there is no real proof that it existed in its present form before the year 600 A.D.”  The “Romantic Legend” cannot be traced farther back than the third century A.D.  Oldenberg says:  “No biography of Buddha has come down to us from ancient times, from the age of the Pali texts, and we can safely say that no such biography was in existence then.”  Beal declares that the Buddhist legend, as found in the various Epics of Nepaul, Thibet, and China, “is not framed after any Indian model of any date, but is to be found worked out, so to speak, among northern peoples, who were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the pedantic stories of the Brahmans.  In the southern and primitive records the terms of the legend are wanting. Buddha is not born of a royal family; he is not tempted before his enlightenment; he works no miracles, and he is not a Universal Saviour.”

The chances are decidedly that if any borrowing has been done it was on the side of Buddhism.  It has been asserted that thirty thousand Buddhist monks from Alexandria once visited Ceylon on the occasion of a great festival.  This is absurd on the face of it; but that a Christian colony settled in Malabar at a very early period is attested by the presence of thousands of their followers even to this day.

In discussing the specific charge of copying Buddhist legends in the gospel narratives, we are met at the threshold by insurmountable improbabilities.  To some of these I ask a moment’s attention.  I shall not take the time to discuss in detail the alleged parallels which are paraded as proofs.  To anyone who understands the spirit of Judaism and its attitude toward heathenism of all kinds, it is simply inconceivable that the Christian disciples, whose aim it was to propagate the faith of their Master in a Jewish community, should have borrowed old Indian legends, which, by the terms of the supposition, must have been widely known as such.  And Buddhist apologists must admit that it is a little strange that the Scribes and Pharisees, who were intelligent, and as alert as they were bitter, should never have exposed this transparent plagiarism.  The great concern of the Apostles was to prove to Jews and Gentiles that Jesus was the Christ of Old Testament prophecy.  The whole drift of their preaching and their epistles went to show that the gospel history rested squarely and uncompromisingly on a Jewish basis.  Peter and John, Stephen and Paul, constantly “reasoned with the Jews out of their own Scriptures.”  How unspeakably absurd is the notion that they were trying to palm off on those keen Pharisees a Messiah who, though in the outset at Nazareth he publicly traced his commission to Old Testament prophecy, was all the while copying an atheistic philosopher of India!