Note 705 — Chapter VII · (continued 2)

In a recent work, called the “World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors” (by Mr. Kersey Graves) which attracted our notice by its title, we were indeed startled as we were forewarned on the title-page we should be by historical evidences to be found neither in history nor tradition. Apollonius, who is represented in it as one of these sixteen “saviours,” is shown by the author as finally “crucified ... having risen from the dead ... appearing to his disciples after his resurrection, and”—like Christ again—“convincing a Tommy(?) Didymus” by getting him to feel the print of the nails on his hands and feet (see note, p. 268). To begin with, neither Philostratus, the biographer of Apollonius, nor history says any such thing. Though the precise time of his death is unknown, no disciple of Apollonius ever said that he was either crucified, or appeared to them. So much for one “Saviour.” After that we are told that Gautama-Buddha, whose life and death have been so minutely described by several authorities, Barthelemy St. Hilaire included—was also “crucified by his enemies near the foot of the Nepäl mountains” (see p. 107); while the Buddhist books, history, and scientific research tell us, through the lips of Max Müller and a host of Orientalists, that “Gautama-Buddha (Sâkya-muni) died near the Ganges.... He had nearly reached the city of Kusinâgara, when his vital strength began to fail. He halted in a forest, and while sitting under a sâl tree he gave up the ghost” (Max Müller: “Chips from a German Workshop,” vol. i., p. 213). The references of Mr. Graves to Higgins and Sir W. Jones, in some of his hazardous speculations, prove nothing. Max Müller shows some antiquated authorities writing elaborate books “... in order to prove that Buddha had been in reality the Thoth of the Egyptians; that he was Mercury, or Wodan, or Zoroaster, or Pythagoras.... Even Sir W. Jones ... identified Buddha first with Odin and afterwards with Shishak.” We are in the nineteenth century, not in the eighteenth; and though to write books on the authority of the earliest Orientalists may in one sense be viewed as a mark of respect for old age, it is not always safe to try the experiment in our times. Hence this highly instructive volume lacks one important feature which would have made it still more interesting. The author should have added after Prometheus the “Roman,” and Alcides the Egyptian god (p. 266) a seventeenth “crucified Saviour” to the list, “Venus, god of the war,” introduced to an admiring world by Mr. Artemus Ward the “showman!”