Note 42 — V THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH. THE BAPTISM

It has been often maintained that Indian influences have worked upon the development of the story of the childhood of Jesus, and in this connection we are accustomed to think of Buddhism. Now, as a matter of fact, the resemblances between the Christian and Buddhist legends are so close that we can scarcely imagine it to be a mere coincidence. Jesus and Buddha are both said to have been born of a “pure virgin,” honoured by heavenly spirits at their birth, prayed to by kings and loaded with presents. “Happy is the whole world,” sing the Gods under the form of young Brahmins at the birth of the child—as we are told in the Lalita Vistara, the legendary biography of Buddha, dating from before Christ, “for he is indeed born who brings salvation and will establish the world in blessedness. He is born who will darken sun and moon by the splendour of his merits and will put all darkness to flight. The blind see, the deaf hear, the demented are restored to reason. No natural crimes afflict us any longer, for upon the earth men have become righteous. Gods and men can in future approach each other without hostility, since he will be the guide of their pilgrimage.”42 Just as the significance of Jesus was announced beforehand by Simeon, in the same way according to the Buddhist legend, the Seer Asita foresees in his own mind the greatness of the child and bursts into tears since he will not see him in the splendour of his maturity and will have no part in his work of redemption. Again, just as Jesus43 even in his early youth astonished the learned by his wisdom, so Prince Siddharta (Buddha) put all his teachers at school to shame by his superior knowledge, and so on. The Buddhist legend itself, however, goes back to a still older form, which is the Vedic Agni Cult. All its various features are here preserved in their simplest form and in their original relation to the sacrificial worship of the Fire-God. This was the natural source of the Indian and Christian legends, and it was the original of those myths which the Evangelist worked up for his own purposes, which according to Pfleiderer belonged “to the common tribal property of the national sagas of Nearer Asia.”44 Again, it could the more easily reappear in the Evangelists’ version of the story of the childhood of Jesus, since the sacrificial act had been re-interpreted mythologically, and the corresponding myths transformed into astrology, and, as it were, written with starry letters upon the sky, where they could be read without trouble by the most distant peoples of antiquity.