The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candourPhelips, Vivian
Religion
The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candour
Phelips, Vivian
Rationalism
I have indicated a few of the more striking parallels in other
religions besides Krishnaism and Buddhism. Did space permit, it
could be shown that there are also parallels to the teaching of
Christ, the darkness at the Crucifixion, the descent into Hell,
the Resurrection, the claim of Jesus Christ to be "Alpha and Omega"
(according to the Revelation of St. John), the prophecy of the
Second Coming, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the doctrine
of the Trinity, the worship of the Blessed Virgin, the Christian
symbols (cross, triangle, I.H.S., fish, serpent, dove, and lamb). I
cannot understand what the Christian cause can gain by ascribing the
parallels in Hindoo mythology to Christian sources, when there is all
this mass of evidence for parallels that are quite as extraordinary
(though less numerous) in those ancient religions where the priority
to Christianity cannot reasonably be denied. Certainly the Krishna
and Buddha parallels are extremely numerous and strikingly exact;
but a policy which seeks to explain them in a different manner from
that adopted in the case of the same phenomena in other religions,
while it serves to confirm the suspicions of the sceptic, is doomed
eventually to failure. This being so, it is unnecessary, I think,
to enter at any great length into the controversy.
In Mr. J. M. Robertson's book, Christianity and Mythology, there
is a scholarly investigation from which I extract the following
leading points [110]:--Hindoos, as Professor Tiele urges, could
perfectly well have borrowed, if they did borrow, from Egypt before
Christianity was heard of. There is hardly a leading detail in the
Krishna birth legend which is not variously paralleled in other early
non-Christian mythology. The more we collate the main Christian
myth-notions with those of Krishnaism, the more clearly does it
appear that, instead of the latter being borrowed from the former,
they are, not indeed the originals from which Christianity borrowed,
but always presumptively the more ancient, and in one or two cases they
do appear to be the actual sources of Gospel stories. The lateness
of the Purânic stories in literary form is no argument against their
antiquity. Scholars are agreed that late documents often preserve
extremely old myth-material. The leading elements in the Krishna myth
are inexplicable save on the view that the cultus is ancient. The
close coincidences in the legends of Krishna and Buddha are to be
explained in terms of borrowing by the latter from the former, and
not vice versa. I should add here that the denial of the "Christian
accretions" theory does not convey also the implication that the Bible
story was borrowed from the Krishna and Buddha myths. On the contrary,
the strong probability is that there has been little or no borrowing
either way--that there is a common source for both in earlier Aryan
and Semitic myths.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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