Paul Constantine Pappas

Who is Paul Constantine Pappas?

Paul Constantine Pappas is an American writer. He is professor of history at West Virginia Institute of Technology.

A Jain, Pappas has an interest in the religions of India. In 1991 he wrote a book on the Roza Bal shrine in Srinagar, which, according to the teaching of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at, is the tomb not of a Buddhist or Muslim holy man, but of Jesus of Nazareth. Pappas notes that the Yuzasaf traditions associated with the tomb are interpreted by Ahmadis to read that the Yuzasaf tradition is also about Jesus and not Buddha. Pappas uses as sources Ahmadi authors such as Nazir Ahmad and Aziz Kashmiri, and esoteric writers such as Andreas Faber-Kaiser and Holger Kersten, but not critical academic sources such as Günter Grönbold, Norbert Klatt, and Per Beskow. However Pappas concludes the scholarship of the Ahmadi claims is questionable, that passages from various texts have been collected and presented inaccuraely and out of context in order to prove that Jesus traveled to Kashmir. Therefore, the thesis rests only on eastern legends which for the most part are not reliable, not only because they were written long after the facts, but also because their stories of "Yuzasaf" are different and in contradiction and therefore it is almost impossible to identify "Yuz Asaf" with Jesus.