When the missionaries of the two religions first came into actual contact has not yet been ascertained, and the influence of the Christian ideals of self-oblivion upon the most essentially selfish system of salvation ever promulgated to the world has yet to be traced. The conception of self-renunciation which is set forth in the legends may have originated in the memory of the kindness and gentleness and goodness of one whose life was far nobler than his creed, and it may have assumed greater strength and clearness when the teaching of the Gospels came to be reflected upon it. It may or it may not, but of this we may be positively certain, that the writers of the New Testament and the composers of the earliest Buddhist traditions knew positively nothing of each other’s productions. This is a conclusion accepted by the very best authorities on the subject, and it is maintained with the greatest firmness by those of them who discount the miraculous occurrences found in the scriptures of both religions as only the fond fancies which their affectionate disciples gradually wove around the memories of their respective teachers. They hold that working independently of each other, but under similar influences and in similar conditions, it was simply natural that they should have come to adorn with wonders somewhat alike in character the story of two lives so pure and beneficial.
The learned author of the Hibbert Lectures for 1881 has made some very interesting and important suggestions as to the rise of the Buddhist legends, and as he seems to imply a similar growth of the “Christian legend,” it may be advisable to consider both accounts in their relation to the literary sources which profess to authenticate them. Let us assume, therefore, that the Lalita Vistara was actually in circulation about the beginning of the Christian era,[[159]] and let us take for granted that one of the oldest Suttas,[[160]] professing to relate a portion of Buddha’s ministry, was extant in the form in which we have it, some three centuries earlier, or a century after Buddha’s death. A comparison of these two productions reveals at once the fact that in the earliest there is no reference to the divinity, pre-existence, or supernatural birth of Buddha, and making allowance for the usual exaggeration of language, that there are very few miraculous incidents recorded in it. It has been asserted that Buddha never professed to work a miracle. Certainly the fragments of his original teaching which survive indicate that he would be the first to repudiate all such as have been ascribed to him. Be that as it may, it is a literary fact that in the supposed earliest books only a few miracles are recorded. We may infer therefore that by the time they were composed his orthodox disciples had not formed those conceptions of his person and mission which their pious descendants later on learned to believe and to proclaim.[[161]]
The Gospels are not the earliest Christian writings, and not several, but many, “narratives concerning those matters which had been fulfilled or established among” Christians, even as they “delivered them who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,”[[162]] were probably in circulation before the Gospels were written. Some of the Epistles of St. Paul also, in all probability, preceded those collections of “the words and deeds of the Lord”; but the substance of the three first Gospels was very early produced, and we may be morally certain that they contain the beliefs which the very first generation of Christians entertained concerning Him. The truth of these beliefs is not now under discussion, but only the fact of them, and the kind of people who were influenced by them. It is averred “that the outward conditions in which Buddhism and Christianity arose were similar, and so were the mental qualities of the disciples of both religions”;[[163]] but the conditions were most dissimilar in this respect, that Buddhism originated in the dimness of an unhistoric age, and Christianity in an age and land so irradiated by the light of history that we know more clearly what was happening then and there than we do of what occurred in Europe a thousand years after. The mental qualities of the disciples of both religions again seem to have been most unlike. About Ananda and his companions we know really nothing but the names, for they meet us in the Buddhist records as mere lay figures, completely resembling one another, and with no individuality to distinguish them.[[164]] We may assume, however, that they belonged to one or other of the many sects of Brahmans or Sramans, and if so, that they were dreamy and contemplative men, withdrawn from practical life, and finding in the life of meditation a sphere more congenial to them than the actual world of which they were parts. They appear to have been directly and thoroughly unlike to the very marked personalities represented by the Evangelists and the other apostles of Christ, who were all drawn from practical life to be His followers. They were the very reverse of speculative; they had little imagination and almost no poetry in them; they were very dull of comprehension in regard to truths higher than the few which they inherited, and very incredulous about any unwonted occurrence said to have taken place outside the little circle of their own observation. In their conscientious, matter-of-fact way of looking at things they were the very last men to dream dreams or weave legends around the memory of one whom they revered; and we have their own confession, not of their slowness of apprehension merely, but of their unbelief at first in regard to all supernatural manifestations.
