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The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors; Or, Christianity Before Christ
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"To Chrishna the Hindoos were indebted for a code of pure and practical morality, which inculcated charity and chastity, performance of good works, abstinence from evil, and general kindness to all living things." (Cunningham.)

"Budhism never confounds right or wrong, and never excuses any sin" (Catharine Beecher.)

"He (Chrishna) honored humanity by his virtues." (St Hilaire.)

"It is probable that every incident in his (Chrisna's) life is founded in fact, which, if separated from surrounding fable, would afford a history that would scarce have any equal in the importance of the lessons it would teach." (Hardy's Manual of Budhism.)

"He (Chrishna) undertakes and counsels a constant struggle against the body. In his eyes the body is the enemy of man's soul (as Paul thought when he spoke of 'our vile bodies.') He aims to subdue the body and the burning passions which consume it… He requires humility, disregard of wordly wealth, patience and resignation in adversity, love to enemies, religious tolerance, horror at falsehood, avoidance of frivolous conversation, consideration and esteem for women, sanctity of the marriage relation, non-resistance to evil, confession of sins, and conversion." (St. Hilaire.)

"Budhism has been called the Christianity of the East." (Abel Remuset.)

"The doctrine and practical piety of their bible (the Baghavat Gita) bear a strong resemblance to those of the Holy Scriptures. It has scarcely a precept or principle that is not found in the (Christian) bible. And were the people to live up to its principles of peace and love, oppression and injury would be known no more within their borders… It has no mythology of obscene and ferocious deities, no sanguinary or impure observances, no self-inflicting tortures, no tyrannizing priesthood, no confounding of right and wrong by making certain iniquities laudable in worship. In its moral code, its description of the purity and peace of the first ages, and the shortening of man's life by sin, it seems to follow genuine traditions. In almost every respect it seems to be the best religion ever invented by man." (Rev. H. Malcom's Travels in Asia.)

"If the morality of Budhism be examined, its exhortations to guard the will, to curb the thoughts, to exercise kindness towards others, to abstain from wrong to all, it propounds a very high standard of practice." (Upham's Doctrines and History of Budhism.)

"It seeks the highest triumphants of humanity in the exercise of devotion, self-contemplation, and self-denial." (Theogony of the Hindoos, by Bjornsjerma.)

"And the doctrines of Budhism are not alone in the beauty of their sentiments and the excellence of much of their morality. 'It is not permitted to you to return evil for evil' is one of the sentiments of Socrates." (Rev. H. S. Hardy's Eastern Monachism.)

"Budhism insists on the necessity of taking the intellectual faculties for guides in philosophical researches." (Tiberghien.)

"It sought to wean mankind from the pleasures and vanities of life by pointing to the transitoriness of all human enjoyment." (Smith's Mongolia.)

"The principal characteristics of Budhism are the doctrines of mildness and the universal brotherhood of man." (Ibid.)

"Life is a state of probation and misery, according to Budhism." (Upham, chap. vi.)

"The Brahmins found fault with him (Chrishna) for receiving as disciples the outcasts of Hindoo society (as the Jews did Christ for fellowshipping publicans and sinners). But he (Chrishna) replied, 'My law is a law of mercy to all.'" (Hue's Voyages through China.)

"Budhism attracted and furnished consolation for the poor and unfortunate." (Ibid.)

"Budhism is a rationalistic and reform system as compared with Brahminism. Landresse expresses his high admiration of the heroism with which the Budhist missionaries before Christ crossed streams and seas which had arrested armies, and traversed deserts and mountains upon which no caravans dared to venture, and braved dangers and surmounted obstacles which had defied the omnipotence of the emperors." (A note on Landresse's Foe Koui Ki.)

"If we addressed a Mogul or Thibetan this question, Who is Chrishna? the reply was, instantly, 'The Savior of men.'" (Hue's Journey through China.)

"Chrishna, the incarnate Deity of the Sanscrit romance continues to this hour the darling God of the women of India… Chrishna was the person of Vishnu (God) himself in the human form." (Asiat. Researches, 260).

