ent to Krishna by a
hunchback woman whom he miraculously makes straight. In estimating the
importance of such coincidences we must remember that they are merely
casual details in a long story of adventures which, in their general
outline, bear no relation to the life of Christ. The most striking of
these is the "massacre of the Innocents." The Harivamsa, which is
not later than the fifth century A.D., relates that Kamsa killed all
the other children of Devaki, though it does not mention a general
massacre, and Patanjali (_c._ 150 B.C.) knew the legend of the
hostility between Krishna and Kamsa and the latter's death.[1096] So
if anything has been borrowed from the Gospel account it is only the
general slaughter of children. The mention of a pot of ointment
strikes Europeans because such an object is not familiar to us, but it
was an ordinary form of luxury in India and Judaea alike, and the fact
that a woman honoured both Krishna and Christ in the same way but in
totally different circumstances is hardly more than a chance
coincidence. The fact that both Nanda and Joseph leave their homes in
order to pay their taxes is certainly curious and I will leave the
reader to form his own opinion about it. The instance of the Bhavishya
Purana shows that Hindus had no scruples about borrowing from the
Bible and in some Indian dialects the name Krishna appears as Krishto
or Kushto. On the other hand, whatever borrowing there may have been
is concerned exclusively with trivial details: the principal episodes
of the Krishna legend were known before the Christian era.

This is perhaps the place to examine a curious episode of the
Mahabharata which narrates the visit of certain sages to a region
called Svetadvipa, the white island or continent, identified by
some with Alexandria or a Christian settlement in central Asia. The
episode occurs in the Santiparvan[1097] of the Mahabharata and is
introduced by the story of a royal sacrifice, at which most of the
gods appeared in visible shape but Hari (Vishnu or Krishna) took his
offerings unseen. The king and his priests were angry, but three sages
called Ekata, Dvita and Trita, who are described as the miraculous
offspring of Brahma, interposed explaining that none of those present
were worthy to see Hari. They related how they had once desired to
behold him in his own form and after protracted austerities repaired
under divine guidance to an island called Svetadvipa on the
northern shore