Part 34

Two of the most important of the utterances attributed to Christ are the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. But there is very strong evidence that the Lord's Prayer was used before Christ's time, and still stronger evidence that the Sermon on the Mount was a compilation, and was never uttered by Christ or any other preacher in the form in which it is given by St. Matthew.

Christ is said to have been tempted of the Devil. But apart from the utter absurdity of the Devil's tempting God by offering Him the sovereignty of the earth--when God had already the sovereignty of twenty millions of suns--it is related of Buddha that he also was tempted of the Devil centuries before Christ was born.

The idea that one man should die as a sacrifice to the gods on behalf of many, the idea that the god should be slain for the good of men, the idea that the blood of the human or animal "scapegoat" had power to purify or to save, the idea that a king or a king's son should expiate the sins of a tribe by his death, and the idea that a god should offer himself as a sacrifice to himself in atonement for the sins of his people--all these were old ideas, and ideas well known to the founders of Christianity.

The resemblances of the legendary lives of Christ and Buddha are surprising: so also are the resemblances of forms and ethics of the ancient Buddhists and the early Christians.

Mr. Arthur Lillie, in Buddha and Buddhism, makes the following quotation from M. Leon de Rosny:

The astonishing points of contact between the popular legend of Buddha and that of Christ, the almost absolute similarity of the moral lessons given to the world between these two peerless teachers of the human race, the striking affinities between the customs of the Buddhists and the Essenes, of whom Christ must have been a disciple, suggest at once an Indian origin to Primitive Christianity.

Mr. Lillie goes on to say that there was a sect of Essenes in Palestine fifty years B.C., and that fifty years after the death of Christ there existed in Palestine a similar sect, from whom Christianity was derived. Mr. Lillie says of these sects:

Each had two prominent rites: baptism, and what Tertullian calls the "oblation of bread." Each had for officers, deacons, presbyters, ephemerents. Each sect had monks, nuns, celibacy, community of goods. Each interpreted the Old Testament in a mystical way--so mystical, in fact, that it enabled each to discover that the bloody sacrifice of Mosaism was forbidden, not enjoined. The most minute likenesses have been pointed out between these two sects by all Catholic writers from Eusebius to the poet Racine... Was there any connection between these two sects? It is difficult to conceive that there can be two answers to such a question.

The resemblances between Buddhism and Christianity were accounted for by the Christian Fathers very simply. The Buddhists had been instructed by the Devil, and there was no more to be said. Later Christian scholars face the difficulty by declaring that the Buddhists copied from the Christians.

Reminded that Buddha lived five hundred years before Christ, and that the Buddhist religion was in its prime two hundred years before Christ, the Christian apologist replies that, for all that, the Buddhist Scriptures are of comparatively late date. Let us see how the matter stands.

The resemblances of the two religions are of two kinds. There is, first, the resemblance between the Christian life of Christ and the Indian life of Buddha; and there is, secondly, the resemblance between the moral teachings of Christ and Buddha.

Now, if the Indian Scriptures are of later date than the Gospels, it is just possible that the Buddhists may have copied incidents from the life of Christ.

But it is perfectly certain that the change of borrowing cannot be brought against Augustus Caesar, Plato, and the compilers of the mythologies of Egypt and Greece and Rome. And it is as certain that the Christians did borrow from the Jews as that the Jews borrowed from Babylon. But a little while ago all Christendom would have denied the indebtedness of Moses to King Sargon.

Now, since the Christian ideas were anticipated by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, and the Greeks, why should we suppose that they were copied by the Buddhists, whose religion was triumphant some centuries before Christ?

And, again, while there is no reason to suppose that Christian missionaries in the early centuries of the era made any appreciable impression on India or China, there is good reason to suppose that the Buddhists, who were the first and most successful of all missionaries, reached Egypt and Persia and Palestine, and made their influence felt.

I now turn to the statement of M. Burnouf, quoted by Mr. Lillie. M. Burnouf asserts that the Indian origin of Christianity is no longer contested:

It has been placed in full light by the researches of scholars, and notably English scholars, and by the publication of the original texts... In point of fact, for a long time folks had been struck with the resemblances--or, rather, the identical elements--contained in Christianity and Buddhism. Writers of the firmest faith and most sincere piety have admitted them. In the last century these analogies were set down to the Nestorians; but since then the science of Oriental chronology has come into being, and proved that Buddha is many years anterior to Nestorius and Jesus. Thus the Nestorian theory had to be given up. But a thing may be posterior to another without proving derivation. So the problem remained unsolved until recently, when the pathway that Buddhism followed was traced step by step from India to Jerusalem.

There was baptism before Christ, and before John the Baptist. There were gods, man-gods, son-gods, and saviours before Christ. There were Bibles, hymns, temples, monasteries, priests, monks, missionaries, crosses, sacraments, and mysteries before Christ.

Perhaps the most important sacrament of the Christian religion to-day is the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper. But this idea of the Eucharist, or the ceremonial eating of the god, has its roots far back in the prehistoric days of religious cannibalism. Prehistoric man believed that if he ate anything its virtue passed into his physical system. Therefore he began by devouring his gods, body and bones. Later, man mended his manners so far as to substitute animal for human sacrifice; still later he employed bread and wine as symbolical substitutes for flesh and blood. This is the origin and evolution of the strange and, to many of us, repulsive idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ.

Now, supposing these facts to be as I have stated them above, to what conclusion do they point?

Bear in mind the statement of M. Burnouf, that religions are built up slowly by a process of adaptation; add that to the statements of Eusebius, the great Christian historian, and of St. Augustine, the great Christian Father, that the Christian religion is no new thing, but was known to the ancients, and does it not seem most reasonable to suppose that Christianity is a religion founded on ancient myths and legends, on ancient ethics, and on ancient allegorical mysteries and metaphysical errors?

To support those statements with adequate evidence I should have to compile a book four times as large as the present volume. As I have not room to state the case properly, I shall content myself with the recommendation of some books in which the reader may study the subject for himself.

A list of these books I now subjoin:

The Golden Bough. Frazer. Macmillan & Co. A Short History of Christianity. Robertson. Watts & Co. The Evolution of the Idea of God. Grant Allen. Rationalist

Press Association. Buddha and Buddhism. Lillie. Clark. Our Sun God. Parsons. Parsons. Christianity and Mythology. Robertson. Watts & Co. Pagan Christs. Robertson. Watts & Co. The Legend of Perseus. Hartland. Nutt. The Birth of Jesus. Soltau. Black.

The above are all scholarly and important books, and should be generally known.

For reasons given above I claim, with regard to the divinity and Resurrection of Jesus Christ:

That outside the New Testament there is no evidence of any value to show that Christ ever lived, that He ever taught, that He ever rose from the dead.