Parahistory and the historical Jesus (a laughing matter?) …

Shingo, Aomori

Deep in the mountainous northern countryside of Japan’s main island of Honshu, in the agricultural prefecture of Aomori, some 300 miles (a good day’s travel) from the metropolis of Tokyo, one will find the village of Shingo (called Herai in former times) nestled unobtrusively in the landscape. This simple village of about 6,000 people is in a remote region which is virtually inaccessible in winter. A few farmhouses are scattered among some terraced rice paddies and apple orchards. Basically, it is your typical rural Japanese village. There’s nothing out of place about the place—nothing, that is, until you begin noticing all the crosses everywhere. Crosses lead a kind of yellow brick road path into the center of town, becoming progressively more numerous as you approach: on street signs, on the façade of the general store, on the uniforms of its few municipal employees. They finally converge on a building of modest size which serves at the town’s official museum. Boasting over 10,000 visitors annually, the museum at Shingo was erected to commemorate one specific piece of local mythology, a legend that is quite extraordinary for such a small rural Japanese village.

You see, Shingo, Aomori, according to local tradition, is the final resting place of Jesus.

Yes, that’s right, the Jesus— Jesus of Nazareth, the famous first-century healer, magician and teacher from the Levant, the very cornerstone figure in the religious development of Western civilization of the last two thousand years. His body is said to lie in a burial mound down the road from this museum a ways, on a charming nearby hill.

A large white cross marks the spot.

Before continuing, I have to stop to ask the reader: Is this your first time hearing this?
If so, what is your initial reaction to this proposition?

My first reaction was to think that this is some kind of joke.

But it isn’t a joke. It’s for real. They’re not kidding. The locals claim Jesus is buried there. There’s even a tourist industry devoted to the perpetuation of this peculiar legend. Officially sanctioned by the town and celebrated annually with a festival that features music, poetry, and dance, the Christ Festival (Kirisuto Matsuri), as it is known, is a significant source of revenue. The locals therefore take it very seriously. They get into it. They look forward to participating every first Sunday in June. But this notion of Jesus having been in Japan is such a strange concept to us westerners, it is so far removed from his legend’s traditional cultural and historical context in first-century Judea, that we can’t help but to find humor in its mere suggestion. We are therefore tempted to reflexively dismiss the whole thing out of hand as a ludicrous proposition.

Why on earth would someone think that Jesus is buried in the land of the rising sun?

A tourist brochure from the museum relates a bit of this strange tale for the curious visitor:

“When Jesus Christ (イエスキリスト) was 21 years old, he came to Japan and pursued knowledge of divinity for 12 years. He went back to Judea at the age of 33 and engaged in his mission. However, at that time, people in Judea would not accept Christ’s preaching. Instead, they arrested him and tried to crucify him on a cross. His younger brother Isukiri (イスキリ) casually took Christ’s place and ended his life on the cross.

Christ, who escaped the crucifixion, went through the ups and downs of travel, and again came to Japan. He settled right here in what is now called Herai village, and died at the age of 106.

In this holy ground, there is dedicated a burial mound on the right to deify Christ, and a grave on the left to deify Isukiri.

The above description was given in a testament by Jesus Christ.”

So Jesus went to Japan and he wrote about it …
 How about that? Who knew?

I grew up in the west, where the story of Jesus is canonical, culturally pervasive, deeply ingrained, so I find this notion to be humorous, a bit surreal, and even ludicrous.

Why?

Why is it that we react with such a high level of suspicion when we hear things like this? Is there some threshold of ludicrousness, beyond which a variant of a story becomes absurd enough to be considered laughable? Where is this threshold? Is mockery or vitriol justified beyond this threshold? What are the social and mythological parameters at play in making these determinations.

The answer ultimately lies, as it does for all historical claims, in following up on whatever evidence there is to support them. Of course, one can simply dismiss the thing altogether as folly without further ado, betting that its probability is so low as to be negligible. It's the prerogative of the individual. But without due diligence, this kind of dismissive mockery is based more on social pressures than on intellectual ones, and it is very important that we make the distinction. More than that, what if it could be demonstrated that Jesus died in Japan and is still buried there? Don’t you want to know why someone would say such a thing? An outright dismissal is more an emotional response than a rational one. One would at least ask to see evidence. We have to ask: Is there any verisimilitude to this legend? Some people think there is. As we explore the story, in fact, it turns out that the heart of this legend is convoluted and as full of moxy, fantasy, and intrigue as a Dan Brown novel.