"Respectable natives told me that some of the missionaries had told them that they were even now almost Christians" (owing to the two religions being so nearly alike). (Ibid).

"All that converting the Hindoos to Christianity does for them is to change the object of their worship from Chrishna to Christ." (Robert Cheyne.)

"Brahminism or Budhism in some of its forms is said to constitute the religion of considerably more than half the human race. It teaches the existence of one supreme eternal, and uncreated God, called Brahma, who created the world through Chrishna, the second member of the Trinity." Paul says, God created the world through Jesus Christ, the second member of the Christian Trinity. (Eph. iii. 9.) How striking the resemblance! "The doctrine of the incarnation, the descent of the Deity upon earth, and his manifestation in a human form for the redemption of mankind, seems to have existed in the shape of prophecy or fact in all ages of the world. Hindooism teaches nine of these incarnations. Furthermore, it teaches the doctrine of the Trinity, the fall and redemption of man, and a state of future rewards and punishments in a future life… This religion in chief of Asia is traceable to remote ages. The doctrine of the Trinity is represented in the Elephantine cavern, and taught in the Mahabarat, which goes back for its origin nearly two thousand years before Christ." (New York Sunday Despatch, 1855.)

"In the year 3600, Chrishna descended to the earth for the purpose of defeating the evil machinations of Chivan (the devil), as Christ 'came to destroy the devil and his works.' (See John iii. 8.) After a fierce combat with the devil, or serpent, he defeated him by bruising his head – he receiving, during the contest, a wound in the heel. ('It [the serpent] shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.' – Gen. iii. 15.) He died at last between two thieves… He lead a pure and holy life, and was a meek, tender, and benevolent being, and enjoined charity, hospitality, and mercy, and forbade lying, prevarication, hypocrisy, and overreaching in dealing, and pilfering, and theft, and violence toward any being." (Lecture before the Free Press Association in 1827.)

"The birthplace of the Hindoo hero (Chrishna) is called Mathura, which is easily changed, and by correct translation becomes Maturea, the place where Christ is said to have stopped, between Nazareth and Egypt… To show his humility he washed the feet of the Brahmins (as Christ is said to have washed the feet of the Jews – see John xiii. 14). One day a woman came to him and anointed his hair with oil, in return for which he healed her maladies. One of his first miracles was that of healing a leper, like Christ (See Mark i. 4). Finally, he was crucified, then descended to Hades. (It is said of Christ, 'his soul was not left in hell.' – Acts ii. 31.) He (Chrishna) rose from the dead and ascended to Voicontha (heaven.)" (Higgin's Anacalypsis, vol. ii. p. 239).

Now, we ask, is it any wonder, in view of the foregoing historical exposition, that Eusebius should exclaim, "The religion of Jesus Christ is neither new nor strange?" (Eccl. Hist. ch. iv.) Truly did St. Augustine say, "This, in our day, is the Christian religion, not as having been unknown in former times, but as having recently received that name."

Here, then, we pause to ask our good Christian reader, Where is your original Christianity now? or what constitutes the revealed religion of Jesus Christ? or where is the evidence that any new religion was revealed by him or preached by him, seeing we have all his religion, as shown by the foregoing historical citations, included in an old heathen system more than a thousand years old when Jesus Christ was born? We find it all here in this old oriental system of Budhism —every essential part, particle and principle of it. We find Christianity all here – its Alpha and Omega, its beginning and end. We find it here in all its details, – its root, essence, and entity, – all its "revealed doctrines," religious ideas, beautiful truths, senseless dogmas and oriental phantoms. Not, a doctrine, principle, or precept of the Christian system, but that is here proclaimed to the world ages before "the angels announced the birth of a divine babe in Bethlehem." Will you, then, persist in claiming that "truth, life, and immortality came by Jesus Christ," and that "Christ came to preach a new gospel to the world, and to set forth a new religion never before heard amongst men" (to use the language of Archbishop Tillotson), when the historical facts cited in this work demonstrate a hundred times over that such a position is palpably erroneous? Will you still persist, with all those undeniable facts staring you in the face (proving and reproving, with overwhelming demonstration, that the statement is untrue), in declaring that "the religion of Jesus Christ is the only true and soul-saving religion, and all other systems are mere straw, stubble, tradition, and superstition" (as asserted by a popular Christian writer), when no mathematician ever demonstrated a scientific problem more clearly than we have proved in these pages that all the principle systems of the past, by no means excepting Christianity, are essentially alike in every important particular – all of their cardinal doctrines being the same, differing only in unimportant details?

