Jesus & Krishna: Two Versions of the Same Archetypal Myth?

Originally published as "Are the Stories of Christianity’s Jesus and Hinduism’s Krishna Simply Two Different Versions of the Same Archetypal Myth?" Midwestern Journal of Theology 12.2 (2013):106-117.  It appears here with some minor changes.

PROLOGUE

I’m sitting and listening to the ministry report of one of the key workers in an organization I’m on the board of.  This guy giving the report has developed an extensive apologetic training ministry in Spanish-speaking countries.  He is reporting with some concern that the influence of the New Atheism is growing in South America and as a result he has been encountering increasingly a counter-Christian argument which says that Jesus is just one of a great number of gods who are examples of a universal, virgin-born, crucified-savior myth. Here is an example of such a list from Michael Dowd’s Thank God for Evolution (2008):1

Many parallels exist between the stories of Jesus recorded in the early Christian scriptures and stories that predate Christianity:

Born of a virgin: Dionysius, Horus, Tammuz, Krishna, Zarathustra, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Attis, Heracles

Son of the Supreme God: Dionysius, Krishna, Mithras, Heracles

Death or torture by crucifixion (including bound to or embedded within a tree or stone): Dionysius, Osiris, Krishna, Prometheus

Resurrection and ascension: Osiris, Tummuz [sic], Krishna, Mithras, Adonis

I was of course familiar with the argument. Even though the current crop of atheists might like to call themselves “new,” their arguments, at least in this case, are not only old, but long debunked, some of the claims as much as a century ago, some a century and a half, some even nearly two centuries. No credible scholars of the history of religions credit the list.  Yet despite this the list keeps circulating, ever circulating, and rising to a point every generation or so where it becomes necessary to put it in its place once again. No sooner, then, was the meeting over than I sat down to write this article.

INTRODUCTION

There was a time during my early spiritual wanderings, before Jesus took hold of me, that I was much taken with Hinduism. It wasn’t that strange a thing in those days for a confused Roman Catholic kid like me to be interested in, especially one who liked the Beatles, and in particular, George Harrison.  My interest, I think, was initially tweaked when I learned this youngest Beatle, George I mean, was being taught to play the sitar by Ravi Shankar, an Indian musician whose album I rushed out and bought.  And then of course there were those George Harrison songs that reflected his own embrace of the Hindu World View, songs like “Within You and Without You,” on the Beatles’ celebrated Sgt. Pepper Album (1967), or “My Sweet Lord,” on Harrison’s own first independent album, All Things Must Pass (1970). 

Right to Left: Billy Preston, George Harrison,

President Gerald Ford, Ravi Shankar

(Photo: David Hume Kennerly)

The latter song, with its chorus of singers in the background alternating back and forth between singing praises to the Christian God (Hallelujah) and praises to the Hindu gods Krishna, Rama, and so on (“Hare Krishna,” “Hare Rama,” etc.), implied by this back and forth, that both the Christian God and the Hindu gods were all one and thus also all the same “Sweet Lord” George was singing about.   At the time I found the approach appealing.

My interest in Hinduism began in earnest, however, at the first Gathering of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, held in and around Granby, Colorado, in the summer of 1972.  Any of my readers who remember that event will recall how hundreds, perhaps thousands, gathered in a large lot just back behind the town, which had apparently been rented from a local farmer to serve as a parking lot, while an even greater number hiked up to Strawberry Lake.2 One day early in the festival a troupe of shaved-headed, pony-tailed, forehead-tilakaed,  saffron-bedecked Krishna devotees showed up in the lower lot with Indian instruments—a tabla or two, harmonium, multiple sets of finger cymbals (kartals)—and led perhaps a hundred or more of us for what seemed like hours of chants in praise of the Hindu gods, and in particular Krishna.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Photo: Christian Jansen)

The next summer, just before starting college, I bought a copy of the first volume of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s Kṛṣṇa [Krishna]: The Supreme Personality of Godhead (1970) from a Hare Krishna devotee selling books on the street in San Diego, California.  That got me hooked. After that I read everything I could get my hands on, though my primary interest lay in the direction of the Vaishnava bhakti tradition,3 especially as it related to Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1485-1533), which focuses on devotion to a personal deity, primarily through chanting the deity’s name, Krishna’s name.4 This was in fact the tradition followed by the Hare Krishnas.

Later, when God’s Spirit began to convict me through the first and second commandments, and it began to become clear to me that whoever would embrace Jesus must follow him exclusively, or else not pretend to follow him at all, I first attempted to donate my collection of Hindu books to the Roman Catholic Newman Center library at the University of Idaho, where I was student.  The priest politely declined my offer, explaining that it would hardly do for there to be more Hindu books in the center’s library than Catholic ones.  So eventually, soon after coming to Jesus, I simply disposed of them.

STRANGE UNHEARD OF STORIES

Sometime after becoming a Christian I began to encounter some rather strange claims about Krishna, claims I had never encountered in any of the Hindu sacred texts I had read. These claims, mainly put forth in atheist and other anti-Christian writers, amounted to this: just as Christians believed Jesus was born of a virgin on 25 December, was crucified, died, and rose again, so too did Hindu’s believe the very same things about Krishna, that indeed both Jesus and Krishna were simply two examples of an ancient, nearly universal, virgin-born, crucified-savior myth.  But if that were the case, I wondered, why had I so totally missed it?

Prabhupada in his effort to successfully transplant Krishna Consciousness to the West generally took advantage of every opportunity to press similarities between Krishna and Christ to the point that Ed Senesi (Jagannath-suta), prominent Hare Krishna leader and one time editor-in-chief of the movement’s Back to Godhead magazine, refers in his published Christian testimony after getting out, to “this whole counterfeit parallel” that was forever being drawn in the movement “between Christ and Krishna.”5  Prabhupada even went so far as to erroneously claim that “Christos is the Greek version of the word Kṛṣṇa.”6

Why then didn’t I come across the idea that Krishna was a crucified and risen savior figure virgin born on 25 December?  As it turns out, the answer is quite simple: That is not at all the story the Hindu holy books tell. Where then, did these claims come from?  That, I feel sure, will become perfectly clear before the end of the present article.  Let’s start by examining what the classic Hindu texts actually say, beginning with the issue of Krishna’s birth.

KRISHNA NOT BORN ON 25 DECEMBER

Krishna's Birthday is a Fall Festival, not a Winter Festival. Here is a poster advertising the
celebration of Krishna's birthday in early September 2015. 

What about the allegation that Christ and Krishna were both born on December 25?  In actual fact, there is really no reason to suppose that either were born on December 25.  Although Christ’s birth is now celebrated on December 25 it was not so from the beginning.  The date or time of year of Jesus’s birth is not noted in the Bible, nor was the early Church much interested in it. The primary Christian annual celebration in the early church (as it continues to be now) was Easter, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection.  The earliest extant evidence for the celebration of Jesus’s birth on December 25 comes from later, from the fourth century.7  In the Julian Calendar, December 25 marked the winter solstice, metaphorically the beginning of the victory of light over darkness, that is, after the year’s longest night.  In and of itself the claim that Krishna was born on December 25 ought to give us pause due to its obvious Western point of reference, since, after all, the Hindu calendar does not have a month named December in it.  That the Hindu’s might have assigned the birthday of Krishna to the winter solstice, for similar reasons that Christ’s was moved there, really wouldn’t be that surprising either.  But they didn’t.  The celebration of Krishna’s birth takes place in August/September (Shravana) and is called Krishna Janmashtami (Janmāṣṭamī).8 In reference to our calendar, the dates vary from year to year because our calendar is solar and theirs is lunar.  So, for example, in the year I came to Christ (1976), Janmashtami was celebrated on August 18,9 this year (2013) it was on August 28.
 

