One edition of the Bhavishya Purana contains a summary of the book of Genesis from Adam to Abraham.[1095] Though it is a late interpolation, it shows conclusively that the editors of Puranas had no objection to borrowing from Christian sources and it maybe that some incidents in the life of Krishna as related by the Vishnu, Bhagavata and other Puranas are borrowed from the Gospels, such as Kamsa’s orders to massacre all male infants when Krishna is born, the journey of Nanda, Krishna’s foster-father, to Mathura in order to pay taxes and the presentation of a pot of ointment to Krishna by a hunchback woman whom he miraculously makes straight.  In estimating the importance of such coincidences we must remember that they are merely casual details in a long story of adventures which, in their general outline, bear no relation to the life of Christ.  The most striking of these is the “massacre of the Innocents.”  The Harivamsa, which is not later than the fifth century A.D., relates that Kamsa killed all the other children of Devaki, though it does not mention a general massacre, and Patanjali (c. 150 B.C.) knew the legend of the hostility between Krishna and Kamsa and the latter’s death.[1096] So if anything has been borrowed from the Gospel account it is only the general slaughter of children.  The mention of a pot of ointment strikes Europeans because such an object is not familiar to us, but it was an ordinary form of luxury in India and Judaea alike, and the fact that a woman honoured both Krishna and Christ in the same way but in totally different circumstances is hardly more than a chance coincidence.  The fact that both Nanda and Joseph leave their homes in order to pay their taxes is certainly curious and I will leave the reader to form his own opinion about it.  The instance of the Bhavishya Purana shows that Hindus had no scruples about borrowing from the Bible and in some Indian dialects the name Krishna appears as Krishto or Kushto.  On the other hand, whatever borrowing there may have been is concerned exclusively with trivial details:  the principal episodes of the Krishna legend were known before the Christian era.

This is perhaps the place to examine a curious episode of the Mahabharata which narrates the visit of certain sages to a region called Svetadvipa, the white island or continent, identified by some with Alexandria or a Christian settlement in central Asia.  The episode occurs in the Santiparvan[1097] of the Mahabharata and is introduced by the story of a royal sacrifice, at which most of the gods appeared in visible shape but Hari (Vishnu or Krishna) took his offerings unseen.  The king and his priests were angry, but three sages called Ekata, Dvita and Trita, who are described as the miraculous offspring of Brahma, interposed explaining that none of those present were worthy to see Hari.  They related how they had once desired to behold him in his own form and after protracted austerities repaired under divine guidance to an island called Svetadvipa