Small Universe

Could Indian religion, in particular Buddhism, have influenced Christianity? Certainly it's possible. Consider that from the Northeast Mediterranean to India, Athens to New Delhi for example, the distance is roughly 3,200 miles. Allowing for rest stops, sea and river crossings, steep terrain and detours, walking only 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, that distance could be covered in less than a year.

Travel along the Silk Road, as well as sea routes to India, were well established in the centuries before Christ. And Christianity had spread to India, possibly by the Apostle Thomas himself, by the end of the 2nd, if not first century A.D. Also, Christianity was in China by 641 A.D.

And so, after Buddha (d. approximately 483 b.c.) there was plenty of time for Buddhist, as well as Vedic and Jain ideas to influence Christianity.


From Wikipedia entry on Greco-Buddhism

The Mauryan Empire (322–183 BCE)

The Indian emperor Chandragupta, founder of the Mauryan dynasty, re-conquered around 322 BCE the northwest Indian territory that had been lost to Alexander the Great. However, contacts were kept with his Greek neighbours in the Seleucid Empire, Chandragupta received the daughter of the Seleucid king Seleucus I after a peace treaty, and several Greeks, such as the historian Megasthenes, who resided at the Mauryan court.

Consider this quote from Megasthenes lost book on India, written almost three hundred years before the Gospel of John.

FRAGM. LIV

Pseudo-Orign, Philosoph. 24, ed. Delarue, Paris,
1733, vol. I. p. 904.

Of the Brahmans and their Philosophy
(Cf. Fragm. Xli, xliv, xlv.)

"Of the Brachhmans in India. There is among the Brachhmans in India a sect of philosophers who adopt an independent life, and abstain from animal food and all victuals cooked by fire, being content to subsist upon fruits, which they do not so much as gather from the trees, but pick up when they have dropped to the ground, and their drink is the water of the river Tagabena. Throughout life they go about naked, saying that the body has been given by the Deity as a covering for the soul. They hold that God is light, but not such light as we see with the eye, nor such as the sun or fire, but God is with them the Word,--by which term they do not mean articulate speech, but the discourse of reason, whereby the hidden mysteries of knowledge are discerned by the wise. This light, however, which they call the Word, and think to be God, is, they say, known only by the Brachhmans themselves, because they alone have discarded vanity, which is the outermost covering of the soul. The members of this sect regard death with contemptuous indifference, and, as we have seen already, they always pronounce the name of the Deity with a tone of peculiar reverence, and adore him with hymns. They neither have wives nor beget children. Persons who desire to lead a life like theirs cross over from the other side of the river, and remain with them for good, never returning to their own country. These also are called Brachhmans, although they do not follow the same mode of life, for there are women in the country, from whom the native inhabitants are sprung, and of these women they beget offspring. With regard to the Word, which they call God, they hold that it is corporeal, and that it wears the body as its external covering, just as one wears the woollen surcoat, and that when it divests itself of the body with which it is enwrapped it becomes manifest to the eye. There is war, the Brachhmans hold, in the body where with they are clothed, and they regard the body as being the fruitful source of wars, and, as we have already shown, fight against it like soldiers in battle contending against the enemy. They maintain, moreover, that all men are held in bondage, like prisoners of war, to their own innate enemies, the sensual appetites, gluttony, anger, joy, grief, longing desire, and such like, while it is only the man who has triumphed over these enemies who goes to God. Dandamis accordingly, to whom Alexander the Makedonian paid a visit, is spoken of by the Brachhmans as a god because he conquered in the warfare against the body, and on the other hand they condemn Kalanos as one who had impiously apostatized from their philosophy. The Brachhmans, therefore, when the have shuffled off the body, see the pure sunlight as fish see it, when they spring up out of the water into the air."