known as such. And Buddhist apologists must admit that it is a little
strange that the Scribes and Pharisees, who were intelligent, and as
alert as they were bitter, should never have exposed this transparent
plagiarism. The great concern of the Apostles was to prove to Jews and
Gentiles that Jesus was the Christ of Old Testament prophecy. The whole
drift of their preaching and their epistles went to show that the gospel
history rested squarely and uncompromisingly on a Jewish basis. Peter
and John, Stephen and Paul, constantly "reasoned with the Jews out of
their own Scriptures." How unspeakably absurd is the notion that they
were trying to palm off on those keen Pharisees a Messiah who, though in
the outset at Nazareth he publicly traced his commission to Old
Testament prophecy, was all the while copying an atheistic philosopher
of India!

It is equally inconceivable that the Christian fathers should have
copied Buddhism. They resisted Persian mysticism as the work of the
Devil, and it was in that mysticism, if anywhere, that Buddhist
influence existed in the Levant. Whoever has read Tertullian's withering
condemnation of Marcion may judge how far the fathers of the Church
favored the heresies of the East. Augustine had himself been a Manichean
mystic, and when after his conversion he became the great theologian of
the Church, he must have known whether the teachings of the Buddha were
being palmed off on the Christian world. The great leaders of that age
were men of thorough scholarship and of the deepest moral earnestness.
Many of them gave up their possessions and devoted their lives to the
promotion of the truths which they professed. Scores of them sealed
their faith by martyr deaths.

But even if we were to accept the flippant allegation that they were all
impostors, yet we should be met by an equally insurmountable difficulty
in the utter silence of the able and bitter assailants of Christianity
in the first two or three centuries. Celsus prepared himself for his
well-known attack on Christianity with the utmost care, searching
history, philosophy, and every known religion from which he could derive
an argument against the Christian faith.

Why did he not strike at the very root of the matter by exposing those
stupid plagiarists who were attempting to play off upon the intelligence
of the Roman world a clumsy imitation of the far-famed Buddha? It was
the very kind of thing that the enemies of Christianity wan