Note 23 — Chapter IV · THE GRAVE SUSPICIONS AROUSED BY THE STUDY OF ANCIENT BELIEFS

In Mr. J. M. Robertson’s book, Christianity and Mythology, there is a scholarly investigation from which I extract the following leading points23:—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.