Now while the supernatural only rarely meets us in the most ancient Buddhist productions, where we would naturally have expected it to have predominated, it meets us in the very earliest writings of Christianity, where we would not have expected it at all. Christ to His first disciples and apostles was a miraculous being. The claim formulated in St. John’s Gospel, which is probably the latest book in the New Testament, is that advanced for Christ by St. Paul in his earliest extant letter to the churches. The Christ of St. John is not a new Person, but the same Divine Being of whom St. Paul says, “He being in the form of God” was “found on earth in fashion as a man.” He may have been all wrong as to the ground of his belief; he may have been an epileptic, a visionary, a man subject to trances, whose intense spiritual affinities disqualified him from judging calmly of matters of history; but there is no mistake as to his own belief and that of the other evangelists and writers of the New Testament. The teaching of St. Paul and St. John concerning Christ is set forth in St. Matthew with a clearness which no language can improve upon.[[165]] St. Mark dwells primarily upon the humanity of Jesus, a most important fact, presenting a historic basis without which Christian truth would have been little more than a mystic speculation; but even in St. Mark that humanity is not described as unfolding under conditions which are merely normal.[[166]] The life to which he testifies is not just that of Jesus of Nazareth, but of the Christ of God, who speaks with more than human authority. The development which is traceable in the theology of the Epistles is the expansion of the significance of the events recorded in the Gospels. The latest writings may more fully interpret the teaching of the earlier ones, but in them we find no other Gospels, but only anathemas pronounced on those who pretend to have them. In them a larger domain is seen expanding beneath our gaze, but it is visible only in the light of the central figure that meets us in the first. Plainly, therefore, while the earliest Buddhist witnesses account for their master and his teaching in the ordinary ways, and while their successors much later on in their attempts to embellish his portrait have produced quite a different person from the man of whom they first testified, the very earliest Christian writers could not account for Christ in any other way than by regarding Him as a supernatural being, who did not come into the world and did not leave it in the way of all other men. It is possible that they may all have been deluded, but if so, they vouched for their sincerity by their martyrdoms. The delusion, moreover, was at least universally and most consistently maintained, and it is the first instance in the history of mankind where a delusion has produced intellectual activity and expansion so wonderful as to have changed the current of history, and originated the great throbbing ever-enlarging world of Christendom which confronts us now.
Another significant contrast between the two sets of writings is found in the fact that while we can dissociate the miraculous elements from the Buddhist Pitakas without detriment to their other contents, we find it impossible to apply the same process with the like results to the New Testament. No one questions that primitive Buddhism is improved by being freed from the portents which subsequently gathered around it, for primitive Buddhism is an intellectual and moral system, a theory of the universe more likely to be obscured than elucidated by an appeal to the supernatural. Christianity, however, while appealing both to intellect and conscience, does so as the revelation of a life which, as a new thing, might break through all men’s conceptions of what was ordinary or necessary. The first appearance of life on this planet as an unwonted phenomenon would be accompanied by manifestations miraculous to all who only judged by experience of what had already been. So would be the first appearance of man to those who judged of things by what was possible to the actual animal world. That the manifestation of One who had come that men might have life, and have it more abundantly, should be accompanied with phenomena new and strange to mankind might have been expected. Christ, as revealing an ideal of excellence to which things as they are in nature, and men as they now are in society, do not conform, will in truth contradict the present working of both. This at least is the impression inevitably produced by the reading of the New Testament. Its teaching is throughout founded upon, and it would be quite unintelligible without reference to, the supernatural. To dissociate the miraculous portions from the rest of its contents would be not only to mutilate but to destroy it.[[167]] Not the theological and metaphysical elements only, but even “the ethical, are so interwoven into one fibre with the supernatural in the New Testament that it is impossible to detach them without destroying the whole fabric.”[[168]] Verily a Gospel without the miracles and all that accounts for them would be a very strange book.
