Where Did Jesus Die? — Page 184
? 184 future of the Jews in which he said that in view of their opposi- tion to him they would be deprived of the Kingdom of Heaven: that is to say, no prophet would appear from amongst them in the future, and this has been literally fulfilled. I have no hesita- tion, therefore, in saying that the accounts of the Buddhist scrolls cannot be taken as genuine and entirely authentic in view of the account of the Gospels. The only positive conclusion we can draw from these ancient writings is that Jesus did go to India and lived a long time during which he preached the words of God to the people of India. The teachings ascribed to him, some of which I have mentioned above, are truly sublime and worthy of a prophet. Had Jesus not gone to India there would have been no need for the Buddhist chroniclers to make mention of his preaching in India. On the one hand they could not deny his preaching there and, on the other hand, they found his teachings superior to the teachings of the Buddhists and the Brahmans. Therefore, in order to show the greatness of Gautama Buddha, they purposely confused the events and instead of revealing the fact that Jesus came to India while he was a prophet, and ascribing to him these teachings originally, they ascribed them to Buddha, saying that Jesus came to India in his early age to avoid marriage and to study the law of the great Buddha. Now it is a fact that Buddhism was hardly heard of in Palestine at the time of Jesus. And ‘The love of home is so deeply rooted in the human breast that none could even think of severing all ties of kith and kin, unless compelled by dire necessity to do so. ’ This kind of necessity never existed in the whole life of Jesus except after his narrow escape from the death on the cross, when his very life in Palestine was under constant danger of being destroyed.