Whether Aramaic scholarship will contribute to the investigation of the life and teaching of Jesus along other lines and in a direct and positive fashion, only the future can show. But certainly if theologians will give heed to the question-marks so acutely placed by Dalman, and recognise it as one of their first duties to test carefully whether a thought or a connexion of thought is linguistically or inherently Greek, and only Greek, in character, they will derive a notable advantage from what has already been done in the department of Aramaic study.
But if the service rendered by Aramaic studies has been hitherto mainly indirect, no success whatever has attended, or seems likely [pg 290] to attend, the attempt to apply Buddhist ideas to the explanation of the thoughts of Jesus. It could only indeed appear to have some prospect of success if we could make up our minds to follow the example of the author of one of the most recent of fictitious lives of Christ in putting Jesus to school to the Buddhist priests; in which case the six years which Monsieur Nicolas Notowitsch allots to this purpose, would certainly be none too much for the completion of the course.[219] If imagination boggles at this, there remains no possibility of showing that Buddhist ideas exercised any direct influence upon Jesus. That Buddhism may have had some kind of influence upon Late Judaism and thus indirectly upon Jesus is not inherently impossible, if we are prepared to recognise Buddhistic influence on the Babylonian and Persian civilisations. But it is unproved, unprovable, and unthinkable, that Jesus derived the suggestion of the new and creative ideas which emerge in His teaching from Buddhism. The most that can be done in this direction is to point to certain analogies. For the parables of Jesus, Buddhist parallels were suggested by Renan and Havet.[220]
How little these analogies mean in the eyes of a cautious observer is evident from the attitude which Max Müller took up towards the question. “That there are startling coincidences between Buddhism and Christianity,” he remarks in one passage,[221] “cannot be denied; and it must likewise be admitted that Buddhism existed at least four hundred years before Christianity. I go even further and say that I should be extremely grateful if anybody would point out to me the historical channels through which Buddhism had influenced early Christianity. I have been looking for such channels all my life, but hitherto I have found none. What I have found is that for some of the most startling coincidences there are historical antecedents on both sides; and if we once know these antecedents the coincidences become far less startling.”
A year before Max Müller formulated his impression in these terms, Rudolf Seydel[222] had endeavoured to explain the analogies [pg 291] which had been noticed by supposing Christianity to have been influenced by Buddhism. He distinguishes three distinct classes of analogies:
1. Those of which the points of resemblance can without difficulty be explained as due to the influence of similar sources and motives in the two cases.
2. Those which show a so special and unexpected agreement that it appears artificial to explain it from the action of similar causes, and the dependence of one upon the other commends itself as the most natural explanation.
3. Those in which there exists a reason for the occurrence of the idea only within the sphere of one of the two religions, or in which at least it can very much more easily be conceived as originating within the one than within the other, so that the inexplicability of the phenomenon within the one domain gives ground for seeking its source within the other.
This last class demands a literary explanation of the analogy. Seydel therefore postulates, alongside of primitive forms of Matthew and Luke, a third source, “a poetic-apocalyptic Gospel of very early date which fitted its Christian material into the frame of a Buddhist type of Gospel, transforming, purifying, and ennobling the material taken from the foreign but related literature by a kind of rebirth inspired by the Christian Spirit.” Matthew and Luke, especially Luke, follow this poetic Gospel up to the point where historic sources become more abundant, and the primitive form of Mark begins to dominate their narrative. But even in later parts the influence of this poetical source, which as an independent document was subsequently lost, continued to make itself felt.
The strongest point of support for this hypothesis, if a mere conjecture can be described as such, is found by Seydel in the introductory narratives in Luke. Now it is not inherently impossible that Buddhist legends, which in one form or another were widely current in the East, may have contributed more or less to the formation of the mythical preliminary history. Who knows the laws of the formation of legend? Who can follow the course of the wind which carries the seed over land and sea? But in general it may be said that Seydel actually refutes the hypothesis which he is defending. If the material which he brings forward is all that there is to suggest a relation between Buddhism and Christianity, we are justified in waiting until new discoveries are made in that quarter before asserting the necessity of a Buddhist primitive Gospel. That will not prevent a succession of theosophic Lives of Jesus from finding their account in Seydel's classical work. Seydel indeed delivered himself into their hands, because he did not [pg 292] entirely avoid the rash assumption of theosophic “historical science” that Jewish eschatology can be equated with Buddhistic.