We may next quote the Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius (who wrote about A.D. 425), compiled by Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople. Therein we may observe how completely the first contradicts Socrates as before quoted, and may also infer the reason why. In book ii., ch. 6, the words run, "The impious Philostorgius relates, that the Christians in Central India, who were converted to the faith of Christ by the preaching of St. Bartholomew, believe that the son is not of the same substance with the father." He adds that "Theophilus, the Indian who had embraced this opinion, came to them and delivered it to them as a doctrine; and also that these Indians are now called Homeritæ, instead of their old name, Sabæans, which they received from the city of Saba, the chief city of the whole nation." This leads me to doubt very strongly whether the ecclesiastical writers in early days did not group, under the name of India, the southern parts of Arabia, Persia, and Beloochistan.
Sozomen, writing about the period of 325 A.D., says, book ii, ch. 24, "We have heard that about this period some of the most distant of the nations that we call Indian, to whom the preaching of Bartholomew was unknown, were converted to Christianity by Frumentius, a priest." Then follows an enlarged edition of the legend told by Socrates, and the words, "it is said that Frumentius discharged his priestly functions so admirably that he became an object of universal admiration." Theodoret, writing about 420 A.D., places the conversion of the Indians about 328 A.D., and gives substantially the same account as the preceding writers whom we have quoted.
We will not, however, content ourselves with this short notice, but will first inquire whether, if the accounts of the earlier reporters, Eusebius, Socrates, Clement, and Rufinus, who wrote about a.d. 320, 390, 190, and 370, are not to be trusted, we can believe the stories of Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, Jerome, Nicephorus, and Abdias, who wrote about a.d. 380, 380, 400, 815, and 910 respectively. If we believe one set of Christian "fathers," that Thomas the apostle died in Syria, we cannot credit a set of Christian "sons," who affirm that he was martyred in India. But—and the point is an important one—we can see reason why the children should invent an account of which the parents saw not the necessity. About the period of Gregory Nazianzen arose that asceticism which sent Simeon Stylites upon the top of his pillar in a.d. 394, and kept him there for the rest of his life, and that peopled the Thebaid with hermits of the most approved Buddhist order—celibates shunning luxury, and cultivating filthiness of the outer to cleanse the inner man. The way in which the original faith, preached by Jesus and modified by Paul, was distorted during the first few centuries in Egypt can only be rationally accounted for by a spread of Buddhist doctrines by Indian missionaries, or promulgated by Christian merchants, who had travelled to the Indies, and modified their original faith by what they saw and heard from the followers of the great Sramana; and it was natural for the Alexandrian Christians to adopt the modifications referred to, and to stamp the innovations with the assertion that they were apostolic reflections—rays of divine light falling from "the sun of righteousness" upon the mind of the blessed Saint Somebody, Thomas, for this purpose, being a name which answered as well as any other. There is positively no evidence whatever—except some apocryphal Jesuit stories about certain disciples of Jesus, found by Papal missionaries at Malabar—that any disciple of Mary's son ever proceeded to Hindostan to preach the gospel during the first centuries of our era. Those who know the history of the "Decretals," and of Prester John, can readily estimate the value of tales told by Jesuits in India, where there was not at the time anyone to test their veracity.
Being myself desirous of ascertaining what evidence really exists—or existed in the times of ancient authors, whose works have come down to us—of the knowledge of India by Europeans in days gone by, I instituted an inquiry, with the determination to be impartial. The results obtained were the following:—
The only reason for believing that Hindostan and Ceylon were known to the Phoenicians is a short passage in the Biblical History of Solomon, in which we are told that after a three years' absence, Hiram's Tyrian sailors returned from Tarshish, bringing what our translators call ivory, apes, and peacocks. The words in the Hebrew original are said by Tennant to be all but identical with those in use in Ceylon at the present date. For a full account of the probable identity of the Tarshish in the passage alluded to and Galle, see Emerson Tennant's History of Ceylon.
