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as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” “I, as a deaf man," it is presumed of him, “heard not; and I was as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth." "I was dumb, I opened not my mouth, because thou didst it." In this manner he was carried off and crucified between two thieves, thus fulfilling the prediction applied to him, that he should be "numbered with the transgressors." Ere he died, he is said to have prayed for those who put him to death, saying, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Ps. xxxviii. 13; xxxix. 9; Isa. liii. 7, 12; Mark xv. 28; Luke xxiii. 34). The whole position is realized in the tale of Mándavya, as recounted in the Mahá-bhárata. This person

age was an illustrious Bráhman who had been long practising austerity under a vow of silence. Some robbers, pursued by the emissaries of justice, took refuge and hid themselves in his hermitage. The pursuers came and questioned the anchorite, who, under the vow he had placed himself under, did not answer them. They thereupon searched, and discovered the robbers with their booty; and considering the holy man to be an accomplice, carried him off with them. The king condemned the whole to death, Mándavya still maintaining silence. In this manner he was impaled with the rest, but as he remained many days without expiring, the spectators were convinced of his saintly character. The king thereon came to ask pardon of the holy man "nailed upon the stake," pleading that what he had done had been done in ignorance. On this, the anchorite spoke and pardoned him. Afterwards he expired, having, as it is said, "by his sufferings, conquered the worlds" (Fauche's Trans., 459-462).

The Christians, in the maturity at which their doctrinal system has arrived, have to realize the idea of a divine being suffering death on earth. The Hindús have not hesitated to declare the actuality of such an event, but they attribute the power to take the life to the divinities, and not to man. Purusha, a "supreme god," the creator of all, and termed "the lord of immortality," was laid hold of by the other gods, bound, and sacrificed. Vishnu himself had his head cut off with a bowstring through the action of rival deities, when it was said of him that he " was indeed a sacrifice (Mrs Manning, Anc. and Med. Ind. I. 40; Muir, Sansk. Texts, I. 10, 11; Do. in Jour. of As. Soc., XX. 34, 35).

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An important type of the sacrifice of Jesus is afforded by the well known legend of Sunehsepha, which I have had occasion to give in a former work.* The king, Harischandra,

is under an obligation to Varuna to sacrifice to him his son Rohita. By sundry bargains, a sage named Ajigarta gives up his son Sunehsepha to be sacrificed in his stead, and undertakes himself to perform the sacrificial act. Varuna accepts

the substitute, a Brahman being more worthy than a Kshatriya. Sunehsepha, when bound to the stake, claims permission to intercede with the gods. He addresses himself to the supreme deity Indra, who refers him to Agni, saying, "He is nearer to thee than I am." Finally his prayers are heard, and the bonds miraculously fall from him. The end is that he is highly exalted. His own father, who had sold him for the sacrifice, is considered unworthy of him, and he is adopted by the renowned divinely born Visvámitra, and raised by him above all his sons (Muir, Sansk. Texts, I. 355-359). Here we have not only human, but vicarious sacrifice, the innocent brought up to suffer in fulfilment of the incurred doom of another. The superior worthiness of the victim is insisted on, and through his patient endurance, as in the instance of Jesus, he becomes highly exalted. In the reply of Indra to the sufferer we have the very essence of the Christian theory. The value of Jesus to mankind is that his assumption of the human nature has brought him into fellowship with them, and given them confidence in the action of his sympathies (Heb. ii., 14-18; iv., 15, 16). They use him as an intercessor and mediator in approaching the Supreme Divinity reigning in some other form in heaven. Jesus is a being

who is "nearer to them," and on him, consequently, they are called on to rely.

The most important representations occurring in the Hindú delineations are those which have served apparently as models for the portraiture of Jesus, namely, the histories given of the divine personages Krishna and Ráma. These are chiefly afforded in the great Indian Epics, the Mahábhárata and the Rámáyana. It is not within the bounds of any reasonable probability that these productions were issued at a date posterior to the time of the Christian "The Legends of the Old Testament," pp. 222, 223.

gospels. The epics represent Brahmanism, and it is fair to conclude were put forth before Buddhism prevailed in India. This would place them at least three or four hundred years before the asserted Christian era. There is room to believe that they appeared before the age of Manu, of whose legislation they show no knowledge. This would take them back, according to the ordinary estimate of the date of the Institutes, to over eight or nine hundred years before Christ. I have examined the whole question to the best of my ability, and feel convinced that a much higher antiquity should be accorded to them.*

Not being able to assert the priority of the gospels to the Indian epics, the ordinary resource of Christian advocates has been to suggest, for they can do no more, that the divinity asserted for Krishna and Ráma is an afterthought, interpolated at some comparatively modern time in these writings. The opinion would be entitled to more consideration could it be said that the doctrine of an incarnation became current only at so late an age as to be possibly traceable for its origin to the Christian scriptures. But it is acknowledged that there were ideas of incarnations in the incalculably remote period of the Vedic literature, and that the incarnation of Krishna himself, it may be suspected, is therein adverted to.† The placing gods on earth in human form, and ascribing to them human action, was common to all ancient mythologies from the earliest known times. The gods of the Grecian Pantheon are of this complexion, and the Osiris and Apis of the Egyptian faith convey the idea of incarnation as absolutely as any such exhibition is ascribed to Vishnu, the prolific god of Avatáras, by the Hindús.

