Some authors hold that the historical Krishna was a teacher, similar to Zarathustra, and that though of the military class he was chiefly occupied in founding or supporting what was afterwards known as the religion of the Bhagavatas, a theistic system inculcating the worship of one God, called Bhagavat, and perhaps identical with the Sun.  It is probable that Krishna the hero was connected with the worship of a special deity, but I see no evidence that he was primarily a teacher.[379] In the earlier legends he is a man of arms:  in the later he is not one who devotes his life to teaching but a forceful personage who explains the nature of God and the universe at the most unexpected moments.  Now the founders of religions such as Mahavira and Buddha preserve their character as teachers even in legend and do not accumulate miscellaneous heroic exploits.  Similarly modern founders of sects, like Caitanya, though revered as incarnations, still retain their historical attributes.  But on the other hand many men of action have been deified not because they taught anything but because they seemed to be more than human forces.  Rama is a classical example of such deification and many local deities can be shown to be warriors, bandits and hunters whose powers inspired respect.  It is said that there is a disposition in the Bombay Presidency to deify the Maratha leader Sivaji.[380]

In his second aspect, Krishna is a pastoral deity, sporting among nymphs and cattle.  It is possible that this Krishna is in his origin distinct from the violent and tragic hero of Dvaraka.  The two characters have little in common, except their lawlessness, and the date and locality of the two cycles of legend are different.  But the death of Kamsa which is one of the oldest incidents in the story (for it is mentioned in the Mahabhashya[381]) belongs to both and Kamsa is consistently connected with Muttra.  The Mahabharata is mainly concerned with Krishna the warrior:  the few allusions in it to the freaks of the pastoral Krishna occur in passages suspected of being late interpolations and, even if they are genuine, show that little attention was paid to his youth.  But in later works, the relative importance is reversed and the figure of the amorous herdsman almost banishes the warrior.  We can trace the growth of this figure in the sculptures of the sixth century, in the Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas and the Gita-govinda (written about 1170).  Even later is the worship of Radha, Krishna’s mistress, as a portion of the deity, who is supposed to have divided himself into male and female halves.[382] The birth and adventures of the pastoral Krishna are located in the land of Braj, the district round Muttra and among the tribe of the Abhiras, but the warlike Krishna is connected with the west, although his exploits extend to the Ganges valley.[383] The Abhiras, now called Ahirs, were nomadic herdsmen who came from the west and their movements between Kathiawar and Muttra may have something to do with the double location of the Krishna legend.