preface

Versions of the earliest source texts of the Hebrew Bible, which are now embedded in the Old Testament books, existed in all the ancient Near Eastern libraries of Assyria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. With these early building blocks (royal psalms, songs, and creation myths) ancient Israel had a collection that was much like any collection you would find anywhere else in the ancient Near East. - David Carr

introduction

In 1997 the eminent scholar, Marcus Borg published Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings. On first take, Dr. Borg seemed to have gone completely New Age. However, if there's one thing the student of the ancient world discovers, it is that there really is nothing new. Theologians who specialize in Reception History has called this infinite regression. Any new religion uses as it's building blocks, existing traditions.

 

Paul Quoted Everyone – Down to the Buddha

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is, Jesus didn’t go to India after all. The good news is, he didn’t have to. India came to him. Well, more specifically, Buddhist monks were sent on a proselytizing mission to the two Hellenistic Emperors who controlled Egypt and Judea, by their Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka.

No religion exists in a vacuum and this certainly was true of Judaism, especially at the time of Jesus. And what was true of Judaism was certainly true of the Jesus sect that eventually broke away from what became mainstream Judaism. Scholars use the term Hellenistic to refer to the strong cultural influence on Judea-Palestine by the Greek Empires, but this term does not acknowledge the broader range of influences from the East that washed over Palestine before and after the time of Jesus. Judea-Palestine – surrounded as it was by powerful Empires – had always been receptive of cultural and religious influences from the East. This Hebrew Bible received its final form in Babylon, and there is evidence that this influence picked up under the occupation of the Persians, Greeks & Romans – three cultures that were tolerant of religious diversity. The best modern-day analogy for just how truly eclectic Greco-Roman Palestine was, is social media. If you think how often it happens that you see even ‘Evangelical’ Christian friends post Rumi quotes, Buddhist quotes or Stoic quotes to reinforce their Christian life-philosophy, you’re beginning to form a picture of the cultural and religious fluidity in this region. These Empires connected cultures from as far away as Northern India to Rome and beyond. If anyone escaped the cultural exchange brought about by military conquest, they were not left untouched by trade. But to go as far as to claim that Paul knew a little Buddhism, isn’t that going a bit too far?


That Trusty Old Mission Strategy

In Acts 17:24-28, Paul borrows a few lines from three popular hymns to Zeus and reworks them for his own purposes: “... he himself gives to everyone life and breath and everything. ²⁶ And he made from one man every nation of humanity to live on all the face of the earth, determining their fixed times and the fixed boundaries of their habitation, ²⁷ to search for God, if perhaps indeed they might feel around for him and find him. And indeed he is not far away from each one of us, ²⁸ for in him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said: ‘For we also are his offspring.’ The poets he is referring to are Epimenides (6th c. BCE), Kleanthes (331-233 BCE), and Aratus (310 BC – 240 BC) whose poems was very popular in the Greek and Roman world, as is proved by the large number of commentaries and Latin translations, some of which survive (http://praxeology.net/stoics.htm). 

These ancient ‘pop culture’ references don’t imply that Paul subscribed to their underlying philosophy, but we can infer that they were part of Paul’s background. They were available to him to use in his mission strategy. Paul’s mission strategy was in no way unique to him. Quite the contrary. It was an old, trusted one used by other missionaries as well, including... wait for it... the Buddha himself! (See the Grange Books edition of The Gospel of Buddha, p. 104) It is thanks to the fact that Paul adopts this as his strategy that we know what people’s pop culture references were, and by implication, the exchange of their religious ideas. And the more he used this strategy, the more we can infer about what else was available to him. Even though Paul, a Roman citizen, was Jewish to the backbone, it is clear that he received a very good Hellenistic education in his hometown of Tarsus (in modern-day Turkey). That brings us to the more pertinent question, what else was in his curriculum? Let’s turn to his parable of the lost son in his letter to the Galatian Christian community.


What’s Buddha Got to Do with It?

In Galatians 3:23-4:12, Paul uses a parable of the lost son to explain our ‘enslavement.’ On first take, it only makes sense that Paul would reference Jesus’ most popular parable. However, Paul never met Jesus, and is at pains to stress that what he knows, he did not learn from Jesus’ disciples or any other human. So how could he know the parable? On second take, it is clear that the lost son of Paul differs from the prodigal son of Jesus in important ways. In summary, Paul writes: “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus... and heirs according to the promise. Now... the heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts. Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.” (New King James)

If you are familiar with similar ‘lost son’ analogies (which must have been popular at the time) it would begin to look as if Paul is repackaging a popular existing tradition or two. He is borrowing from these non-Christian parables in the same way as with the Hymn to Zeus that we looked at above. But which non-Christian lost son parables? Well, it just so happens that a ‘lost son’ analogy is also recorded in Buddhist literature. In 1906, Paul Carus put together a collection of teachings taken from old Buddhist records, amongst which was a ‘parable’ of a lost son. And remarkably, like Paul’s version of the story, it also features the theme of the rich householder’s son who, without knowing that he is heir to his father’s riches, works as a labourer on the estate while overseen by servants.

The story goes as follows: There was a householder's son who went away into a distant country, and while the father accumulated immeasurable riches, the son became miserably poor. And the son, while searching for food and clothing, happened to come to the country in which his father lived. The father saw him in his wretchedness, for he was ragged and brutalized by poverty, and ordered some of his servants to call him. When the son saw the place to which he was conducted, he thought, "I must have evoked the suspicion of a powerful man, and he will throw me into prison." Full of apprehension, he made his escape before he had seen his father.

Then the father sent messengers out after his son, who was caught and brought back in spite of his cries and lamentations. Thereupon the father ordered his servants to deal tenderly with his son, and appointed a labourer of his own son's rank and education to employ the lad as a helpmate on the estate. And the son was pleased with his new situation. From the window of his palace the father watched the boy, and when he saw that he was honest, and industrious, he promoted him higher and higher. After some time, he summoned his son and called together all his servants, and made the secret known to them. The poor man was exceedingly glad and he was full of joy at meeting his father. Just so, little by little, must the minds of men be trained for higher truths. (The Gospel of Buddha, p. 105)

Now you may think, “that’s just two or three lines - not a whole lot of similarity, is it? What about verse 6-7 that says, ‘God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts. Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God...’.” And you would be right. However, there is a Gnostic hymn that parallels this idea, but more about that later.

The purpose of our exploration is not to find out if Paul had access to a Buddhist manuscript from which he could cull a parable whole cloth. Our purpose is to explore the possibility that he may have thought up that analogy because there was, in the context of his hearers, a similar, existing tradition that derives from the orient, via the Greeks. Jewish inter-testamental literature already provides us with enough textual evidence of the enormous impact Greek philosophy and religion had on Hellenistic Palestine. But for us to entertain the idea as a possibility we would need textual evidence that Buddhists missionaries made it to Greece in any significant way, long before Jesus was even born. Well, it just so happens that there is such a text in existence. It lists the names of Buddhist monks who were sent on proselytizing missions by their Buddhist Emperor, to the lands of the Greeks. To find it, we need to go to Bactria (a Greek territory comprised of parts of Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan). Bactria was the cultural consequence of a long chain of intense cultural exchange that resulted from Greek forays into the Indian subcontinent, from the time of Alexander the Great (332 BCE) onwards.