count: 16
publisher: Down-to-Earth Books