There is really nothing more to be said on this point.  The claim that Krishna was born on December 25 is simply false and it has been false ever since ignorant folk in the West started making the claim.10 The claim is rooted in the false assertion by Kersey Graves in the 1870s that Shravana, the month on which Janmashtami is celebrated, “answers to our December,”11 which it definitely does not, as was in fact known in the West well before Graves wrote.12

KRISHNA NOT BORN OF A VIRGIN

The most familiar, popular, and influential telling of the story of Krishna’s birth, indeed the version that can be essentially considered the “canonical” one in India, comes from the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana (950 AD; henceforth = BP).13 As the webpage for the Bhagavata Purana Research Project, connected with the Oxford Center for Hindu Studies, notes,

The Bhagavata Purana is one of the most highly regarded and variegated of Hindu sacred texts…this work of over 14,000 Sanskrit verses ranks, along with the Ramayana and Mahabharata, as central to the contemporary Hindu corpus of sacred texts in the Sanskrit language…All major vernacular languages of India have renditions of the Bhagavata, which often become regional classics in their own right.14

Story Tellers Box:  Illustrating the Life of Krishna, India, Rajasthan c. 1900

       (Denver Art Museum)15

 Edwin F. Bryant notes that, “whereas most of the other puranas, have produced no traditional commentaries at all, and others only one or two, the Bhagavata [Purana] has inspired eighty one commentaries in Sanskrit alone that are presently available, and there are others that no longer exist.” [xvi] The portion of the BP that tells the story of the life of Krishna is readily available in English in a Penguin Classics paperback, translated by Edwin F. Bryant, under the title Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God (Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa Book 10).  Prabhupada had also produced a multi-volume English translation and commentary on the work, each volume of which I used to eagerly purchase as they became available. When Hindus think of the story of Krishna’s birth, when they relate, celebrate, reenact it, [xvii] or depict it iconographically, the version they have in mind is the version told in the Bhagavata Purana. It is also the first version I encountered reading Prabhupada’s Krishna book and his translations.  Edwin F. Bryant tells us that he first encountered the story from Prabhupada’s writings as well. [xviii]

It should be said before continuing further, that anyone who carefully reads the story of Krishna’s birth in the BP will encounter one item that may well remind them of the story of the birth of Jesus in the New Testament.  This is not to say, however, that Krishna was virgin born.  For brevity’s sake let me summarize the BP story.

As the wicked King Kamsa is driving his younger sister, Devaki, along in her wedding chariot, a disembodied voice says to him: “The eighth offspring of the woman you are transporting will kill you, you fool.”[xix]  Terrified, Kamsa seizes his sister and prepares to kill her on the spot.  Her new husband Vasudeva, however, comes to her rescue by promising to deliver each child they bear over to Kamsa to kill as soon as they are born.  Their first child is a son named Kirtiman [xx] (revealing to us already that the story has nothing to do with Krishna being born of a virgin, since he will be Devaki’s eight child, not her first).  

In any case, Vasudeva, true to his word, takes the child Kirtiman to Kamsa.  Kamsa at first relents and lets Vasudeva take the child and return home, on the grounds that the frightening prophecy concerned the eighth child of Vasudeva and Devaki, not the first.  Later on, however, after the great sage Narada informed Kamsa that the prophesy related to an incantation of the god Vishnu, Kamsa has second thoughts, imprisons Vasudeva and Devaki and kills the first child and each one afterward as it is born.  

In the meantime Vishnu and certain other gods are planning a way to thwart Kamsa’s schemes.  The first step in their plan takes place after Devaki becomes pregnant with her seventh child.   Vishnu then sends the goddess Yogamaya to transfer the embryo from Devaki’s womb to the womb of Rohini, another wife of Vasudeva, hence making it appear that Devaki had miscarried. [xxi]  Next, Vishnu enters Devaki’s womb and Yogamaya enters the womb of the wife of a cowheard named Yasoda.  In the course of time Vishnu is born as Krishna to Devaki, and Yogamaya to Yasoda in the middle of one and the same night. The chains that hold Vasudeva’s feet fall off, and he takes the child out of the house (each locked door opening as he passes through), and hurries to the home of Yasoda and her husband Nanda.  He then switches his boy (Krishna) with Yasoda’s girl child and returns to his home.  After he arrived the doors relock themselves, Vasudeva puts himself back into his chains, and the guards are awakened from the supernatural sleep that had allowed Vasudeva to make the switch undetected. They hear the cry of an infant and they inform Kamsa.  Kamsa rushes to kill the baby, but no sooner has he snatched the infant up by her feet and dashed her on the floor than she rises up into the sky, manifests herself as a great goddess, and says to Kamsa: “What will be achieved by killing me, you fool?  Your enemy…the bearer of your death, has already been born somewhere else.  Do not kill helpless creatures capriciously.”[xxii]  At this Kamsa becomes remorseful, begs his sister’s and Vasudeva’s forgiveness and releases them.  Afterwards, however, he meets with his ministers (who are actually shape-shifting demons) to discuss the situation.  They promise they will immediately go out and kill all babies ten days old and younger in all the villages, towns and countryside round about.[xxiii] After hearing them out in their murderous advice, Kamsa, himself a “demon trapped in a snare” orders them “to engage in wholesale slaughter of saintly people” roundabout.[xxiv].

The story of how Vasudeva’s chains fell off and locked doors opened to allow him to switch the babies, might well call to mind the story in Acts 12 where the imprisoned Peter’s chains fell off (v. 8) and how he and the angel “passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city” (v. 10).  In the New Testament, however, that does not really relate at all to the story of Christ’s birth. More to the point in terms of a seeming echo is the plan of Kamsa’s advisors to kill all children under ten days old, which might well remind us of how Herod gave an order to kill all children under two years old (Matt. 2:16). I vividly remember thinking this latter parallel rather striking the first time I read it under the light of a small lamp in the back of my brother’s Volkswagen Van as we bumped our way through the Sonora desert in deep darkness of night somewhere south of Tijuana.  Perhaps one of the reasons I remember it so vividly, is that the seeming parallel represented for me at the time a sort of mark of authenticity: Just as Herod tried to kill Jesus, so Kamsa tried to kill Krishna.   But as one examines the two stories more fully, these seemingly straightforward parallels run into complications. The story of Herod and the slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem, appears in an account which virtually all New Testament scholars would admit, was written within living memory of the events described.  In the case of Krishna, it relates to events which supposedly took place thousands of years before Christ, but were reported in a text which came into its final form, hundreds of years after Christ. Krishna, Prabhupada tells us in the preface to the book I was reading, “is an historical person who appeared on this earth 5,000 years ago.”[xxv] Yet, granting the presence of older traditions in the text, the general consensus dates it sometime after the eighth century AD.[xxvi] Doniger dates it to around 950 AD.[xxvii]

Naturally I was not alone in noting the seeming parallel between Herod’s slaughter of the innocents in the Gospel of Matthew and the demons’ promise that they would seek out and kill all infants under ten days old in the BP.  That is why I feature it here, despite the fact that it can have only peripheral significance to the question whether Jesus was born of a virgin.  We get right to the heart of the matter in a footnote Bryant attaches to his translation of the killing of children ten days and under passage:

The similarities between this story and that of Herod in the New Testament caused some early Indologists to suppose that the Hindus had borrowed the narrative from early Christian sources.  Eventually, however, it was pointed out that there was evidence to prove that the Krsna story predated the common era.[xxviii]

But is Bryant really correct?  Even if we grant that the general story of Krishna goes back to pre-Christian times, the ten-days-and-under detail found in the BP appears to be a late addition.  In the first place it is not followed up at all in the BP narrative. Instead we only see Krishna himself targeted by a series of shape-shifting demons.  But even more significant, indeed decisive, is the fact that two much earlier sources standing behind the BP either do not have the detail at all, or else do not have it in a form that strikingly suggests a parallel to the Herod two-years-and-under detail.  The BP, the reader will recall, we are dating around 950 AD, [xxix] the two earlier sources referred to are the Vishnu Purana (400-500 AD [xxx]) and the Harivamsa (450 AD [xxxi]), the latter of which was originally an appendix to the Mahabharata.

