Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/119

Rh refers to the influence of Greece on Indian art, and the traces of Indian influence on Greek mythology and literature, especially on the cycles of Dionysos and Alexander and the development of fables. Coming down to a later period, he shows unquestionable Buddhistic material in Christian legends, such as the, a legendary account of the Apostle St. Thomas, and the Barlaam and Joasaph. He argues that Indian (mainly Buddhist) influence on the apocryphal Gospels is certain, and that this fact renders probable some Indian influence on the canonical Gospels. Alexandria was by no means the only focus of speculation and thought in the first two centuries. Antioch, for example, from early times a noted Christian centre, was also a centre of trade, the terminus of one of the great roads to the East. The concourse of East and West in that city must have led to the exchange of ideas and of stories.

When, however, we cast an eye over the parallels accepted by Dr. van Eysinga as exhibiting a correspondence too close to be explainable by anything short of conscious or unconscious borrowing, we find that their total number is but small. They occur chiefly in the earlier part of the life and ministry of Christ; and "it cannot escape our attention," he says, "that the narratives wherein we consider Indian influence probable are precisely such as belong to a Gnostic form of Gospel." I am inclined to doubt whether most of the undoubted coincidences in the apocryphal writings which the author accepts are really of Buddhist origin, though some weight must of course be attached to their number. Of those in the canonical writings (and they are not many) the most probable seems the story of the Temptation, which has always been a difficulty to Christian expositors and apologists, but is certainly in place in the legend of Gautama.

Gnosticism was the product of the clash of Greek philosophy with oriental speculation. If it was mainly through Gnostic channels that Buddhist incidents and conceptions filtered into Christian narratives, and those incidents and conceptions themselves were comparatively few in number, then the importation of Eastern stories and ideas into the West may have been more limited than we are sometimes called on to believe, and the probability is strengthened that the transmission of fable from East to West, which admittedly took place, was mainly a literary process. The subject, however, of the intellectual influence of