Both archaeology and historical notices tell us something of the history of Muttra.  It was a great Buddhist and Jain centre, as the statues and viharas found there attest.  Ptolemy calls it the city of the gods.  Fa-Hsien (400 A.D.) describes it as Buddhist, but that faith was declining at the time of Hsuean Chuang’s visit (c. 630 A.D.).  The sculptural remains also indicate the presence of Graeco-Bactrian influence.  We need not therefore feel surprise if we find in the religious thought of Muttra elements traceable to Greece, Persia or Central Asia.  Some claim that Christianity should be reckoned among these elements and I shall discuss the question elsewhere.  Here I will only say that such ideas as were common to Christianity and to the religions of Greece and western Asia probably did penetrate to India by the northern route, but of specifically Christian ideas I see no proof.  It is true that the pastoral Krishna is unlike all earlier Indian deities, but then no close parallel to him can be adduced from elsewhere, and, take him as a whole, he is a decidedly un-christian figure.  The resemblance to Christianity consists in the worship of a divine child, together with his mother.  But this feature is absent in the New Testament and seems to have been borrowed from paganism by Christianity.

The legends of Muttra show even clearer traces than those already quoted of hostility between Krishna and Brahmanism.  He forbids the worship of Indra,[384] and when Indra in anger sends down a deluge of rain, he protects the country by holding up over it the hill of Goburdhan, which is still one of the great centres of pilgrimage.[385] The language which the Vishnu Purana attributes to him is extremely remarkable.  He interrupts a sacrifice which his fosterfather is offering to Indra and says, “We have neither fields nor houses:  we wander about happily wherever we list, travelling in our waggons.  What have we to do with Indra?  Cattle and mountains are (our) gods.  Brahmans offer worship with prayer:  cultivators of the earth adore their landmarks but we who tend our herds in the forests and mountains should worship them and our kine.”

This passage suggests that Krishna represents a tribe of highland nomads who worshipped mountains and cattle and came to terms with the Brahmanic ritual only after a struggle.  The worship of mountain spirits is common in Central Asia, but I do not know of any evidence for cattle-worship in those regions.  Clemens of Alexandria,[386] writing at the end of the second century A.D., tells us that the Indians worshipped Herakles and Pan.  The pastoral Krishna has considerable resemblance to Pan or a Faun, but no representations of such beings are recorded from Graeco-Indian sculptures.  Several Bacchic groups have however been discovered in Gandhara and also at Muttra[387] and Megasthenes recognized Dionysus in some Indian deity.  Though the Bacchic revels and mysteries do not explain the pastoral element in the Krishna legend, they offer a parallel to some of its other features, such as the dancing and the crowd of women, and I am inclined to think that such Greek ideas may have germinated and proved fruitful in Muttra.  The Greek king Menander is said to have occupied the city (c. 155 B.C.), and the sculptures found there indicate that Greek artistic forms were used to express Indian ideas.  There may have been a similar fusion in religion.