It doesn’t take much to figure out the Jesus Connection in Kashmir.

In Srinagar, Kashmir, the Roza Bal shrine is the tomb of a man called Issa, presumed to be that of Jesus Christ since Jesus is usually called Issa in Arabic, which means he who resuscitates the dead. In Swahili and Arabic it also means salvation and protection. It is often superfluous as the Arabic translation of Jesus, since in Arabic, Jesus is Yasue.

The Gospels reveal that Jesus’ birth name was Yeshua and that the word Jesus is its derivative.

Except for one, the Gospels were written in Greek. The word for Jesus is Iησοῦς pronounced as “eeaysoos.” When “eeaysoos” was transliterated into the English long ago, it became Jesus — the word used in English today (https://carm.org/jesus-name-really-yeshua).

Matthew 13:55-56 discloses that James, Joses, Simon and Judas, were Jesus the son of Mary’s brothers. The sisters are not named.

Mark 3:31, Mathew 12:49 and Mathew 12:46-50 further confirm the existence of Jesus’ brothers.

So even when the Bible does not specifically refer to Jesus’ cousins, nieces or nephews, their existence cannot be denied. And since names do tend to run in families, cousins may carry the same name. One of Jesus’s brothers was Joses, only a short Greek form of Joseph. So Joses was named after his father, a cross-cultural practice right up to the present. Every contemporaneous son of Joseph does not necessarily refer to Jesus or one of his brothers.

From all this information, then, Issa, as an Arabic attribute of the act of raising the dead cannot be considered Jesus’ name. And since there is no evidence in the Bible that Jesus flaunted his gift of raising the dead, he would not have referred to himself with such an attribute and even less so in Arabic which was neither his mother tongue in Israel nor spoken in Kashmir at that time.

By all the known, consensual evidence, Jesus and his disciples stayed within a linguistic environment of Aramaic, Greek and perhaps some Latin but not Arabic or Swahili.

The attribute Issa as he who raises the dead could not have been given until at least the first raising of the dead and that happened only after the thirtieth year of Jesus’s life. We are dealing with an act and not a proper noun.  The attribute of raiser of the dead in Arabic was given only after news of the miracle reached the Arabic speaking world.

As stated earlier, Jesus never brandished his miracles. Even if he had gone to Kashmir, he would never have introduced himself as Issa. Furthermore, there is neither any evidence of the dead being raised in Kashmir two thousand years ago by a certain Issa, nor any trace of the Arabic language or Arabic speakers to justify the attribution Issa to a person. Starting from the 13^th century, Muslim preachers brought Arabic into Kashmir in trickles, since the Qura’an is written in and Muslim prayers are formalized in Arabic.

The burial site of Issa is located in the Roza Bal shrine, in the Khanyaar neighbourhood of central Srinagar, the capital of the mountainous Indian state. The site used to be a center of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shaivism for a thousand years before Islam.

The Issa buried here was Jesus’ nephew who had the gift of faith healing which many Christians and non-Christians have had since the beginning of time without being messiahs.

The name given to the person who is buried in Roza Bal is Yuz Asaf meaning “Son of Joseph and also implies “Leader of the Healed.”

Since Joseph and Joses are the same name, this son of Joseph / Joses was Jesus’ nephew.

Phonetically, the sound of Yuz Asaf can, with mild tweaking, be pronounced as Jesus — a practice so fraught with errors that no scholar would attempt it for fear of the derision and rejection of peers. That is because homophonic sounds are more often coincidental than incidental, except as an amusing after-dinner parlor game.

The common cognate meaning of two words is the decisive factor confirming a common origin. That is absent between Yuz Asaf  and Jesus and Issa. The cognate of Yuz Asaf is compounded from the Hebrew he will add and leader of the healed. But Yuz Asaf also means Son of Joseph, and one of Jesus’s brothers was Joseph / Joses (Matthew 13:55-56).

If Jesus did appropriate the tenets of peace and neighborliness, and nothing is known of his life between the age of 12 & 30, he could as easily have retrieved them from Australian Aborigines or Siberians and not necessarily Buddhists as some believe. These universal concepts are not exclusive to Buddhism. Synchronicity — Jung defined it and Sting sang it.

Why an Aramaic speaking Jew in 78CE, the date of the supposed Jesus in Kashmir, would use an Arabic attribute to declare his most singular power in a language that was to take a thousand years to reach Kashmir is devoid of sense.

Pinpointing The Jesus Connection in Kashmir is Rocket Science 101.