If Christianity be the offspring of Buddhism, or even if Buddhism exercised any direct influence upon its earliest development, some indications of that influence should be traceable in the Jewish and Greek literature of that period. Yet in spite of the most searching examination none have as yet been found, and it is not at all likely that they ever will be found.[32] Our religion was well advanced in its course before we find in the works of its defenders any sign of acquaintance with the Buddhist legend, or any expression of suspicion, as on the part of Cyril and Ephraim of Jerusalem in the fourth century, that the taint of some of the heresies which had infected the Church might be traced to its contagion. Then, unfortunately for the ingeniously constructed theory that the doctrines were secretly transmitted by the channel already indicated till they reached St. Paul through Stephen the Therapeut, the only passage on which the existence of Therapeuts in Apostolic times could be founded has been recently proved to be a spurious interpolation in the writings of Philo of a treatise forged several centuries after his death.[33] Research can find no trace of Therapeuts in Alexandria nor anywhere else till Monachism had become the fashion in the Christian Church. Bishop Lightfoot has convincingly proved that the theory of the transmission of Christian doctrine from the Buddhists of India through the Babylonian Jews to the Essenes has not the slightest trace of evidence to support it, but that, on the contrary, the weight of evidence and probability is all against it.[34] Again, any one who compares the Gospel account of the life of the Baptist with the description given in Josephus[35] of the manners and tenets of the Essenes will find that just as the Essenes owed nothing to Buddha, so Christ, and even John Baptist, owed nothing to them. Though similar in a few external points, the Baptist’s preaching and manner of living were essentially antagonistic to those of the little Jewish sect which had severed itself not only from Jewish society but from Jewish hopes. The teaching of Christ, again, whose manner of life, notoriously in contrast to that of His herald, was throughout a powerful though silent contradiction to every doctrine which the Essenes held, and it would be extravagant to assert that He owed to it even an illustration of His own.[36] It may be safely asserted that the theory of the derivation of Christianity from Buddhism breaks down at every point at which it is tested. We may dismiss it in the words of Professor Kuenen, that the “so-called connection between Essenism and Christianity cannot bear serious inquiry for a moment,” and in those of the learned Bishop,[37] “that though the Essenes may have had some connection with Persia, their system was antagonistic to that of Buddhism in everything save the spirit of despair which called both into existence.”