In the Harivamsa, probably the earliest extant literary account of the birth of Krishna, there is no reference at all to Kamsa’s demon advisors suggesting they will kill children.  In that version, when the goddess Kamsa dashes on the stones rises up and addresses him, she does not reveal that the child who will kill him has already been born elsewhere, as we saw her doing in the BP, where she said: “What will be achieved by killing me, you fool?  Your enemy…the bearer of your death, has already been born somewhere else.”[xxxii]  Instead, in the Harivamsa, she says only “Kamsa, Kamsa, since you attacked me to destroy me, hurling me down upon the stone, therefore at your death, when you are overpowered by your enemy, I will smash your body with my own hands and drink your warm blood.’” [xxxiii]   Since no mention is made of the child being born already, no plan follows to kill him by targeting all the children of a certain age generally.

In the Vishnu Purana, the goddess does tell Kamsa that the child that is to kill him is already born—“What benefit have you derived, O Kansa [Kamsa], by hurling to the ground.  He is born, who shall destroy thee” [xxxiv]—but instead of instituting a plan to kill children under a certain age, Kamsa instead instructs his demons to keep watch for remarkable children and kill them: “Let us vigorously find out all young children upon earth and let every boy in whom there are signs of unusual vigour, be killed mercilessly.”[xxxv]   This fits better, as well, the flow of the larger story, i.e., which, even in the BP, has the demons one by one trying to kill Krishna over longer period, only to be destroyed themselves.

In view of this evidence I wrote to Bryant concerning his reference in this connection to the Krishna story, saying that it “predated the common era.” Here is what I said in part:

You imply that the earlier view was overthrown by the fact that “there was evidence to prove that the Krsna story predates the common era.”  But can you really claim that the evidence “proves” that this particular detail  of the story predates the common era, particularly since the Harivamsa, for example, does not seem to have it (at least in the translation I have access to, which is based on the critical edition of Vaidya)?  Unfortunately I do not read Sanskrit, which puts me at a disadvantage. In the Harivamsa  Kamsa only becomes seriously alarmed about Krishna after he hears of the wonders he is working and after a second visit from Narada.

Just as an aside : I agree that there is no need to propose an origin of this story in Christian sources, since the situation described is common enough in all cultures, as the Bhagavata [i.e., the BP] itself says: “As a general rule, avaricious kings on the earth, who are addicted to life’s pleasures, can kill mothers, fathers, brothers, and well-wishers.” (10.1.2.67) [xxxvi]  To which Professor Bryant kindly responded:

If this story is not in the Harivamsa - and that would need to be checked - I don't see how one could prove that this particular narrative is pre common era, so you make a fair point … Also as an aside, and as I think you hint at, non-scholarly claims to originality between narratives shared by traditions are sometimes tied into religious commitments as to validity, or, at least, hierarchical validity between those traditions, with neo-Hindus often duplicating the excesses of early Christian Indologists in reverse!  Of course academic scholars are required to steer clear of all that….”[xxxvii]

Following up on Bryant’s suggestion as to the Harivamsa needing to be checked, I enquired of noted Indologist Benjamin Preciado-Solis, who kindly responded: “You are right in your observation about the Harivamsa passage, in fact the words for "is already born" do not appear in the text.”[xxxviii]

HOW DID DEVAKI BECOME PREGNANT WITH KRISHNA?

As we have already seen Krishna was not born of a virgin.  That is not to say, however, that he was conceived in the ordinary way, at least not in the BP.  Devaki’s husband Vasudeva had a part, but not the usual part.  It came about rather, through a process of “mental transmission.” Initially Vishnu (whose avatar Krishna was) enters the mind of Vasudeva, rendering him “invincible and unapproachable by all living entities,”[xxxix] after which, Vishnu was “deposited there [i.e., in Devaki’s womb] by Vasudeva…by mental transmission.”[xl]  This is as close as we get to the idea of a virgin birth for Krishna in the BP, but it is improper to call it a virgin birth, not only because Devaki was not a virgin at the time, but also, and more significantly, because of the relevant role played by Vasudeva in the process, first receiving Vishnu into his mind and then transmitting him into Devaki’s womb.  This role, as the BP explains it, related back to a promise Vishnu had made to both Vasudeva and Devaki jointly in their previous lifetimes.  In their earlier incarnations, when Vasudeva was called Sutapa and Devaki was called Prsni, the two had engaged in arduous acts of austerity for 12,000 divine years, after which Vishnu was pleased and offered them the boon of their choice.  The favor they asked was to have a son like Vishnu, a desire he was now granting the couple for a third time in a row.[xli]  In the end, however, the issue is moot, because this story of mental transmission along with its explanation are, again, not present in the earlier accounts of Krishna’s birth in the Harivamsa (450 AD) and the Vishnu Purana (400-500 AD).  So again, those who claim Krishna was born of a virgin are simply wrong. As a last ditch defense of their position they may choose to cling to the account of “mental transmission,” but even if they do so, the fact still remains that it is a late detail introduced centuries after the New Testament.

WHERE DID THE FALSE IDEA OF KRISHNA’S VIRGIN BIRTH COME FROM?

Well one of the places it comes from is the Masons.

“For each of the great races of the past has had its savior who taught the people and showed them the true pathway of life.  Of many of them the same legends and traditions are told, and many were the ‘Christs’ of pre-Christian ages, said to have been, like Him, born of virgin mothers and revered as saviours of men.  India had her Krishna and her Gautama Buddha; China her Fo-hi and her Yu; Egypt her Horus; Persia had her Zarathusthra; Greece her Dionysius; ancient America her Quetzalcohuatl, and many others might be named, all of whom were of divine birth, born of virgin mothers.”

(Joseph H. Fussell, 32^nd degree Mason, in his article, “The Significance of Easter: A Masonic Interpretation,” [1917]).[xlii]

When I first encountered the claim about Krishna and Jesus being simply two examples of an ancient, all-but-universal, virgin-born, crucified-savior myth it was not the sort of thing one would find boldly proclaimed in mainstream sources.  Instead one would find it appearing, usually, as part of a larger list of virgin-born, crucified saviors circulating with considerable variation via a sort of vast telephone game in what might be described as the Atheist Crank Circuit.  I say “might be described,” because as a matter of fact, the circuit included not only outright atheists but also various other historically aligned groups who were equally guilty of both imbibing and passing along the same fundamentally anti-Christian,[xliii] pseudo-historical, dime-store esoteric-syncretistic, bogus account of universal religious history. Groups, for example, like Freemasons, Theosophists, Freethinkers, New Thought teachers, and Mind Scientists. 

More recently things have been changing, not because the claim has gained credibility in scholarly sources, but because more mainstream publishing houses seem to have become more willing of late to publish unscholarly rubbish of a sort that in former times would have been either self-published, or published by firms that stood more on the fringe of respectability.[xliv] So in this case, for example, Christopher Hitchens, in his book god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), a National Book Award finalist, asserts that “Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka.”[xlv] Or again, Bishop John Shelby Spong, in his Born of a Virgin: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Treatment of Women in a Male-Dominated Church (1992), published by HarperSanFrancisco, writes: “Krishna, the eighth Avatar of the Hindu pantheon, was born of the virgin Devaki around 1200 B.C.E.”[xlvi]  Or yet again, Michael Dowd in his book Thank God for Evolution (2008), published by Penguin Viking, lists among supposed virgin-savior bearers: “Devaki: virgin mother of Krishna (born on December 25)”[xlvii]

Contra Bishop Spong: The 10 Avatars of Vishnu

Photo: Steve Jurvetson

Now in each of these cases, we run into some additional problems (besides the basic false claim about Krishna being born of a virgin). Hitchins, for example, gets the name of  Krishna’s mother wrong.  He calls her Devaka instead of Devaki.  In point of fact Devaki is the name of Krishna’s mother and Devaka, of his maternal grandfather. 