Seeing, then, that all systems of religion have been found to be essentially alike in spirit and in practice, the all-important question arises here, What is the true cause assignable for this striking resemblance? How is it to be accounted for? Perhaps some of our good Christian readers, unacquainted with history, may cherish the thought that all the oriental systems brought to notice are but imitations of Christianity; that they were reconstructed out of materials obtained from that source; that Christianity is the parent, and they the off-spring. But, alas for their long-cherished idol, those who entertain such forlorn hopes are "sowing to the wind, and are doomed to disappointment." With the exception of Mahomedanism alone, Christianity is the youngest system in the whole catalogue. The historical facts to prove this statement are voluminous. But as it needs no proof to those who have read religious history, but little space will be occupied with citations for this purpose. With respect to the antiquity of the principal oriental system, we need only to quote the testimony of Sir William Jones, a devout Christian writer, who spent years in India, and whose testimony will be accepted by any person acquainted with his history. He makes the emphatic declaration, "That the name of Chrishna, and the general outline of his history, were long anterior to the birth of our Savior, and probably to the time of Homer (900 b. C.) we know very certainly." (Asiat. Res. vol. i. p. 254.) No guess-work about it. "We know very certainly."

And being a scholar, a traveler, and a sojourner among the Hindoos, and well versed in their history, no person ever had a better opportunity to know than he. We will hear this renowned author further. "In the Sanscrit dictionary, compiled more than two thousand years ago, we have the whole history of the incarnate deity (Chrishna), born of a virgin, and miraculously escaping in his infancy from the reigning tyrant of his country (Cansa). He passed a life of the most extraordinary and incomprehensible devotion. His birth was concealed from the tyrant Cansa, to whom it had been predicted that one born at that time, and in that family, would destroy him;" i. e., destroy his power. (Asiat. Res. vol. i. p. 273.) This writer also states that the first Christian missionaries who entered India were astonished to find there a religion so near like their own, and could only account for it by supposing that the devil, foreseeing the advent of Christ, originated a system of religion in advance of his, and "just like it." Stated in other words, he got out the second edition of the gospel plan of salvation before the first edition was published or had an existence. Rather a smart trick this, thus to outwit God Almighty.

With respect to the vast antiquity of the Hindoo oriental religion, which indicates it as being not only the source from which the materials of the Christian religion were drawn, but as being the parent of all the leading systems, with their three thousand subordinate branches which existed at a much earlier period than Christianity, we need only point to the deep chiseled sculptures and imperishable monuments enstamped on their time-honored temples, tombs, altars, vases, columns, pagodas, ruined towers, &c., which, with contemporary inscriptions, warrant us in antedating the religion of the Himmalehas far beyond the authentic records of any other religion that has floated down to us on the stream of time. The numerous images of their crucified Gods, Chrishna and Saki, emblazoned on their old rock temples in various parts of the country, some of which are constructed of clay porphyry, now the very hardest species of rock, with their attendant inscriptions in a language so very ancient as to be lost to the memory of man, vie with the Sanscrit in age, the oldest deciphered language in the world.

All these and a hundred corroboratory historical facts fix on India as being the birthplace of the mother of all religions now existing, or that ever had an existence, while the great workshop in which they were subsequently remodeled was in Alexandria in Egypt, whose theological schools furnished the model for nearly every system now found noticed on the page of history – Christianity of course included. So much for the unrivaled antiquity of the Hindoo religion. Now, the more important query arises, What relationship does ancient heathen or Hindoo Budhism bear to Christianity? What is the evidence that the latter is an outgrowth of the former? As an answer to this question, the reader will please note the following facts of history: —

1. Alexandria, the home of the world's great conqueror, was at one period of time the great focal center for religious speculation and propagandism, the great emporium for religious dogmas throughout the East, and a place of resort for the disciples of nearly every system of religious faith then existing.

