The legend of St. Issa persists to this day among street people and scholars in holy cities and remote villages throughout India and Tibet. But few have ever seen the Himis manuscript. Perhaps no one ever will.

        Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1947 and what remains of the Buddhist gonyas and their ancient archives is unknown. But even before the Communist occupation, the written "Life of St. Issa" seems to have disappeared.

        Richard Bock describes a visit to a monastery in Calcutta where a man named Prajnananda testifies that he had heard from Abhedananda—"from his own lips"—that the manuscripts did exist at Himis in 1922. A few years later, however, those scrolls were no longer there.

        "They have been removed," Prajnananda told Bock, "by whom we do not know."

        "Dick," I said, "are they in the Vatican?"

        "Notovitch thought so."

        "Then why doesn't the Church..."

        "You have to go back to the early days of Christianity," Bock interrupted. "They wanted a strong church. They thought they had to control the people. So they treated them like children who don't have the capacity to understand a deeper significance. They created a religion for "commonplace minds," as Notovitch put it."

        "Where is the Jesus they know in the East?" I asked. "Where is the striving, the sense of a personal Christhood, so to speak?"

        "Jesus lives in the hearts of the Hindus and the Buddhists," Bock said.

        That's where Jesus really lives—in the hearts of us all.

        In His name I demand to see those manuscripts. Whatever the Vatican thinks is too much for my mentality—let me decide. Let me know all there is to know. Don't let me lose faith because I've been spoon-fed a diluted doctrine that cannot satisfy the hunger of my soul to know that man, that Master Jesus—my Lord.