As for Spong, he calls Krishna the “eighth Avatar of the Hindu pantheon,” when he should have actually called him the eighth avatar of Vishna. Spong also says that Krishna was born in 1200 B.C.E.  But that too is incorrect.[xlviii]  As noted earlier, Prabhupada said in the preface to the Krishna book I bought from the Hare Krishna all those years ago that Krishna, “is an historical person who appeared on this earth 5,000 years ago.”[xlix]  The reason Prabhupada places Krishna in history there, is that a key feature of the Krishna story is that his death marked the beginning of the Age of Kali, which is usually dated to around 3100 BC.50 As for Dowd, although he presents himself as a Christian, he seems in this case so unfamiliar with his topic that he fails even t correctly name the New Testament Gospels presenting Jesus as virgin born (in the immediate context he names Luke and John but not Matthew).51  

In each case the claim about Krishna’s supposed virgin birth appears in a list along with other deities that also supposedly had virgin births.  Significantly none of the authors cite a reference as to where they got their information. In doing so each is found out to be guilty of plagiarism.  Indeed due to the fact that they were plagiarizing, we cannot even be sure that Hitchens, Spong, and Dowd have any idea who Krishna or Devaki were, since none of them actually compiled the lists themselves, but rather simply copied them uncritically and without acknowledgment from others.  Their source, in fact, is a list that was developed by dubious cranks in the nineteenth century and never corrected and updated to agree with present day scholarship.  Indeed the list was known to be a gigantic fraud and already exposed as such by nineteenth century scholars. When our three authors follow the usual procedure of simply plagiarizing the list from others without crediting their sources, they join a long line of similar writers who have done the same thing, deceiving and being deceived, as it were, through a process of uncritical plagiarizing and being plagiarized.  Do we judge our authors too harshly?  Let’s talk about that.

Hitchens was perhaps our most conspicuous plagiarist. Although he doesn’t credit his source in the book itself, he conveniently provided a way for finding him out when he reprinted an excerpt of the obscure atheistic book he plagiarized, which was published in the first third of the previous century.  The book was entitled Essays in Freethinking by Chapman Cohen (1868-1954).52  In god is not Great, Hitchens simply copies what Chapman had in the order he had it, adding a touch here and there and changing things around a bit so as to “put it in his own words.” Because he was simply copying without apparent understanding, he takes over Cohen’s problematic spellings of the names of foreign deities and other figures, including, as we have already said Devaka (should be Devaki), Catlicus (should be Coatlicue), and Agdestris (should be Agdistis).  He does however update Cohen’s archaic spelling of Krishna.  This may signal that Hitchens has at least heard of Krishna, but we can’t be sure since the correction might as easily have originated in a more multiculturally literate proofreader. Hitchens’s at times word for word plagiarism, though not limited to the section, can at least be illustrated by comparing the immediate section where Krishna is mentioned.

[See further "An Example of Christopher Hitchens' Plagiarism"].

Despite the lack of appropriate citation we know the primary source from which the list was derived and we know it as a source that can boast no real connection with either the credible study of comparative religion, or the careful study of the sacred texts of other religions.  I refer to Kersey Graves and his 1875 book The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors.  

How little the list has changed since Graves’s time can be seen when comparing Spong’s particular misstatements to Graves’s original reference to “Chrishna, the eighth avatar of India (1200 B.C.)”54   This is not to say that Spong had read Graves directly, although he may have.  He could just as easily have picked up the statement from any number of dubious sources.  In Moscow, Idaho, where I was born, there was before my time a very colorful religious charlatan named Frank B. Robinson (1886-1948), who ran a New Thought, positive-thinking, mail-order religion called Psychiana.55  Robinson, whose ads in national magazines proclaimed “I talked to God (yes I did: Actually and Literally),” used to like to reproduce this same claim, as he does, for example, in his Psychiana Advanced Course: "Chrishna" of India was supernaturally born and crucified in 1200 B.C.”56 Unlike so many who reproduced Graves’s claim, Robinson actually acknowledges his source. One thing, however, that seems beyond doubt is that both Spong’s and Robinson’s references to Krishna bare some genetic relationship both to Graves and to each other.  This is seen, for example, in their agreement with Graves’s erroneous 1200 BC date for Krishna.

    Kersey Graves, we must stress, was no scholar, and neither was he the originator of most of the erroneous material he passed along. As such he was more dupe than outright fraud, more perpetuator than perpetrator of the intellectual fraud that lay at the root of the claim that Krishna was virgin born.  The direct falsification and academic fraud was apparently initially committed by one Robert Taylor in the 1820s.

Robert Taylor

Taylor perpetrated the fraud by quoting extensively from an article by the noted early Indologist, William Jones, following Jones’s wording for the most part just as it was, but then changing crucial details at points to make it appear that the great scholar was actually claiming that Krishna was born of a virgin. So, for example, in a work entitled the Diegesis, Taylor quotes Jones as saying, “In the Sanskrit dictionary, compiled more than two thousand years ago, we have the whole story of the incarnate deity born of a virgin, and miraculously escaping in his infancy from the reigning tyrant of his country.”57 What Jones had actually said in the section referred to was: “He [Krishna] was the son of Devaci by Vasudeva; but his birth was concealed through fear of the tyrant Cansa, to whom it had been predicted, that a child born at that time in that family would destroy him.”58  In other words: no virgin birth.  Presumably Taylor did not expect anyone to bother hunting down the original reference.  It had, after all, been published in a learned journal out of Calcutta, India.  But somebody did check, and Taylor was found out almost immediately and exposed in public and in print already by 1828.59 In spite of this, Taylor’s misquotation of Jones continued to be appealed to up to the time of Graves, who quotes it without mentioning that he was not quoting Jones directly but only the distortion of Jones found in Taylor.  And it continues to be appealed to right down to the present time.60

WAS KRISHNA A DYING AND RISING CRUCIFIED SAVIOR?

Here the answer is a very inconspicuous.  No.  Krishna was not crucified nor did he rise from the dead.  All the classical Indian sources say that he died after being shot in the foot by a hunter named Jara.  The earliest account comes from the great Indian epic the Mahabharata (c. 300 BC-C.300 AD):

A fierce hunter of the name of Jara then came there, desirous of deer. The hunter, mistaking Keshava [Krishna], who was stretched on the earth in high Yoga, for a deer, pierced him at the heel with a shaft and quickly came to that spot for capturing his prey. Coming up, Jara beheld a man dressed in yellow robes, rapt in Yoga and endued with many arms. Regarding himself an offender, and filled with fear, he touched the feet of Keshava [Krishna]. The high-souled one comforted him and then ascended upwards, filling the entire welkin [firmament] with splendour.[lxi] 

Krishna and Jara the Hunter

The same story is told in the later Vishnu Purana 5:37, and in the BP 11.30.27-40. In both sources, as in the Mahabharata, Jara is horrified because the shooting was an accident, and in each case Krishna forgives him. There is a variant to the story, however, in which Jara wasn’t so innocent, but was actually the reincarnation of the evil Bali, whom Krishna’s brother Balarama had slain in a previous life, now come back seeking revenge.62

WHY WAS KRISHNA SHOT IN THE FOOT?

The reason Krishna died after being shot in the foot, was because, along similar lines as Achilles, Krishna’s body was invulnerable except on the bottoms of his feet. The story is told in the Mahabharata.  One day the irascible, arbitrary and quick tempered sage Durvasas comes as a guest to Krishna’s palace.  While there, he seemingly arbitrarily commands Krishna to smear his body with frumenty [pudding].  Krishna obeys, covering his whole body except the soles of his feet. As a result the sage grants Krishna the gift of invincibility, but only where the frumenty had been smeared.63 The Mahabharata goes on to report that, just prior to the coming of the hunter Jara with his bow and arrow, Krishna “recollected the words that Durvāsas had spoken at the time his body was smeared by that Rishi with the remnant of the Payasa [pudding] he had eaten (while a guest at Krishna’s house).”64

What then was the reason for his death?  Was it for the salvation of mankind?   Again the answer is no.  In the traditional stories He died as a result of a double curse: (1) The curse of Gandhari, and (2) The curse of the Brahmanas.

(1) The Curse of Gandhari: To understand the first curse, the curse of Gandhari, we need to know something about the great war that is the central focus of the Mahabharata, the war between the sons of the half-brothers Dhritarashtra (Dhṛtarāṣṭra) and Pandu (Panḍu).  This is the same war that serves as the setting for the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna serves as charioteer for his cousin the Paṇḍava Arjuna and delivers the teaching as they enter the battlefield of Kurukshetra prior to the beginning of the battle. The Pandavas, or sons of Pandu, represent the Pandu Dynasty (Arjuna’s Clan), and the Yadavas, or sons of Yadu, represent the the Yadu Dynasty  (Krishna’s Clan).