The idea, then, that the incarnations of Vishnu in the forms of Krishna and Ráma, as given in the Indian epics, are due to interpolation, is an objection taken specially against these particular forms; and it is apparent that the reason thereof simply is that unless it can be shown that these characters, as divine personages, have been drawn from the model of the Christian scriptures, it must follow that the Christian portraiture has been drawn from them, so close and so frequent are the correspondences involved. The whole *"The Legends of the Old Testament," chap. iii. † Ibid, pp. 80, 81.

structure of the Epics, it appears to me, makes it a most unwarrantable assumption that there has been such interpolation. The action of the Epics depends throughout upon the supernatural. They are the produce of times when the sense of the marvellous predominated. The poems teem with this element, and, were it eliminated, they would be torn to shreds, and but little of them would remain. The gods are clothed in outward forms, and appear visibly to mortals. It is not Vishnu only who is incarnate, and involved in human action. Siva twice appears veiled in mortal flesh, and does battle with mortals.* Rishis are repeatedly met with constituted with powers so as to be able to coerce the divinities. Rákshasas, or demons, abound, of monstrous shapes. Snake populations, bears, monkeys, and vultures, with human speech and superhuman capacity, enact marvels. Enchantments and disenchantments occur, the relieved beings having figured as Rakshasas or animals. Weapons of war are endowed with the powers of their divine donors. Many are the personages whose parentage is traced to divinities. To single out Krishna and Ráma from this crowd of miraculous beings, and to say that their deification is no part of the thought of the original composers, is therefore most arbitrary, and it is an assertion wholly without warrant. The multiplicity of Christian delineations evidently formed upon Pagan moulds; the absence of all originality in whatever there is of Christian sentiment or doctrine; the drafts liberally made by the Christian writers from all around them,-pure Jews, Essenes, Neoplatonists, Greeks, Egyptians, Buddhists, and Hindús, certainly certainly prepare us to believe that where further correspondences of a very marked nature occur between the Asiatic and the Christian records, the copying that alone can account for them has been by the latter from the former. When it is considered that the life of Jesus, as exhibited in the Christian narratives, is apparently a mere portraiture, destitute of true historical materials, it becomes easy to accept, from similar sources to those already used for the composition of the picture, further additions for it of features of the like pictorial complexion; and when it becomes clearly apparent that there were no Christians in *"The Legends of the Old Testament” 224.

India at an age sufficiently early to have possibly influenced the composition of the Epics, and that those who first appeared upon the arena of India were so circumstanced, socially, intellectually, and geographically, as to have been totally incapacitated to act upon the centres of learning where the Epics were current-the conclusion appears inevitable that the similitudes, the origin of which is in question, have been caused, as have all such other traceable similitudes, through the free adoption by the early Christian writers of whatever they thought might strengthen their system, and impart lustre to their elected hero, from whatsoever source the supply may have reached them. I introduce thus, without hesitation, the last and the most important moulds I have for the Christian Jesus, as derived from Hindú fictitious delineations.

Krishna figures in the Mahábhárata, where he is introduced as the friend and instructor of Arjuna, the chief hero of the poem. His history is given with fuller detail in the Vishnu and other Puránas, works of a much more modern time, though representing, as the name Purána denotes, ancient records.* Professor Wilson concludes that the tale of Krishna must have been complete when the Mahábhárata was compiled (Vishnu Purána, 492 note). We may consequently accept the representations made of this divine personage as belonging to a pre-Christian era.

The authorities I follow for what I give of the life of Krishna are Sir William Jones in As. Res. I. 273; Professor Wilson's Essays, II. 66; Professor Wilson's Vishnu Purána, 440, 493, 500-515, 550, 607-617; Muir, Sansk. Texts, IV. 242; T. Wheeler, Hist. of Ind., I. 386–391, 414, 445 —449, 462—464, 470; Mrs Manning, Anc. and Med. Ind., I. 219, 229--232, 237, 239.

The great deity Vishnu, the second person in the Hindú trinity, undertakes to be born incarnate as Krishna, to deliver the earth from iniquity, and open out the path of righteousness to mankind. Especially was he to put an end to Kansa, an incarnate Daitya or Titan, who figured on earth as king of the sacred city of Mathura (Muttra). The Christian parallel here is Herod as king of Jerusalem.

Kansa, as Herod, is prophetically informed of the fate he is * "The Legends of the Old Testament" 48

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