The Followers of Issa, son of Mariam [Jesus, son of Mary], generally call themselves Muslims, and inhabit a number of villages scattered throughout the western area of Afghanistan whose center is Herat. I have heard of them several times, but considered that they were probably the people who had been converted by the European missionaries from eastern Persia, or that they were a relic of the time when Herat had been a flourishing bishopric of the Nestorians, before the Arabs conquered Persia in the seventh and eighth centuries. But, from their own accounts, and from what I could observe, they seem to have come from a much older source. There must be about a thousand of these Christians. Their chief is Abba Yahiyya (Father John), who can recite the succession of teachers, through nearly sixty generations, to Issa, son of Mariam of Nasara [Nazareth], the Kashmiri.”

The quote clearly states that Jesus Christ taught in Afghanistan and attracted a following of people, the descendants of whom refer to themselves as The Followers of Issa. But does this place him in Afghanistan after the event of the crucifixion? Burke continues:

“Jesus, according to the community, was a carpenter and also a shepherd...The ‘Traditions of the Masih’ (anointed one) is the holy book of the community. They do not believe in the New Testament; or, rather, they say that these Traditions are the New Testament, and that the Gospels, which we have, are partly true but generally written by people who did not understand the teachings of the Master [Jesus].

“Abba Yahiyya, a towering figure with the face of a saint, was certainly an erudite man, and he knew his own scriptures, plus a great deal of the Jewish writings, very well indeed. He had heard of the teachings of the ‘heretics’ as he called what we would call the various sects of Christians known to us, and he wanted no part of them.

“‘My son,’ he said, in his softly accented Persian, ‘these people are reading and repeating a part of the story. They have completely misunderstood the message. We have the story told to us by the Master [Jesus], and through him we will be saved and made whole. Some of the events in that document which you call the Bible are true, but a great deal is made up or imagined or put in for less than worthy reasons. Isa lived for over thirty years after the materials you have were completed, and he told us what was true.

“‘Briefly, the doctrine is that Jesus was the son of God because he had attained that rank through his goodness and sacrifices. Thus he was equal to a divine person. He came after John the Baptist, who himself had reached the highest degree of development possible at that time. John baptized him with water, Jesus with spirit and fire. These were the three stages of understanding, which were taught by our Christians.’

“There was a great deal of confusion at first, because I was talking about sacraments and being saved, while it took me some time to realize that Abba John’s people saw baptism, the Holy Ghost and the Kingdom of God to be three stages in a system of human illumination. This is what they claim is the function of the Church: the preservation of an administration of these three ‘developments’ for the worshipers.

“There is a ritual meal, like the Last Supper, but this is carried out once a week. Bread and wine are eaten, but as symbolic of the grosser and finer nutritions that are the experiences of attainment of nearness to God.

“While it is possible to consider these people as mere heretics, or else as followers of someone else who impersonated Jesus, yet I was singularly impressed by their piety, their feeling of certainty, their simplicity and lack of the unpleasant forms of fervor which one often finds in minority cults. They were convinced, too, that the day would come when the world would discover the truth about Jesus.”

The reader will note that the Followers of Jesus claim that Jesus taught a message quite similar to the Gnostic one we studied earlier, as well as the message contained in the documents discovered by Nicholas Notovitch amongst the Buddhists. Baptism, the Holy Ghost, and the Kingdom of God were three stages of illumination. This idea is contrary to the current Christian doctrine that places Jesus as the intermediary between human beings and perfect knowledge of God. Is it simply “coincidental” that three different groups of people, living in different parts of the world—the Gnostics Christians, the Followers of Jesus in Afghanistan, and the Buddhists of Tibet—shared an understanding of the teachings of Jesus Christ that was exactly the same, and yet totally at variance with what is now called “Christianity”?