After the battle, Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra, cursed Krishna for being indifferent to the slaughter of her and Dhritarashtra’s 100 sons and his own kin even though he had the power to prevent it:

If I have gained any powers by my loyal and devout service to my husband, O! Kṛṣṇa I curse you on the strength of that power.  Since you forsook relations like the Kauravas [her and Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s offsping] and the Pāṇḍavas who quarrelled [sic] with each other, you also will have to witness the killing of relations.  Thirty[-]six years from today your relations, ministers and sons will be killed, and you too will be killed by a hunter in the forest.  Your women-folk also will cry as we women cry now.65

(2) The Curse of the Brahmanas: Thirty-six years after the Kurukshetra war, the Yadava princes decided to play a trick on some holy men. They disguised one of Krishna’s sons, Samba, as a woman, then approached the ascetics claiming he was the wife of a prominent man hoping for a son and seeking a prognostication as to the child’s gender. The rishis saw through the ruse at once, and, knowing that it was the Yadu prince Samba that stood before them, pronounced a curse against the Yadavas, predicting that Samba would give birth to an iron club that would destroy the clan. When it happened as predicted, the club was duly ground to powder and thrown into the sea in hopes of evading the curse. The curse came to fruition, however, when a quarrel broke out among the Yadavas at the sea side, and they began pulling up blades of eraka grass and throwing it at one another, each blade of which “was seen to be converted into a terrible iron bolt…due to the curse denounced by Brahmanas.”66

In the Mahabharata, Krishna himself appears to be exempted from the curse, even though he himself was a Yadava, and dies primarily due to his own will and because of Gandhari’s curse.  In later stories, however, the effect of the Brahmanas’ curse is extended to Krishna through the claim that Jara’s arrowhead had itself been made of a shard of metal from the Samba’s club.  In the Vishnu Purana, for example, we read:

There was one part of the iron club which was like the blade of a lance, and which the Andhakas could not break: this, when thrown into the sea, was swallowed by a fish; the fish was caught, the iron spike was extracted from its belly, and was taken by a hunter named Jará.67

The same is true in the BP:

Āhuka [Ugrasena], the king of the Yadus, had the club ground up, and then hurled it into the waters of the ocean, along with the piece of iron that remained from it. A certain fish ate the iron piece, and the ground-up particles were carried by the waves to the shore, where they became absorbed into eraka grass.  The fish was caught by a fisherman from the ocean in a net, along with other fish, and a hunter made an arrowhead from the piece of iron that had entered its stomach.68

And then in the same work:

Confusing it [Krishna’s foot] with a deer, Jarā the hunter pierced that deer-like foot with an arrow made from the piece of iron that was left over from the club.69

Krishna dies and ascends into heaven, but he is not resurrected.  Rather he leaves his body on earth.  In the summary in the first part of the Mahabharata, we read how Arjuna, for whom Krishna plays charioteer in the Bhagavad Gita, would have “the funeral rites performed for the bodies of Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva, the great-spirited Rāma [i.e., Krishna’s elder brother, Balarama], and the chiefs of the Vṛṣṇis.”70  Then later, in the proper place in the story itself, we read: “Searching out the bodies then of Rama and Vasudeva [Krishna], Arjuna caused them to be burnt by persons skilled in that act.”71    Again the case is the same in the Vishnu Purana.72

The BP speaks of Krishna’s death in terms of his relinquishing his body: “…how did the Lord relinquish his body, which is so dear to the eye?”73  This same language of relinquishment is also used in Sarala Dasa’s 15^th century Oriya rendition of the Mahabharata, the first retelling of the great epic in one of the regional languages of India. Mushali (=Mausala) parva 16 begins:

“With the advent of the Kali age, Shri Krishna decided to relinquish his earthly incarnation.  All his kinsmen, the Yadavas, perished through mutual destruction, and Shri Krishna was slain by an arrow from the hunter Jara, who mistook his feet for the ears of a deer.”74

So there it is:  

(1) Krishna died after being shot accidently in the foot by the hunter Jara. 

(2) He had to be shot in the foot because he had been granted invincibility everywhere else.

(3) He died the way he did as a result of the curse(s) of Gandhari and/or of the Brahmanas.

(4) He ascended spiritually but left his dead body behind.

In other words: No crucified Krishna and no resurrected Krishna, leaving us once again to ask where the oft-repeated false claim came from. As Elizabeth Armstrong Reed stressed back in 1891: “The idea that Kṛishṇa was crucified is an extravagant myth of exceedingly modern and quite untrustworthy manufacture.”75  The source of that “extravagant myth” is to be found in the same circles that the claim about his being virgin born first emerged.76

All of this took shape before the basic texts telling the stories became available in Western languages.  The first of the Puranas to be translated into a European languages were the Vishnu Purana into English in 1840 and the BP into French in the same year. The first complete translation of the Mahabarata was done in English in 1883 and 1896. Before that, people had to trust what they read about those texts, and much of what they read, as we have seen already, was rubbish.  In the case of the story of a supposed crucified Krishna, the academic fraud involved is so strikingly outrageous as to invite fresh refutation.

If you do a search for images of Krishna crucified, you are likely to turn up one of the following two images. 

This version of the two images appeared in Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (1884) along with the following description:

Our Figure No. 7 (next page), is a pre-Christian crucifix of Asiatic origin, evidently intended to represent Crishna crucified. Figure No. 8 we can speak more positively of, it is surely Crishna crucified.77 

So, since the claim about these two pictures can’t be true, where did Doane get them?  In our answer let’s deal with the pictures separately, beginning with the picture on the right.

Doane’s source for the crucifix on the right was John Patterson Lundy’s Monumental Christianity (1876), where we find a picture of the same cross, this time explicitly identified as “Krishna Crucified.”78 

In the list of illustrations at the beginning of his book, Lundy identifies this figure as an “Irish or Phoenician Crucifix.”79 But when he actually comments on the crucifix in context, he sets aside the possibility that it originated in Ireland and opts exclusively for “the East”:

Was Krishna ever crucified? Look at Fig.61 and see. It is indeed an ancient Irish bronze relic, originally brought to the island from the East by some of the Phoenicians. It is unlike any Christian crucifix ever made.80 

Actually there is in Lundy’s statement almost nothing that is true. There never was any reason to suppose the crucifix came from anywhere but Ireland.  Lundy’s source was Marcus Keane’s, The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland (1867), which also displays a drawing of the crucifix, identified only as an “Irish Bronze Relic.”81  Keane simply describes the crucifix as “An Ancient Irish Relic; from the ‘Dublin Penny Journal’ [published between 1832-1836] one third of the size of the original, which is in the possession of Mr.  W. Mcguire.”82

The larger misstatement, however, is Lundy’s claim that the crucifix he displays “is unlike any Christian crucifix ever made.”  In fact there are hundreds of such crucifixes in museums all over Europe and America, coming from Ireland and other locations in Europe.  A single visit, for example, to the Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland (see footnote for instructions), should set to rest any doubts in this regard.83 But here I need not leave my own city, since we have a very similar crucifix right here in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum. 

Corpus,  France (Limoges) 13^th cent. 

Champlevé, enamel on guilt copper,

 Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO

So much for the first picture.  It depicts Christ crucified, not Krishna Crucified.  It is just as we would expect of a crucifix found in good old Catholic Ireland.  There is no credible reason whatsoever to imagine it has anything to do with Krishna.

So what about Doane’s second depiction of Krishna crucified? Is it Krishna?  Once again the answer is no. Again it is Marcus Keane’s 1867 work that helps us locate the true setting of the second picture.  Here it is alongside an old photograph.84

So once again, as it turns out the claim that this is Krishna crucified is an absolute, unmitigated fraud.  The so-called picture of Krishna crucified is, in fact, nothing other than the head of the perfectly ordinary Celtic Market Cross from Tuam, Country Galway, Ireland.  Here is an old photograph of it, with a detail revealing its proximity to the Ulster Bank.85

This particular cross had broken to pieces over time and was reassembled in 1853, and although the stock and the crucifix head do not match they both date to the 12^th century AD, therefore rendering it in no way appropriate to describe it, as Lundy did, as “a pre-Christian crucifix of Asiatic origin.”86 The cross still exists, though it was moved from the market square in 1992 to St. Mary’s Cathedral in the same city.