In 1935, while researching his family’s library in the prefecture of Ibaraki (about 60 miles northeast of Tokyo), a man named Kyomaro Takeuchi claimed to have unearthed some very ancient documents which turn out to be the source of this peculiar, lesser-known variant of the Jesus legend. These documents included the Legend of Daitenku Taro Jurai (the Japanese name that Jesus would reportedly take on for himself). The legend revealed that Jesus first came to Japan during the reign of the eleventh emperor Suinin, landing at the port of Hashidate (on the western coast of Honshu), and that he eventually settled in the Etchu province, where he studied Japanese language, literature, and philosophy under a Shinto priest.

After this formative period of immersion into pre-classical Japanese culture, it is reported that Jesus returned to Judea. The New Testament tells us what happened next. The part where Jesus less-than-triumphantly marches into Jerusalem one Passover weekend to usher in the new Davidic age, botches it up and then proceeds to get crucified in the process for all his trouble, is ingrained into our collective cultural frontal lobe. There’s no need to revisit the details of the familiar story. But the Takeuchi documents have a different, happier ending than the New Testament does. They inform us that Jesus was in fact spared the undignified death outlined in the gospels. Cancel the passion. Cancel the resurrection. Cancel Pentecost. The ancient texts tell us that Isukiri, Jesus’ baby brother, voluntarily took his place and died instead.¹  Having thus escaped death by the hand of Rome Jesus hurried eastward, carrying with him his martyred brother’s ear and a lock of hair from their mother. After much hardship along the long way from Judea to Japan (via Siberia and Alaska—!!—, we are told) Jesus eventually made it home to Japan. The legend then holds that during this second visit, Jesus eventually settled down in Herai, married a woman named Miyuko, worked as a simple rice farmer, raised a couple of daughters, and later died there at an extremely advanced age. The Takeuchi documents further reveal the Sawaguchi family to be the direct descendants of Jesus of Nazareth.²

At the time of their “discovery”, these documents caused very little stir (most of it negative) in the Japanese press, who would have been understandably highly skeptical and hostile to such an interpolation of gaijin (alien/outsider) religious symbolism into pre-axis Imperial Japanese culture. Therefore, no one really took Takeuchi seriously.

But still there are those who even now perpetuate the legend, or else there would be no yearly festival. Right?
At the very least, we are justified in asking to see the original Takeuchi documents.The response to which (I extrapolate in dialogue form from the literature at the museum) goes something like:

— ‘Well, the originals were so precious that they were transferred from Ibaraki to Tokyo, where they’d be safe, but they did not survive the subsequent constant bombing of Tokyo during the war, I’m afraid. They were destroyed.  But copies were made by the Takeuchi family, and can be read today; some are on display at the museum in downtown Shingo.’

— I see, … so the originals don’t exist any longer, only copies do, and the people claiming to have found the document are the people who did the copying.  (My spidey sense starts to go off and I start making mental notes.)
Hmm.
Anything else? What other evidence is there that this legend is based on anything real?  

It turns out that those few who take the authenticity of the Takeuchi documents seriously actually have a few lines of ‘evidence’ in support of their belief.

(Aha! Cool. Now we're talking. Evidence!)

The Evidence:

First, notice the similarity between the Sawaguchi family emblem and the familiar star of David, symbol of the Hebrews since ancient times.

¿

→

?

—Wait … That's your evidence?

You do realize that the star of David has six points, right? The Sawaguchi emblem has five points.  

Well, that's not all. There is also the evidence from some of the ancient songs that are traditionally (and still) sung at the festivals. There is a body of music which has been exclusively performed in this region for ages and ages. It is pretty evident that these songs go back to the time before Takeuchi made his infamous discovery. They are so ancient that they were sung eons before anyone ever heard of Jesus in Shingo. In fact they go way further back than the Japanese language itself. Their syllables have been handed down from generation to generation, faithfully taught phonetically even though no one remembers what they mean any longer.³  One scholar, Eiji Kawamorita, has argued that the lyrics of one such song could have come from some Hebraic source that has been babble-ized over time. In his ethnography of the songs of the region in 1935, he stated, "This is a military song of ancient Judea and it means to give glory to God in Hebrew."  An approximate pronunciation of this particular popular festival chant is:

Naniyaa dorayayo...................(ナニヤアドラヤヨ)
Naniyaa donasare inokie............(ナニヤアドナサレイノキエ)
Naniyaa dorayayo ..................(ナニヤアドラヤヨ)

(Some footage of the chant and the dance performed by the locals at Christ's burial mound at the 45th annual Kirisuto Matsuri.)