2. In this capital city, comprising about five hundred thousand inhabitants, were established a voluminous library, and vast theological schools, in which men of every religious order, and of every phase of faith, met and exchanged religious ideas, and borrowed new doctrines, with which they remodeled their former systems of faith, amounting in some cases to an entire change of their long-established creeds.

3. In these theological schools the Jewish sect, which afterward became the founders of Christianity, were extensively represented; for, let it be noted, its first disciples and founders had all been Jews, probably of the Essene sect. "For a long time the Christians were but a Jewish sect," says M. Reuss' "History of Christian Theology." Alexander had, previous to this time (that is, about 330 b. c.), subjected the whole of Western Asia to his dominions, including, of course, "The Holy Land" – Judea.

4. By this act a large portion of the Jewish nation were transferred from their own country to Alexandria. And this number was afterward vastly increased by Alexander's successor, Ptolemy Sotor, who carried off and settled in that credal city one hundred thousand more Jews.

5. As the result, in part, of these repeated calamities, "the Lord's chosen people" were literally broken up. They lost their law, lost their leader and lawgiver, lost their language, lost the control of their country, the "Promised Land" which (they verily believed) the Lord had deeded to them in fee simple, and ratified in the high court of heaven, and had declared they should hold and possess forever. And finally they partially lost their nationality, being literally dissolved and broken up; and were finally almost lost to history – the ten tribes disappearing entirely.

6. The Jews had ever manifested a proneness for copying after the religious customs of their heathen neighbors, and engrafting their doctrines into their own creeds, as their bible history furnishes ample proof.

7. In Alexandria a very superior opportunity was afforded for doing this, excelling in this respect any previous period of their history.

8. The shattered condition of their own religion, with all its conventional creeds, customs, and ceremonies, now suspended and literally prostrated, as above shown, vastly augmented the temptation ever rife with them to make another change in their religion, and subject their creed to another installment of new doctrines, by which it became Christianity.

9. The liberal character and tolerant spirit of the political and religious institutions of the kingdom of Alexandria, with its vast and attractive library of two hundred thousand volumes, established principally by Ptolemy Phila-delphus, with other attractive features already pointed out, furnished great facilities, as well as increased temptations to religious propagandists to absorb new theories, and make new creeds out of the vast medley of religious doctrines and speculative dogmas preached and propagated in that royal city by the disciples and representatives of nearly every religious system then in existence, brought together by the attractions above specified.

10. Hence every consideration would lead us to conclude, taken in connection with the facts above stated, and the well-known borrowing proclivity and imitative propensity of the Jews, that they would not, and could not, withstand the overweening and overpowering temptation to make another radical change in their religion by a new draught on the boundless reservoir of speculative ideas, religious tenets, and specious theories then glowing in the popular schools of Alexandria.

11. All the facts above enumerated would impel us to the conclusion that the Jews would – and every page of history touching the matter proves they did – make important changes in their religion by this contact with the oriental systems, as they had repeatedly done before. Some of this proof we will here present, to show how they originated Christianity.

12. "The schools of Alexandria" says Mr. Enfield, a Christian writer, "by pretending to teach sublime doctrines concerning God and divine things, enticed men of different countries and religions, and among the rest the Jews, to study its mysteries, and incorporate them with their own… The Jewish faith mixed with the Pythagorean, and afterward with the Egyptian oriental theology" (that is, they became Essenes in the Grecian school of Pythagoras, who taught the doctrines of that religious order, then Bud-hists in the Egyptian schools of Alexandria). And finally, with Christ as their leader, who taught the doctrines of both schools (they being essentially alike), they assumed the name of Christian in honor of him, and thus is Christianity from Essene Budhism.