CONCLUSION

On Friday, 20 May 1768 John Wesley remarked in his journal: “Freethinkers, so called, are seldom close thinkers.”  In this article we have seen very clearly that this remains the case even centuries after Wesley said it. Hence this study should leave us with the conviction that the current advocacy of the idea that Krishna was a virgin-born, dying and rising savior, is not the product of the hard thinking of critical intellectuals as it is often represented. The very behavior of those who advocate it, in fact, implies that, for all their denunciations of Christianity, they do not have in themselves enough curiosity even to seek out and discover what the other world religions really teach. So, to conclude, I ask you, what do they really have to offer anybody out there earnestly seeking for Spiritual Truth, for God, in this dark, crazy, confusing world?


____________ 

Notes:

[i] 1. Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World (New York: Penguin Viking, 2008), 363. As it happens, Dowd claims he is a Christian.

[ii] 2. See Tim Cahill, “Acid Crawlback Fest: Armageddon Postponed,” Rolling Stone (Aug 3, 1972): cover, 6,8,10. For more on the event from a local perspective see, “Peace Gathering Continues to Grow,” Middle Park Times (June 22, 1972): 11; “Editorial: No Ground Work,” Middle Park Times (June 29, 1972): 2; [Jay Bauer] & Photos: Jay Bauer and G. O. Pickering, “The Strawberry Lake Affair,” Middle Park Times (July 6, 1972): 6-7; John A. (Jay) Bauer, “The Strawberry Lake Affair,” Middle Park Times (July 13, 1972): 15. And now more generally: Michael I. Niman, People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).

[iii] 3. As opposed to the non-dualistic Advaitism of Shankara (700-732 AD), which “would certainly acknowledge that a bhakti Hindu is sincere in his or her devotion and worship, but he would be equally firm that a bhakti Hindu or any other Hindu who speaks about God descriptively cannot be assured that he or she speaks accurately and meaningfully” (Timothy C. Tennent, Christianity at the Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002], 49). For a concise treatment of Shankara’s thought, and of those who opposed him in Hinduism, see George Cronk, On Shankara (n.p.: Thomason-Wasworth, 2002).

[iv]  4. “Swami Bhakti Promode Puri Goswami Maharaj, The Heart of Krishna: Vainshnava Aparadha & The Path of Spiritual Caution (rev. ed.; San Raphael, CA: Mandala, 2001), 88. See, e.g., Sri Chaitanya, “Chanting the Name of the Lord,” in Vedanta for the Western World (ed. Christopher Isherwood; New York: Viking Press, 1960), 225-26, and Steven J. Rosen (Satyaraja Das), “Who is Shri Chaitanya Mahaphrabu?” in The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (eds. Edwin F. Bryant & Maria L. Ekstrand; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 63-72.

[v] 5. “Inside ISKCON [International Society for Krishna Consciousness],” Forward: The News and Research Periodical of the Christian Research Institute 4.1 (1981):11. This is also available online as CRI Statement DI 120, p. 5. This publication interviews Senesi at length about his experience in and conversion to Christ from the Hare Krishna Movement.

[vi] 6. “Kṛṣṇa or Christ: The Name is the Same,” Back to Godhead 11.3/4 (March/April 1976): Repr. in A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, The Science of Self Realization: Articles from Back to Godhead Magazine (Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1969-1997), 112. See, further, Robert D. Baird, “Swami Bhaktivedanta and Ultimacy,” in Religion in Modern India (4th rev. ed.; ed. Robert D. Baird; New Delhi: Monohar, 2001), 573.

[vii] 7. See in more detail with basic bibliography, Ronald V. Huggins, “Christmas,” Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (ed. David Noel Freedman; Grand Rapids, MI / Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2000), 240.

[viii] 8. See, e.g., “Krishna Jayanti: Birthday of the God of Divine Love,” Hinduism Today (April, May, June 2010): 30; John Stratton Hawley, At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Bridavan (with Shrivatsa Goswami; Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992 [orig. ed. Princeton University Press, 1981]): 62.

[ix] 9. See Back to Godhead 11.8 (Aug 1976): 15.

[x] 10. This despite the tortured arguments writers like Acarya S (D. M. Murdock) try to make to rescue the false claim (Sons of God: Krishna, Buddha, and Christ Unveiled [Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2004], 235-40). As an example of the kinds of problems Murdock runs into is the statement: “[Thomas William] Doane asserts the [month of] Bhadra … birthday, while various Indian authorities claim it is in [the month of] Sravana … on a variety of days. Thus again, there is no consensus.” The problem is not that “there is no consensus” as to the date of Krishna’s birth. It falls on different days (in terms of our calendar) because of differences between the Indian calendar and our calendar. It is a point of synchronizing two calendars not of there being no consensus as to when the festival takes place. As to the alleged Bhadra / Shravana problem, the festival falls in the month of Bhadra in the North of India and Shravana in the South (see, e.g., in an older source, E. Denison Ross and the Imperial Record Department, An Alphabetical List of the Feasts and Holidays of the Hindus and Muhammadans [Calcutta, India: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1914], 40), or, more recently, http://hinduism.iskcon. org/practice/402.htm). As the latter source explains: “In North India, the month generally begins with the full moon, in South India with the new moon. Festival days will still fall on the same day, or very closely, but the name of the month may be different. For example, Krishna's Birthday falls on the eighth day of the dark moon; in the North this is in the month of Bhadra; in the South in Shravana.”

[xi] Kersey Graves, The Worlds Sixteen Crucified Saviors (4th ed., rev. and enl.; Boston: Colby and Rich, 1876), 69.

[xii] See, e.g., “Review of Henry Cavendish, On the Civil Year of the Hindoos, and Its Divisions, with an Account of Three Hindu Almanacs belonging to Charles Wilkins, Esq,” Philosophical Transactions 82 (1792): 252, and John Bentley, A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy: From the Earliest Dawn of Science in India (London: Smith, Elder, 1825), 110-11.

[xiii] 13. In this article I am following the dates of Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). The dating of Hindu texts is more problematic than the dating of New Testament texts, due to (1) the lack of manuscript evidence that comes anywhere close to contemporaneity with the original writing of a text, and (2) the lack of external literary evidence contemporaneous with the events described in Hinduism’s sacred texts. This means that scholars must rely more on internal evidence in the texts themselves, as well as such things as references to text in other datable works. Doniger’s dates are fairly representative, although one might do well to consult as well those making the argument for earlier dating, as, e.g., Edwin F. Bryant, “The Date and Provenance of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the Viakuṇṭha Permāl Temple,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 11.1 (Sept, 2002): 51-80.

[xiv] 14. http://www.ochs.org.uk/research/bhagavata-purana-research-project.

[xv] 15. The Denver Art Museum descriptive card reads: “Traveling storytellers. A traveling storyteller used this multi-paneled wood box. Moving from village to village, the storyteller brought the painted images on the box to life through story, song, dance, mime, and instrumental music. Villagers considered storytelling a specialized caste role, inherited at birth. Storytellers visited rural communities on a recurring basis, returning home only for short periods of time.” The story would have been shaped primarily by the account of the BP.

[xvi] 16. Edwin F. Bryant, “Krishna in the Tenth Book of the Bhagavata Purana,” in Krishna: A Sourcebook (ed. Edwin F. Bryant; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 112.

[xvii] 17. See, e.g., Hawley, At Play with Krishna.

[xviii] 18. In the acknowledgements to his translation, Bryant, who is now a noted scholar in Hinduism, notes that he first encountered the story of Krishna through Prabhupada’s works and the work he now translates through Prabhupada’s translation.