Another very distinctive feature in the New Testament accounts is displayed in the character of the wonders there recorded. Indeed, this distinguishing element is found in all the miraculous narratives of the Bible. If it be true that the ancient writers or redactors of Scripture have employed the legends of other nations to illustrate their works, it must be conceded that they have immensely improved, and made a much better use of them. The story of the creation of the world, of the primeval paradise, and of the deluge, may be only myths common to several nations, but somehow, while all other writers just lose themselves in these myths, the Hebrews alone have laid hold of them to enforce the sublimest views ever formulated in human speech concerning the origin of the world and of man. The narratives of the Old Testament are evidently not constructed to startle the reader with portents, but to disclose the providential dealings of a holy and merciful God with man to enlighten and save him. The Gospels in like manner are not written to record miraculous occurrences, nor are miracles introduced to glorify Christ: they are simply referred to as incidents in His ministry. When we compare the prodigies ascribed to Buddha during the many changes of his pre-existence, or during his ministry, with the miracles of the Gospels, they are like the rough casts in clay or wood made by a rude or childish people contrasted with the perfect productions of nature in the world of animals or of men. They may endure comparison with the portents found in the Apocryphal books, or in the Lives of the Saints, but placed side by side with the Gospel miracles they serve only to illustrate the difference between what is artificial and grotesque, and what is original and natural. There is a marked sobriety in the Gospel accounts totally lacking in the Buddhist legends. The latter serve no other end but to exalt and magnify Buddha,[[169]] but the Gospel miracles are all founded in some great human necessity which they are intended to supply. The Buddhist marvels are simply produced to startle us, the Christian are recorded as signs to instruct us. What a gulf separates the conception of Buddha leaping high in air amid the sounding of the bells of the heavens and the plaudits of all the gods, just to prove that he was Buddha, from the account of Christ’s refusal to work a miracle to win the adherence of the crowd, or give the sign from heaven to vanquish Sadducean unbelief! The Gospel miracles are few after all, but they all flow from and are in harmony with the original idea of Christ as Messiah which is assumed in all the Gospels. The mighty works done by Him are all such as might be expected to be done in a world like this by the Son of a heavenly Father. The cure of all manner of disease, the exorcism of all the evil spirits that have afflicted humanity, the victory over death, the control of all the forces of nature, were all in the scope of one who came hither to establish the kingdom of God. Christ’s miracles were all signs of man’s present and prophecies of his future relations to all the evils that afflict him. They all remind us of the Divine original ideal that man, perfectly obedient to God, must exercise dominion over His creatures in this world. Man’s present antagonism to nature, and the disorder seen in his own social relations, are alike due to his refusal to merge his will in God’s, and the miracles of our Saviour are all prophecies that when through obedience to or faith in God he shall be restored to holiness, he will find his social and external relations improved, and will regain over nature that spiritual authority which even already the winds and the waves in part recognise and obey.[[170]]
Again, the New Testament writers claim for Christ what the early disciples of Buddha never dreamed of claiming for their master, and they insist upon their claim, though it is associated with the meanest and apparently most contradictory of elements. It is not the glorification but the humiliation of Christ which constitutes the marvel in the Gospels. It was very natural that the Evangelists should imagine that the angels should sing over the birth of a Saviour, but it was not natural that they should conceive of them singing over a babe in a manger. It was not wonderful, again, for Jews to believe that the coming of their Messiah was divinely announced, but it is very wonderful that they should believe that this annunciation was made to unknown shepherds. It was certainly not in that way their Messiah was expected to come. Had He come in the way they expected, the miracles might naturally have been accounted for which they associated with His coming; but, as matter of fact, it requires the miracle to account for their belief in Him. And so it is all through in the Gospels. That the Messiah should be discovered to be the Son of God need not surprise us, but that the Son of God should be recognised by Jews in the form of a servant, enduring patiently the contradiction of sinners, submitting to trial, to torture, to death on the cross, is one of the greatest marvels in the whole history of religion. This combination of glory and shame was a difficulty in the way of faith, not a help or support of it. The claim, we must remember, was not advanced for Christ by the Evangelists after He died; it was formulated by Himself, and by Him it was asserted more conspicuously, and with greater frequency and emphasis toward the close of His earthly life. It was the only charge on which He was condemned; all other accusations brought against Him broke down; but this one He admitted—that He called Himself the Son of God. Questioned upon it, He would not retract. “Thou sayest,” was all His reply, and for the saying He was ordered to the cross. Yet upon the cross His assertion was strengthened. Had He been a pretender, He would never have so comported Himself before Pilate and Herod; had He been self-deluded, He never would have said to His fellow-sufferer on Calvary: “To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” The torture of crucifixion was sufficient to expel the hallucinations of the maddest brain, but the Evangelists show that while faith in His Messiahship was, during His crucifixion, fading even from His disciples, in Himself it was stronger than ever, and at the very last it was communicated to a dying robber, who trusted that He had power to absolve him, and to open to him the gates of a better life. Now, all this surely never could naturally have occurred to Jewish men to conceive, and if their records be only fictions, the devout creations of over fond imaginations, then their legends are miracles themselves.
