a port, which is now occupied by
the city of Jaffa. The chronicles in question were compiled before,
during and after the time of Jesus Christ.

During his sojourn in India, in the quality of a simple student come to
learn the Brahminical and Buddhistic laws, no special attention whatever
was paid to his life. When, however, a little later, the first accounts
of the events in Israel reached India, the chroniclers, after committing
to writing that which they were told about the prophet, Issa,--_viz._,
that he had for his following a whole people, weary of the yoke of their
masters, and that he was crucified by order of Pilate, remembered that
this same Issa had only recently sojourned in their midst, and that, an
Israelite by birth, he had come to study among them, after which he had
returned to his country. They conceived a lively interest for the man
who had grown so rapidly under their eyes, and began to investigate his
birth, his past and all the details concerning his existence.

The two manuscripts, from which the lama of the convent Himis read to me
all that had a bearing upon Jesus, are compilations from divers copies
written in the Thibetan language, translations of scrolls belonging to
the library of Lhassa and brought, about two hundred years after Christ,
from India, Nepaul and Maghada, to a convent on Mount Marbour, near the
city of Lhassa, now the residence of the Dalai-Lama.

These scrolls were written in Pali, which certain lamas study even now,
so as to be able to translate it into the Thibetan.

The chroniclers were Buddhists belonging to the sect of the Buddha
Gothama.

The details concerning Jesus, given in the chronicles, are disconnected
and mingled with accounts of other contemporaneous events to which they
bear no relation.

The manuscripts relate to us, first of all,--according to the accounts
given by merchants arriving from Judea in the same year when the death
of Jesus occurred--that a just man by the name of Issa, an Israelite,
in spite of his being acquitted twice by the judges as being a man of
God, was nevertheless put to death by the order of the Pagan governor,
Pilate, who feared that he might take advantage of his great popularity
to reestablish the kingdom of Israel and expel from the country its
conquerors.

Then follow rather incoherent communications regarding the preachings of
Jesus among the Guebers and other heathens. They seem to have been
written during the first years