[xix] 19. Bhāgavata Purāna 10.1.34; Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God (Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāna Book 10) (trans. Edwin F. Bryant; London: Penguin Books, 2003), 11. Henceforth I will simply give the Bhāgavata Purāna reference, followed by the page number of Bryant’s translation on which the passage in question appears (e.g., in this case: Bhāgavata Purāna 10.1.34, p. 11, meaning Book 10, Chapter 1, Verse 34, found on page 11 in Bryant.

[xx] 20. BP 10.1.56-57, p. 13.

[xxi] 21. BP, 10.2.4-15, pp. 14-15.

[xxii] 22. BP 10.4.12, p. 25.

[xxiii] 23. BP 10.4.31, p. 27.

[xxiv] 24. BP 10.4.44, p. 28.

[xxv] 25. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Kṛṣṇa [Krishna]: The Supreme Personality of Godhead (Boston, MA: ISCKON Press, 1970), xii.

[xxvi] 26. Edwin F, Bryant, “The Date and Provenance of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the Viakuṇṭha Permāl Temple,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 11.1 (Sept 2002): 52.

[xxvii] 27. Doniger, The Hindus, 473.

[xxviii] 28. Bryant, Beautiful Legend, 429, n. 5.

[xxix] 29. Doniger, The Hindus, 473.

[xxx] 30. Ibid., 475.

[xxxi] 31. Ibid, 370. Bryant, (“Date and Provenance,” 55), says that the Harivamsa is “usually dated between 1st -3rd century,” explaining in a footnote (72, n. 15) that “The Harivaṁśa is certainly prior to the 5th century C.E., when an inscription…mentions the Mahābhārata of 100,000 verse, which would indicate the epic at a date when it included the Harivaṁśa as supplement. The date of the Harivaṁśa is to a great extent predicated on the fact that the text mentions the Greek denaruis [denarius], which was introduced into India sometime around the beginning of the common era…Needless to say, the inclusion of this term could have been a later insertion and thus not reflective of the text as a whole.”

[xxxii] 32. BP10.4.12, p. 25.

[xxxiii]33. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from Sanskrit (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 213. Another English translation of the Harivamsa version if the birth of Krishna that is less easy to get hold of is Francis G. Hutchins, Young Krishna: Translated from the Sanskrit Harivamsa (West Franklin, NH: Amarta Press, 1980), see page 29.

[xxxiv] 34. Vishnu Purana 5.3 (ET: Manmatha Nath Dutt, A Prose English Translation of the Vishnupurana (Calcutta: Elysium Press, 1896), 326.

[xxxv] 35. Ibid., 5.4, p. 328.

[xxxvi] 36. Email to Edward Bryant (2 Sept 2013).

[xxxvii] 37. Email: Edwin F. Bryant to me (2 Sept 2013).

[xxxviii] 38. Email: Benjamin Preciado-Solís to me (18 Sept 2013). Bryant had recommended this author’s The Kṛṣṇa Cycle in the Purāṇas (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), as “the best resource (of which I am aware) for which bits of the early Krishna story are dated when” (email to me [2 Sept 2013]); advice, by the way, which I followed and heartily recommend to others interested in this subject.

[xxxix] 39. BP 10.2.17, p. 16.

[xl] 40. BP 10.2.16-18, pp. 15-16.

[xli] 41. BP 10.3.33-45, pp. 22-23.

[xlii] 42. Joseph H. Fussell 32̊ “The Significance of Easter: A Masonic Interpretation,” New Age Magazine 25.6 (June, 1917): 243. New Age Magazine was the official organ of the Supreme Council 33̊ A. A. Scottish Rite Free Masonry, Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A. Or again, along the same lines, from noted Masonic “historian” Albert Pike:

“All antiquity solved the enigma of the existence of Evil, by supposing the existence of a Principle of Evil, of Demons, fallen Angels, an Ahriman, a Typhon, a Siva, a Lok, or a Satan, that, first falling themselves, and plunged in misery and darkness, tempted man to his fall, and brought sin into the world. All believed in a future life, to be attained by purification and trials; in a state or successive states of reward and punishment; and in a Mediator or Redeemer, by whom the Evil Principle was to be overcome, and the Supreme Deity reconciled to His creatures. The belief was general, that he was to be born of a Virgin, and suffer a painful death. The Indians called him Chrishna; the Chinese, Kione-tse; the Persians, Sosiosch; the Chaldeans, Dhouvanai; the Egyptians, Har-Oeri; Plato, Love; and the Scandinavians, Balder. Chrishna, the Hindoo Redeemer, was cradled and educated among shepherds. A Tyrant, at the time of his birth, ordered all the male children to be slain. He performed miracles, say his legend, even raising the dead. He washed the feet of the Brahmins, and was meek and lowly in spirit. He was born of a Virgin; descended to Hell, rose again, ascended to Heaven, charged his disciples to teach his doctrines, and gave them the gift of miracles.” (Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry: Prepared for the Supreme Council of the Thirty Third Degree, for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States and Published by its Authority (New York: Masonic Publishing Company, 1874), 277.

[xliii] 43. The false story of human religious history I am describing was actually hatched as a means of debunking Christianity. Let me clearly state that no person who embraces, for example, the “Masonic Interpretation” of Easter Joseph H. Fussell quoted at the beginning of this section can claim to be a follower of the one who of whom it was said: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

[xliv] 44. As I have argued elsewhere: “My use of the term “rubbish” is not intended to be derisive but descriptive of a genre of literature that, first, is characterized by a pretense to scholarship that is not sustained by the substance of what is presented, and second, is not rooted in an authentic love or pursuit of truth or knowledge, but rather exists only to feed the prejudices and/or prurient interests (scandal, sensation, cynicism, hatred) of the readers who consume it. It is often characterized by (1) sensationalism and conspiratorial thinking, (2) demonization of religious people, (3) wide-ranging plagiarism, (4) bogus etymologies, (5) embellishment of sources, (6) preferring old, outdated scholarship, or long-debunked pseudo scholarship to newer, better research” (Ronald V. Huggins, “Kersey Graves’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Prometheus as Test Case,” Midwestern Journal of Theology 10.1 (2011): 145, n. 2.

[xlv] 45. Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York, Boston: Twelve, 2007), 23.

[xlvi] 46. John Shelby Spong, Born of a Virgin: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Treatment of Women in a Male-Dominated Church (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 56.


[xlvii] 47. Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World (New York: Penguin Viking, 2008), 363.

[xlviii] 48. This incorrect date entered the rubbish stream when Godfrey Higgins included it in the first volume of his Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of Saitic Isis; Or, An Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions (vol. 2, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, 1836), 8.6.8 (1.431), taking it over as a part of a quotation from James Tod’s, “On the Religious Establishments of Méwar,” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2.1 (1829): 299. From thence it made its way, for example, to Kersey Graves’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, 140. When Higgins quoted from Tod, he also took the indefensible liberty of replacing (within the quotation marks) Tod’s spelling “Crishna” with his own, more parallel to Christianity sounding “Christna.” A friendly reviewer commented in reference to Higgins’s Anacalypsis: “Never was there more wildness of speculation than in this attempt to lift the veil of Isis” (“Godfrey Higgins,” in A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,1874]). Regrettably once a claim, however erroneous it might, has managed to enter the rubbish stream, it is uncritically repeated decade after decade, century after century, by other rubbish writers, without anyone ever checking their facts. We see this here in John Shelby Spong’s reference to the 1200 date.

[xlix] 49. Prabhupada, Kṛṣṇa, xii.

[l] 50. “Kali Yuga,” in Roshen Dalal, Hinduism: An Alphabetical Guide (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2010), 187.

[li] 51. Ibid.

[lii] 52. Chapman Cohen, Essays in Freethinking (London: Pioneer Press, 1923-1938), repr. in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (ed. Christopher Hitchens; Boston, MA: Da Capo, 2007). The plagiarized passage appears on 178 of Portable Atheist and 22-23 of Hitchens, god is not Great.

[liii] 53. Repr. in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (ed. Christopher Hitchens; Boston, MA: Da Capo, 2007), 178.

[liv] 54. Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors (4th ed. rev. and enl.; Boston: Colby and Rich, 1876), 58.