Some one has said that it is possible to find in the Buddhist books a parallel to every incident in the Gospels; if so, these parallels will be found to be very far apart; but to the incident of the Crucifixion there can be no parallel. That one historical event separates not only the two systems of thought and belief, but marks off Christianity from all other religions in the world. Till the crucifixion of Jesus was accomplished, the idea of associating with Deity humiliation, and of conceiving of God as dying the death of a slave upon the cross, would have been regarded as the grossest impiety. The fundamental idea of the Incarnation was not wholly foreign to the mind either of India or of Greece; to the Jew it was not a natural thought, but one so anti-Semitic that Jew and Moslem alike have rejected Christianity because of it;[[171]] but the incarnation of Deity represented in the Gospels, the humiliation of the Godhead implied in the Crucifixion, is an idea which never could have originated in the mind of either Gentile or Jew. It is one of the things of God which the natural man cannot conceive, a mystery hid from all ages until it was revealed, and apparently, unless we admit the reality of the revelation, we never can account for the faith.
The miraculous personality of Christ is thus the outstanding and distinctive feature of the Christian writings. As the mists clear away in the East, Buddha emerges more and more in the stature of a good and great man, but Christ rises upon us as one who cannot be accounted for according to the measure of any man, nor even that of an angel. It is not as a teacher, a guide out of the difficulties of life, that He meets us, but as a Revealer and Saviour. It is thus He has been accepted by His disciples, and upon their faith He has reared His Church. It is thus He conceived of Himself, and His conception is not more astounding than are the simplicity and lowliness and meekness of His character. He is Himself thus the miracle of miracles, wholly inexplicable on any human theory devised to account for Him; and till that one miracle is solved, all questions as to the miracles which are ascribed to Him can afford to wait for their solution.
We have no desire to exaggerate the value of the miraculous elements in Christianity, but it does not appear to be true wisdom that would depreciate them or ignore them altogether. Miracles by many have been wrongly considered, and they have been often expounded by the advocates of Christianity in such a way as to create instead of removing difficulties connected with the faith. On the other hand, many who reject or refuse to consider them seem afflicted by a kind of mental semeiophobia which in its own way may be as dangerous an affliction as hydrophobia is. The proper way is to consider them in relation to the nature and purpose of the Revelation with which they are associated. The miracle may sometimes be found only in the form of the narrative, as a hieroglyph whose purpose we are too lazy to search for, whose meaning we are too stupid to elucidate. The theory that miracles are only figurative expressions of spiritual truth is not true, as it is generally expounded; but it has a truth in it which must never be overlooked. Every miracle is a parable, and every parable is a miracle. It is the spiritual reality revealed by both which gives them value, and not the wonder in them by which we are at first arrested. Yet without the wonder to arrest us we might never have received the revelation. “What did the apostle mean,” asks Robert Elsmere,[[172]] “by death to sin and self? what the precise idea attached by him to being risen with Christ? Are this death and resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain alleged historical events, or are they not primarily, and were there not, even in Paul’s mind, two aspects of a spiritual process perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of the Father? the spiritual history of the individual and of the world, or the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attached such importance?” The envelope certainly would be as worthless without the message which it carries as a husk from which the kernel has dropped. Would St. Paul, however, ever have conceived the spiritual truths referred to, if they had not been suggested by historical facts? Could he ever have conceived of a death to sin had the world never witnessed the death of the Holy Christ upon the cross? Could he ever have dreamed of rising again in the power of a new life if the tomb in the garden nigh Golgotha had never been found empty of its crucified occupant? Is he not just suggesting the significance of very exceptional historical events? He may be wrong in his interpretation, but there can be no mistake that the interpretation is founded upon the history, that it was the event which originated his theory, and not his theory that produced the story of the event. Christian theology, instead of giving this miraculous character to the tragic story of the life and death of Christ, has been called into existence by man’s endeavours to account for it as a fact not only marvellous, but simply unique in the experience of mankind.