Page:The Story of Barlaam & Joasaph - Buddhism & Christianity.djvu/8

( ii ) responsible for his own share in the work. The limit of time and the poverty of the public and private libraries of Calcutta must be held as to some extent accountable for short-comings in the work.

The introduction is mainly devoted to the rectifying of what I believe is a total misrepresentation of the facts of History with reference to the supposed influence of Buddhism on the literature of the West. As helpful towards this rectification it ought to have been noted at page xiii. that of the so-called Therapeutæ of Egypt we know nothing save what is recorded in the De Vita Contemplative attributed to Philo the Jew, who lived B. C. 20 to A. D. 40. Dean Mansell wd after him Mr. R C. Dutt greatly depended on the evidence of this work; though at the best it amounted to very little. That little is made worthless by the fact that Lucius of Strasburg in his Die Therapeuten, &c., 1879, has proved that not only was the work never written by Philo, but that it is a forgery of the fourth century A. D. Philo eminent critics as Hilgenfeld, Eünen and Schürer are satisfied with the proof.

reading The Church in the Roman Empire before A. D, 170 y by, M. A., Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen, formerly Professor of Classical Archæeology, Oxford, it occurred to me that of all living men, he was the man to know, yea or nay, whether Buddhism had been in Asia Minor in the first century of the Christian era. He is an expert in Latin and Greek and in the Archaeology of the time and place under consideration, as his " Historical Geography of Asia Minor," his "Church in the Roman Empire before A. D. 170 and his various learned articles contributed to the Expositor have declared him to be. He is facile princeps in the palæography of the early centuries of the Christian era. In these circumstances, I applied to him for