[lv] 55. I wrote an entry on Robinson and his religion for an encyclopedia for Baker Book House some years ago, which may or may not ever be released. In speaking of Robinson’s fraudulence, I refer, for example, to his lying about his country of origin, his two degree-mill doctorates, and in the falsification of printed sources in order to discredit his father. Some of these claims had previously been made, but not proved. In the course of my research I was able to obtain a copy of Robinson’s birth certificate as well as the pages from the book he had falsified. See further on Robinson, John Kobler, “The Shepherd of Moscow, Idaho,” Collier’s (Feb 20, 1943): 46, 62-63; Frank S. Mead “The Lunatic Fringe of Religion,” The American Mercury (Feb 1941): 167-75; and Keith C. Petersen, “Psychiana” The Psychological Religion (Moscow, ID: Latah County Historical Society, 1991).

[lvi] 56. Psychiana, Advanced Course 1, Lesson 8. Robinson also has his character Dr. Bannister repeat the claim in his book God…and Dr. Bannister : This War Can Be Stopped (Moscow, ID: Psychiana, 1941), 238.

[lvii] 57. Robert Taylor, The Diegesis: Being a Discovery of the Origin, Evidences, and Early History of Christianity (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1873 [1829]), 169. Taylor gave the short quotation and then referenced several pages in Jones’s article, on none of which is the claim that Krishna was virgin born found. One must of course keep in mind the possibility that Taylor himself was simply plagiarizing someone else misquoting Jones.

[lviii] 58. William Jones, “On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India (1784)” Asiatick [sic] Researches 1 (1798): 259.

[lix] 59. “Sketch of the Controversy between the Rev. J. R. Beard, and the Rev. Robert Taylor,” The Christian Pioneer 27.3 (1828): 93. Actually Taylor had already falsified the Jones quotation earlier, in a discourse that appeared in part in “Extracts from the Reverend Robert Taylor’s 44th Oration,” The Republican 13.1 (Jan 6, 1826):7, in response to which Beard had already called him on it in his response in “To the Rev. Robert Taylor” The Republican 13.9 (March 3, 1826): 280-281.

[lx] 60. Graves, Sixteen Crucified Saviors, 248. See, in addition, Logan Mitchell, The Christian Mythology Unveiled, lectures (London: D. D. Cousins, n.d.), 97; William McDonnell, Reminiscences of a Preacher (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1887), 149; “Professor Marten and the Rev. George Ogilvie, or the Value of Exact Authority Illustrated,” The Reasoner and Unitarian Record 3.71 (1847): 542; Charles J C. Davidson, Tara, the Suttee: an Indian Drama (London: by the author, 1851), 116; Acarya S [D. M. Murdock], The Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha, and Christ Unveiled (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited, 2004), 206; Peter Eckler includes it in his annotations to Edward Gibbon, History of Christianity (New York: Peter Eckler, 1916), 608b. Thomas William Doane (Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions [4th ed.; New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1882], 166), plagiarizes the falsified quote from Jones as if it is he himself writing it, and then, on top of that erroneously claims the birth story of Krishna is found in the Mahabharata.

[lxi] 61. Mahabharata 16 (Mausala-parvan, “Book of the Clubs”) Sec. 4.

[lxii] 62. Vettam Mani, Purāṇic Encyclopedia (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975), 429.

[lxiii] 63. “As long, again, O thou of unfading glory, as thou wilt wish to live, so long wilt thou have no fear of death assailing thee through such parts of thy body as have been smeared with the frumenty [pudding] I gave thee! O son, why didst thou not smear that frumenty on the soles of thy feet as well? By not doing it, thou have acted in a way that is not approved by me!” Mahabharata 13 (Anusasana Parva “Book of Instructions”) Sec. 159.

[lxiv] 64. Mahabharata 16 (Mausala-parvan, “Book of the Clubs”) Sec. 4.

[lxv] 65. Mahabharata 11 (Sitrī-parva “Book of the Women”) Sec. 25 (E. T. Vettam Mani, Purāṇic Encyclopedia, 428).

[lxvi] 66. Mahabharata 16 (Mausala-parva, “Book of the Clubs”) Sec. 3.

[lxvii] 67. Vishnu Purana, 5:37.

[lxviii] 68. BP 11.5.2-23, p. 401.

[lxix] 69. BP 11.30.33, p. 415.

[lxx] 70. Mahabharata 1 (Adi-parva, “Book of the Beginning”) Sec. 2.

[lxxi] 71. Mahabharata 16 (Mausala-parva, “Book of the Clubs”) (Mausala-parva, “Book of the Clubs”) Sec. 7, Vasudeva is also the name of Krishna’s father.

[lxxii] 72. Vishnu Puraṇa 5.38.1: “Arjuna having found the bodies of Krishńa and of Ráma, performed for them, and the rest of the slain, the obsequial rites. The eight queens of Krishńa, who have been named, with Rukminí at their head, embraced the body of Hari [Krishna], and entered the funeral fire.”

[lxxiii] 73. BP 11.30.2, p. 412.

[lxxiv] 74. ET: Bijoy M Misra, “Orissa: Shri Krishna Jagannatha: The Mushali-parva from Sarala’s Mahabharata,” Krishna: A Sourcebook (ed. Edwin F. Bryant; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141. Sarala Dasa also embellishes the story with an interesting detail of having the Krishna’s dead body be cremation-resistant:

"After the death of Krishna, with the help of Jara the Soara, Arjuna made arrangements for the funeral. He lighted the pyre, but only the logs burnt, not the body. Arjuna was disconsolate. So a divine voice told him, 'The fire cannot devour this body. It will be wor-shipped for a long time on the Nilasundar hill. Put out the fire. Remove the body and set it afloat on the sea.' One night and one whole day the fire had burnt, but the body did not burn. Only both the hands, legs, ears, nose and face had been burnt. Arjuna placed the body in the sea.” (Quoted in the Padmalaya Das, “Legends of Jagannath,” Orissa Review [July 1969]: 33).

[lxxv] 75. Elizabeth Armstrong Reed, Hindu Literature; or, the Ancient Books of India (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1891), 382-83.

[lxxvi] 76. See, e.g., Graves, Sixteen Crucified Saviors (4th ed. rev. and enl.; Boston: Colby and Rich, 1876), 29; “Marten and Ogilvie, Exact Authority Illustrated,” The Reasoner and Unitarian Record 3.71 (1847): 542. Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of Saitic Isis; Or, An Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions (vol. 1; London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, 1836), 184.

[lxxvii] 77. Thomas William Doane, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions (3rd ed.; New York: J. W. Bouton 1884), 185. The images themselves appear on page 186.

[lxxviii] 78. John Patterson Lundy, Monumental Christianity (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1876), 157.

[lxxix] 79. Ibid., x.

[lxxx] 80. Ibid., 159.

[lxxxi] 81. Marcus Keane, The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, and Co., 1867), 167.

[lxxxii] 82. Ibid., xv.

[lxxxiii] 83. Simply visit http://huntmuseum.com/collection.aspx and then select from the menus as follows: All Object Types: “Religious/Ritual Equipment,” All Materials, “Metal” Key word in Title, “Corpus,” Key word in Description: “Crucifix Figure.” Or if you would prefer to go directly to the crucifixes most similar to the one displayed by Lundy, simply enter in the “Registration Number” for each as follows: CG064, CG 066, CG 068, HCM 040, HCM 046, HCM 047.

[lxxxiv] 84. Marcus Keane, The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, 1867), 166. The accompanying picture comes from Maggie McEnchroe Williams, “Constructing the Market Cross at Tuam: The Role of Cultural Patriotism in the Study of Irish High Crosses,” in From Ireland Coming: Irish Art from the Early Christian to the Late Gothic Period and Its European Context (ed. Colum Hourihane; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 144.

[lxxxv] 85. T. H. Mason’s photo reproduced from Arthur Kingsley Porter, The Crosses and Culture of Ireland (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press / London: Oxford University Press, 1931), pl. 194.

[lxxxvi] 86. On the 12th century dating of the Tuam cross, see Peter Harbison, The Golden Age of Irish Art: The Medieval Achievement, 600-1200 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 308.