Offered up as evidence of Hebraic origin is the suggestion that, in the middle of the song is a string of syllables (nasare) which closely resembles the name "Nazareth." Moreover, the old name of the town, Herai,  is said to derive from the word for "Hebrew."

(My spidey sense is tingling like crazy at this point.)

— Hmm. I see. Yes, of course, and the "inokie" part clearly is a reference to Enoch. And obviously the "yayo" is an allusion to the Hebrew tetragrammaton ( יהוה‎ ).    (I find it hard to restrain my sarcasm here.
It really IS hard to not resort to mockery — but I digress).

Needless to say, presented with such flimsy scraps of circumstantial 'evidence,' it's hard to imagine that anyone is drawn in by it at all.  The first bit about the similarity between the Sawaguchi family emblem and the star of David, for example, is clearly just ad-hoc and forced from the git-go. I’d go as far as saying it’s silly.   

Dig a bit deeper into the folkloric chanting of that region, and you’ll learn that although Professor Kawamorita is cited as supporting the hypothesis that the songs are Hebraic in origin, others don't agree.  Dr. Kunyo Yanagida, for example, a premier Japanese ethnologist, has interpreted the words of that same song to translate as, "You must have nerve to express your heart." He thinks it was a love song in the local proto-Japanese accent of the region instead of a Jewish religious exultation.   How would Occam cut this knot?

 Dig deeper still and you’ll learn that Professor Kawamorita in fact rejected and detested the whole Christ burial business. He also clearly resented the fact that his work was being used to support the ideas of hyper-nationalistic Takeuchi. So annoyed was he at Takeuchi that he would (in his work Research on the Hebrew Song Words in Japan) eventually write about the whole affair:

“During the summer of 1935, when I set foot in Herai, the tomb of Christ did not exist yet [...] I have nothing in common with Kyomaro Takeuchi, who posed as an oracle and a remote descendant of Sukune Takeuchi  (武内宿禰), and his group, Katsutoki Sakai, Banzan Toya, history researcher Kikue Yamakawa etc. who created that "Christ's grave" fantasy in Herai, and I refuse to bear that responsibility.”

If this wasn't damning enough, after a few tourism inquiries into the region, one learns that the tomb of Jesus is not Shingo’s only popular tourist attraction; there are also some ancient (older than Giza, so the brochure reads) pyramids nearby. You can also find, a few kilometers from Jesus’ grave, the location of the Garden of Eden. Apparently, Shingo, Aomori is the Sedona, Arizona of Japan, a groovy place to titillate all manner of gullible mystic visionaries in their quest for is-ness and otherness and what-not.

This is not looking so good for the historicity of the story.

So what about these documents, then?  What, if anything, can we glean from them? What does a crritical review of them reveal?  The answer, I am afraid, amounts to nothing but good old human artifice and guile. In fact, if the circumstantial evidence above seems pretty thin, the textual evidence is even worse in several ways. It is blatantly fraudulent.

a copy of Jesus' signature

To begin with, the copies of the various Takeuchi documents on display at the Shingo museum are written in what are legible kenji, hiragana, and katakana characters — all of these are standard in the Japanese language.   But this is a big problem.  Why?  Well, this is a Japanese writing system that did not exist until the ninth century. What's more, the Japanese didn’t even have any writing system at all until the sixth century or so!  Whoever "copied" these documents has to explain why Jesus (the supposed writer of this scroll) was expressing himself in modern Japanese during the second century C.E.

The following excerpt from Japan: A Short Cultural History is a good encapsulation of the discontinuity involved:

Apart from Chinese chronicles, our chief sources of information about early Japanese history are two official records, the Kojiki ('Record of Ancient Things') and the Nihongi, or more correctly Nihon-shoki ('Chronicles of Japan'), compiled in 712 and 720 respectively, […] It must be repeated that both these records were compiled at a date when Japan had been for centuries under the influence of Chinese culture, and that they are both written in Chinese script—since the Japanese had no writing of their own.⁴ (my emphasis)

It is my understanding (indeed, it is explicitly stated in the museum literature) that the Takeuchi family had "copied" (not "translated") the documents before the originals were destroyed, so it follows that the originals were also written in this modern Japanese script.

