My journey to Ladakh began one idle summer afternoon in the dusty stacks of the London Library. I was browsing the volumes in the theology section when I came upon a 19th-century book with an intriguing title: The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ. It was a battered brown quarto, written in French by an author with a Russian name: Nicolas Notovitch.
Notovitch's book told an astonishing story. He claimed to have discovered an ancient text in the sacred Pali language that revealed previously unknown aspects of Jesus's life. According to this text, which Notovitch had translated into French, Jesus had spent his missing years -- the years between his childhood and the beginning of his ministry -- studying Buddhism in India. At the age of about 30, he'd returned to the Middle East and the life that is familiar to us from the New Testament.
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