already canonised elsewhere, were then acknowledged
by the Pope and the College of Rites to be saints
of the Catholic Church of Christ. Among such,
under the date of the 27th of November, are included
“The holy Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of India,
on the borders of Persia, whose wonderful acts Saint
John of Damascus has described. Where and when
they were first canonised, I have been unable, in spite
of much investigation, to ascertain. Petrus de
Natalibus, who was Bishop of Equilium, the modern
Jesolo, near Venice, from 1370 to 1400, wrote a Martyrology
called Catalogus Sanctorum; and in it, among
the ‘Saints,’ he inserts both Barlaam
and Josaphat, giving also a short account of them
derived from the old Latin translation of St. John
of Damascus. It is from this work that Baronius,
the compiler of the authorised Martyrology now in
use, took over the names of these two saints, Barlaam
and Josaphat. But, so far as I have been able
to ascertain, they do not occur in any martyrologies
or lists of saints of the Western Church older than
that of Petrus de Natalibus. In the corresponding
manual of worship still used in the Greek Church,
however, we find, under 26th August, the name ’of
the holy Iosaph, son of Abener, King of India.’
Barlaam is not mentioned, and is not therefore recognised
as a saint in the Greek Church. No history is
added to the simple statement I have quoted; and I
do not know on what authority it rests. But there
is no doubt that it is in the East, and probably among
the records of the ancient church of Syria, that a
final solution of this question should be sought.
Some of the more learned of the numerous writers who
translated or composed new works on the basis of the
story of Josaphat, have pointed out in their notes
that he had been canonised; and the hero of the romance
is usually called St. Josaphat in the titles of these
works, as will be seen from the Table of the Josaphat
literature below. But Professor Liebrecht, when
identifying Josaphat with the Buddha, took no notice
of this; and it was Professor Max Mueller, who has
done so much to infuse the glow of life into the dry
bones of Oriental scholarship, who first pointed out
the strange fact—almost incredible, were
it not for the completeness of the proof—that
Gotama the Buddha, under the name of St. Josaphat,
is now officially recognised and honoured and worshipped
throughout the whole of Catholic Christendom as a Christian
saint!” Professor T.W. Rhys Davids gives
further a Bibliography, pp. xcv.-xcvii.
M.H. Zotenberg wrote a learned memoir (N. et Ext. XXVIII. Pt. I.) in 1886 to prove that the Greek Text is not a translation but the original of the Legend. There are many MSS. of the Greek Text of the Book of Barlaam and Joasaph in Paris, Vienna, Munich, etc., including ten MSS. kept in various libraries at Oxford. New researches made by Professor E. Kuhn, of Munich (Barlaam und Joasaph. Eine Bibliographisch-literargeschichtliche