Kersten also promotes Ahmadiyya founder Ghulam Ahmad's claims regarding time spent by Jesus in India between the age of 33 and 120, and his burial at the Roza Bal shrine in Srinagar.
Kersten additionally draws on earlier material by Louis Jacolliot, Andreas Faber-Kaiser, and German novelist Siegfried Obermeier (1983).
The passage describes the Hindu king Shalivahana travelling to mountains, where he meets a man who calls himself Isa, son of a virgin.
Isa says he has ministered to the Mlecchas, explaining that he has reformed their lives by recommending principles of mental purity, using japa by chanting holy names, and meditation.
In doing so, their work draws on earlier comparisons between Buddhism and Christianity, including that of Oxford New Testament scholar Burnett Hillman Streeter (1932), who argued that the moral teachings of the Gautama Buddha hold four remarkable resemblances to the Sermon on the Mount.
Because Jesus surviving the cross would contradict the teaching of the Resurrection, the central belief in Christianity, the authors allege that the Vatican used a piece from a 13th-century cloth with a similar herringbone weave to the Shroud of Turin as a substitute in the carbon dating.
"[2] Gerald O'Collins and Daniel Kendall opined that "Kersten's discredited book" is simply the repackaging of Notovich and Ahmad's material for consumption by the general public.