13. Beers in his "History of the Jews," sustains the above statement by the declaration that the Essenian Jews "fled to Egypt at the time of the Babylonian captivity, and there became acquainted with the Pythagorean philosophy, and ingrafted it upon the religion of Moses," which would make them Essenian Budhists – for Cunningham assures us that "the doctrine of Pythagoras were intensely Budhistic." (Philsa. Topus, chap. x.)

14. We will condense a few more historical testimonies relative to the entire change of the Jewish faith, while in Alexandria, as well as on other occasions, to show how easy and natural it was for that portion of the Jews who afterward became the founders of Christianity to slide into and adopt Essenian Budhism, whose doctrines they took to constitute the Christian religion.

15. Mr. Gibbon (chap. xxi.) declares that the theological opinions of the Jews underwent great changes by their contact with the various foreigners they found in Alexandria. Mr. Tytler likewise, in his "Universal History," assures us that the Jewish religion "became totally changed by the intermixture of heathen doctrines." Dr. Campbell also testifies that "their views came pretty much to coincide with those of the pagans." (See his Dissertation, vi.) And the author of "The Expositor for 1854" complains that the pagan "theology stole upon them from every quarter, and mingled in all the views of the then known tribes, so that by the year 150 b. c., it had wrought visible changes in their notions and habits of thought." (P. 423.) Here we have the proof that the whole Jewish religion underwent a change in Alexandria.

16. Now, most, certainly a nation or sect professing a religion so easily changed, and possessing a character so fickle, or so irrepressible as to yield on every slight occasion, and embrace every opportunity to imbibe new religious ideas and doctrines, would easily, if not naturally, slide into the adoption of the religious system then promulgated in Alexandria under the name of Budhism, and afterward remodeled or transformed, and called Christianity.

17. The Jews of the Essenian order, as we have in part shown in a previous chapter, set forth in their creed all the leading doctrines now comprised in the Christian religion hundreds of years before the advent of Christ, not excepting the doctrine of the divine incarnation and its adjuncts, as these concomitants of the present popular faith, we will now prove, were not unknown to the Jewish theology, but constituted a part of the religion of some of the principal Jewish sects. That standard Christian author, Mr. Milman, in his "History of Christianity," tells us that "the doctrine of the incarnation ('God manifest in the flesh') was the doctrine from the Ganges, and even the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Ilissus. It was the fundamental principle of the Indian Budhist religion and philosophy. It was the basis of Zoroasterism. It was pure Platonism. It was Platonic Judaism in the Alexandrian school." Here it is positively declared, by a popular Christian writer, whose work is a part of nearly every popular library in Christiandom as a standard authority, that the appearance of God amongst men in the human form, by human birth, was a doctrine of the Jewish religion in some of its branches, especially the Essenian branch – further proof that Christianity originated nothing, and gave utterance to no new doctrine or precepts, and performed no new miracles. Where, then, is the claim for its originality? On what ground is it predicated? Please answer us, good Christian brother.

18. It is a question of no importance, if it could be settled, whether Christianity is a direct outgrowth from one of the new-fangled sects of Judaism, or whether it derived a portion of its doctrines from this source and the balance from ascetic Budhism. Yet we regard it as an incontrovertible proposition that it all grew out of Budhism originally, either directly or indirectly.

19. Christ may have received his doctrines secondhanded, all or a portion from the Essenian Jews; for that sect held all the leading doctrines of Budhism (as we have shown in a previous chapter), which now goes under the name of the religion of Jesus Christ.

20. Or we may indulge the not unreasonable hypothesis that the founders of Christianity, who republished the doctrines of Budhism and adopted them as their own, received them all direct from the disciples of that religious order; for "they were everywhere," as one writer (Mr. Taylor) declares, speaking of their extensive travels to propagate their doctrines through the world. And it was about that period, as Mr. Goodrich informs us, they sent out nine hundred missionaries, who made six millions of converts, – a small fraction of their present number (three hundred and eighty millions, as given by some of our geographies), – one third more than the entire census of Christendom, and six times the number of believers in the Christian religion, if we omit Greeks and Catholics. "It is." as a writer remarks, "the oldest and most widely spread religion in the world." And, whatever hypothesis may be adduced to account for the fact, Christianity is now all Budhism.

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