But let's give the Takeuchis the benefit of the doubt, let's allow for the possibility that the original documents were in ancient Chinese and that the pertinent members of the family were qualified to translate them from this archaic form of Chinese script to modern Japanese; there are still problems within the text itself which are very hard to explain. Insurmountable hurdles, in fact.

A single glaring example will suffice to make my point. One of the pages of the document is signed,
イスキリスクリスマス神,
"Isukirisu, Christmas god."

Not only is this supposedly a testament written by Jesus himself, this is a Jesus who apparently thinks he’s Santa Claus. Clearly, this could only have been written by a modern Japanese person with a very limited, incomplete, and cursory understanding of Christian belief and ritual.  

It doesn't take a genius to deem the Takeuchi  documents a forgery.   At this point, I have enough evidence to make my own Bayesian estimate for the probability that this legend might be historically viable. Obviously, I don’t think there’s anything to it, which is to say that I think that Takeuchi invented the story in 1935 from whole cloth, just as I think that Joseph Smith’s having “discovered” the Book of Mormon means that he is its sole source and author.  

Having thus determined the legend to be completely fanciful and made up, I now return to the question with which I started: Namely, I am interested in the threshold of tolerance for any given false historiographical claim, trying to highlight the burden of evidence that is called for in establishing such a claim laughable or ridiculous (or merely impossible). Any one of quite a few similarly refutable claims would have served as examples: 
Jesus’ supposed sojourn to Kashmir as revealed in Nicolas Notovitch’s infamous “discovered” Issa document; 
… or Jesus’ supposed sojourn to England (with his uncle Joseph in tow?) as beautifully immortalized in William Blake’s verse:

“And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?”

Poetic as the notion may be, the answer to the questions posed by Blake is a resounding ‘no’ on both counts. It is, in fact, so highly unlikely that it is safe to say that it almost certainly never happened (we, of course, are never justified in saying “never”, but we are surely justified in making some bets regarding the matter). It is just as unlikely that Jesus went to England as it is that he went study with the swamis in the Himalayas or that he settled down in middle-of-nowhere Japan or that he visited the meso-Americans during his alleged three-day sojourn to the netherworld. These kinds of claims can be dismissed outright, based as they are on either fabricated evidence, or circumstantial non-evidence.  They can be dismissed regardless of how one relates to or interprets the historicity of traditions involving Christian origins in the early Roman Empire as outlined in the early Christian writings and various other related primary sources. One need not be a mythicist, in other words, to call 'bullshit' on them. There is simply no reason to think that these newer aberrant tales are in any way relevant to the quest of the historical Jesus.

It looks like an ad hoc solution to the problem of Jesus' missing years. But the problem of these missing years is not resolved by these absurd formulations of his various legendary journeys, for which only anecdotal evidence or completely fabricated evidence or totally discredited evidence has been retained. Anyone who would believe in any of these supposed travels of Jesus (or Issa, or Iesukirisuto) does so at the peril of the credibility of their own reasoning. That person would be taking a logical leap without any due warrant. These credulous people may have to pay a high social price for subscribing to such an unsubstantiated view. People who believe that Elvis is living in exile in Santa Monica (or in Paraguay) will inevitably get funny looks from their less-eccentric neighbors. That’s just the way life is.

I would suggest that there is valid reason to mock that which has been demonstrated to be a guileful ruse. Such mockery is well deserved. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the festival.  I don't mind Easter either, even though I seriously doubt its veracity too. I actually think that ritual is a good thing, necessary for human psychological balance and cultural identity. The metaphors and symbols within these rituals are the navigational aides by which people orient themselves to their values and ideals.   But as the higher criticism of the last two centuries have been repeatedly showing us, it is inadvisable and unwise to try to lend gravity to one's myths by insisting that they are historically supported facts.  The story of the Buddha's birth, in which he utters his first words: "Worlds above, worlds below, there's no one in the world like me" is a beautiful story, but to believe that a newborn baby actually spoke in a complete sentence with such eloquence is just plain silly. Likewise with Jesus. The New Testament if filled with much metaphorical beauty and mythological symbolism. It is a shame and an utter waste of energy to think that the stories are factual, that they happened exactly as reported there.  

