Violets and Other Tales

by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Just whether to take the history seriously or not is a subject that requires much thought; but whether it be truth or fiction, whether the result of patient investigation and careful study of an interested scholar, or the wild imaginings of a feeble brain, it opens a wild field of speculation to the thoughtful mind.

The first three chapters of this history, contain a brief epitome of the Pentatouch of Moses. Though contrary to the teachings of tradition, Moses is said not to have written these books himself, but that they were transcribed generations after his time. According to this theory, then, the seeming imperfections and inconsistencies and tautological errors of the Old Testament as compared with the brief, clear, concise, logical statement of the Buddhists may readily be explained by the frailty of human memory, and the vividness of Oriental imagination.

Prince Mossa of the Buddhists, otherwise Moses of the Jews, was not, as is popularly supposed, a foundling of the Jews, or a protege of the Egyptian princess, but a full fledged prince, son of Pharaoh the mighty. This abrupt over-throw of the tradition of ages is like all disillusions, distasteful, but even the most superficial study of Egyptian customs and laws of that time will serve to impress us with the verity of this opinion. The law of caste was most rigidly and cruelly adhered to, and though all the pleadings and threatenings and weepings of the starry-eyed favorite of the harem may have been brought to bear upon this descendant of Rameses, yet is it probable that a descendant of an outcast race should receive the care and learning and advantages of a legally born prince? Hardly.

The condition of the ancient Israelites in the Christian Scriptures and in the Buddhist parchment are the same, yet there is reason to believe that the former was transcribed many centuries after the hieroglyphics of the latter became faded with age, hence, perhaps, the difference in the parentage of Moses.

"And Mossa was beloved throughout the land of Egypt for the goodness and compassion he displayed for them that suffered, pleaded with his father to soften the lot of these unhappy people, but Pharaoh became angry with him, and only imposed more hardships upon his slaves."

At this period in our Scriptures, the Lord communicates with Moses, and inflicts the plagues upon the nation, while in the manuscript of the Himis monks, the annual plague brought on by natural causes falls upon Egypt, and decimates the community. Here is a strange reversal of the order of things. In India, for ages the home of superstition and idol worship, that which has always been regarded by the Christians, the sworn enemies of the supernatural, as an inexplicable mystery, is accounted for by perfectly natural causes.

From that time, the fourth chapter of the chronicle of St. Issa corresponds exactly in its condensed form to the most prominent chronology of the Old Testament. With the beginning of the next chapter, the Divine Infant, through whom the salvation of the world was to come, appears upon the scene, as the first born of a poor but highly connected family, referring, presumably, to the ancestry of Joseph and Mary.

The remarkable wisdom of the child in earlier years is chronicled in our ancient parchment with as much care as in the vellum-bound volume of our church scriptures. At the age of twelve, the last glimpse we have of Jesus in the New Testament, is as a precocious boy, seated in the Temple, expounding the Scriptures to the learned members of the Sanhedrin. After that, we have no further sight of him, until sixteen years later, he re-appears at the marriage in Cana, a grown and serious man, already with well-formulated plans for the furtherance of his father's kingdom. This broad lapse in the Scriptures is filled by one simple sentence in the gospel of St. Luke. "And he was in the desert till the day of his showing into Israel." Where he was, why he had gone, and what he was doing are left to the imagination of the scholar and commentator.

Many theories have been advanced, and the one most accepted, was that he had followed the trade of his terrestrial father, Joseph, and was near Jerusalem among the tools of carpentry, helping his parents to feed the hungry mouths of his brothers and sisters.

But there appears another plausible theory advanced by the Buddhist historians, and sustained by the Buddhist traditions, that as Moses had fled into the wilderness to spend forty years in fasting and preparation for his life work, so Jesus had fled, not to the wilderness, but to the ancient culture and learning and the wisdom of centuries to prepare himself, by a knowledge of all religions for the day of the redemption.