Yet, if we grant that the Tyrian shipmen traded to India, we are bound to confess that the knowledge which they acquired died with them; nor did their successors, the Greeks, know anything distinctly about Hindostan prior to the time of Alexander the Great. In the Biblical story of Esther we are told, i. 1, viii. 9, that a Persian king reigned from India to Ethiopia, the Hebrew word for the former being Hodoo, supposed to be a form of handoo, or hindoo; Pehlevi, hendo; Zend, heando; Sanscrit, Sindhu (Fürst, s.v.), equivalent to the Greek Indikee, or the country of the Indus. We find reason to believe that the India of Artaxerxes was a portion of Hindostan—first, because the Persian monarch had Indian soldiers in his army, and elephants, when he fought with Alexander; and secondly, because the peacock, a bird of Ceylon, was known to the Greeks, in the time of Aristophanes, as "the Persian bird." That the Persians traded with Northern India we infer, from the account which Appian gives us of the advance eastward of Alexander, after his victory at Arbela. But the whole story of the Grecian warrior's advance into the Punjaub and down the Indus, contains, in itself, tolerably clear proof that Hindostan was very little known to the Greeks. Of a subsequent invasion of India by Alexander's successor, Seleucus Nicator; of the mission of Megasthenes to Sandracottus, the grandfather of Asoka, the Buddhist Constantine; of the navigation of the Grecian ship down the Indus, and the subsequent traffic by land and sea between the Greeks and the Hindoos, we need not say more than that Augustus, b.c. 30, regulated the trade to Hindostan, via Alexandria, and that, at the time of Pliny the elder, about A.D. 60, voyages were being made to India every year, companies of archers being carried on board the vessels to protect them from pirates. We learn also that a twelvemonth did not elapse without a drain upon the Roman Empire of about one million and a-half sterling for India, in exchange for Hindoo wares (book vi., ch. 26).
At the period Pliny refers to, and for a long time previously, there can be no pretence that any of Jesus' apostles accompanied traders to Hindostan, for every one of them were employed nearer home. On the other hand, we may inquire into the possibility and the reasonableness of Buddhist missionaries travelling westward in the course of Alexandrian traffic, or of the caravans which, we have grounds for believing, came through Persia to the Roman Empire.
On turning to Oriental literature, we find that the often-mentioned King Asokâ adopted Buddhism as the religion of his empire about b.c. 250, and that, in his time, missionaries carried that faith successfully to the uttermost parts of Hindostan—to Burmah, to Ceylon, to Japan, to Thibet, and to China. The envoys carried with them, in some instances, written books, in others, their guide was oral tradition. Wherever they went they bore a biography of Sakya—or Buddha—accounts of miracles that he had performed, and a summary, more or less extended, of his preaching or doctrines. This dispersion of Hindoo envoys was about fifty years later than the mission of the Greek Megasthenes to the court of Asokâ's grandfather, and it is quite as probable that Buddhist preachers went to enlighten what they imagined to be the benighted, and what they knew to be the then defeated Grecians, as that they went over frightful mountains and stormy seas to Thibet, China, and Japan.
We may profitably pause for a moment here, to contemplate that which I at one time believed to be the most wonderful of all the miracles recorded in the New Testament, viz., "the gift of tongues." The references to this which we meet with in the epistles of the apostle Paul might lead to the supposition, that some who had this "gift" spoke mere gibberish—something which was not, either in intention or in reality, an utterance in a foreign language; but the story of the original imparting of power to speak in a previously unknown tongue involves the idea, that the disciples had, on the occasion referred to, a faculty given to them, by which they knew the languages used by various nationalities, without the trouble of learning them. Many divines have held that such ability was absolutely necessary to those who had to go forth to teach all nations the doctrines of the gospel I am quite aware that, however earnest I might be to propagate truth, I could not go, with advantage, to preach in Russia, because I know nothing of its language.
Doubt in the reality of the miracle recorded in Acts ii. was not born until I found that Buddhist missionaries went out into distant lands, where their own tongue was unknown, and yet made converts. When once I felt dubious as regards the veracity of the historian, I began to notice what the apostles generally did when they went to a new country or town. Their practice seems to have been to have visited synagogues of the Jews living on the spot—and able, if they chose, to be interpreters—or, where there were such establishments, "the schools" were visited, where the students and the masters understood Greek. In the time of Paul the language of the Hellenes was spoken by Romans of high position, much as French was spoken at the court of Frederic the Great of Prussia, and as German is at St. Petersburg. The Apostle seems to have spoken Greek readily, and when he could use that tongue or the Hebrew he was fluent. I have sought in vain for evidence that either Paul or any of the Apostles ever addressed a foreign mob, whose language was neither Greek nor Hebrew. A study of the nineteenth chapter of the Acts will show this—especially, we must notice the end of the tenth verse, where we are told "that all who dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks." When disturbance occurred in the theatre, Paul was not the orator put forward to appease the people—he probably could not speak their patois. Yet he tells us, 1 Cor. xiv. 18, that he spoke with tongues more than his fellows.*