If anyone wants to talk about Buddha stories or Jesus stories or Hohokam legends or Obatalá legends in their proper function, I am all over that. I love to interpret and discuss the beauty of these myths and how they relate to human living. Myths are among the most precious human artifacts, and as such, they deserve respect and admiration. But anyone who wants to obstinately insist on a myth's historicity, — well, I'm sorry, but I am going to think you are a dazed and confused person. I might even laugh at you if you get all smug and haughty in the defense of your delusion. 

That said, the reason why this question has been prompting me to think through all of this is that I detect a lot of undue mockery  being leveled at some scholars whose work is far from this contriving subterfuge that is clearly in evidence in the Shingo legend.

What about this Christ Myth idea that gets batted around? Is mythicism a crazy notion too? Do its proponents commit the same sort of disregard for evidential standards as those who would accept the Shingo-Jesus legend as authentic?

I don't intend to lay out a case for mythicsm.5  It is enough to say that, whether or not one accepts the arguments for it, it is obvious that they are not the same kind of arguments as the ludicrous one outlined above.  Therefore I find the invective directed at the mere mentioning of the idea that I witness in print and on the bloggosphere to be undeserved.   

The Christ myth theory is at the very least tenable precisely because it does not rely on the kind of whole-cloth fabrication  or misguided analogues that are the hallmark of fanciful parahistory like the examples above.  Given that the evidences outlined in defense of the Christ myth theory  are based on demonstrably solid scholarship (whether one agrees with the mythicist interpretations or not is not the point now) it is troubling to see scholars behaving so badly toward fellow scholars. This is something that I say as someone who has spent much time poring over the materials that call historicity into question, it’s not a call I make in haste. In fact, I confess that when I first encountered the idea, I argued against it forcefully. But the various formulations of the Christ myth of Hermann Detering, Earl Doherty, Robert Price and Richard Carrier are defensible and validly expressed, so the kneejerk tendency to dismiss them out of hand like I had previously diminished.  I think that Carrier’s forthcoming volume will probably be the most exhaustive and carefully argued one to come on the subject. We'll see.  I suspect that it won’t be so easy to swat the theory away with the derision that it has been dismissed by those who detest it once the historical problem has been properly defined and inductively outlined .  Until then, I'm sure that the silverback academics will keep hurling shit and sticks and stones up in the air, trying to dissuade others from entertaining the possibility. Mythicism is so reviled by these people, their hatred is so irrationally out of proportion to the implications resulting from the theory that I can't help but paraphrase the line from Hamlet:  "Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much." 

We'll have to grin and bear it for a while, I suppose. It's not easy to overturn the weight of two thousand years of enculturation, after all.  However, Jesus' aphorism concerning the futility of trying to keep a light hidden is a beautiful truth, no matter who said it.  Whether Jesus was a historical person or not, this is something in which I have faith.

Ó

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¹ The phonetic quality of written Japanese katakana highlights a curious relation between the names of the two brothers. The name of Jesus, イエスキリスト (= Iesukirisuto) contains the name of his brother  イスキリ (=Isukiri). It’s really a condensation of the first five characters of the former name to four (just omit the ‘e’=エ). Compositionally, this link between the names sets up a potential doppelganger motif to the tale. Note that the name Isukiri is a far cry from Jacob, Judas, Simon, or Joses, the names of Jesus’ brothers as listed in the Gospel of Mark.

² The Sawaguchi family curiously parallels the St. Clairs in the Dan Brown novel The DaVinci Code in this regard, except that they are not fictional characters, but actually existed in history (and still exist to this day).

³ This reminds me of the various Lucumí chants that are sung to the Orishas (in the Yoruba-derived syncretic religions of the Americas). No one really knows the meaning of the phrases, they are taught phonetically by a priest(ess) to a catecumen.

⁴ Japan: A Short Cultural History by G.B.Sansom, Stanford University Press, 1931 (1988 edition) pp. 20–21

⁵    Mythicism, for those who are unfamiliar with the subject, is the notion that the legend of Jesus might be just that, legendary, not based on a real historical personality, but instead on an essentially fictional character. For anyone who might be genuinely interested in listening to a pretty good introductory presentation of the mythicist case in three parts. The podcaster is Dr Zachary Moore, who also produced the excellent Evolution 101 podcast. 

1. the arguments from silence,
2. the arguments from similarity,
3. the arguments from ahistoricity.

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