One of the subjects I’ve looked into has been the subject of alleged correspondences between the figures of Buddha and Jesus, as presented by a certain coterie of fringe scholars who appeal to obscure Buddhists texts – nearly all of which are of late or else undetermined date. Their creativity exceeds their logic in most instances; an example of this is an article in which it is claimed that, “Q is the main Buddhist source of the four gospels of the New Testament.”
Te article did not name an author, but it is apparently Christian Lindtner – who has made “Jesus = Buddha” one of his personal hobbyhorses. Unfortunately, there is little to suggest that Lindtner is anything but a quack. In addition to his odd ideas about Jesus and Buddha, he is also a Holocaust denier (see link below). I am therefore thoroughly inclined to distrust any claim he makes automatically.
As a reminder, Q, generally, is reputed to be the source from which Matthew and Luke drew their common material. It is also, in my findings, an unnecessary scholarly fantasy. To that extent, this article claiming a link to a Buddhist document is merely one fantasy atop another. (It is also said that this Buddhist document was a source for “most of the other books of the NT, above all The Acts and Revelations.” We know we are dealing with a true authority when they add an S to the end of that book’s name!) In terms of actual arguments for this dependence – well, they’re of the sort we have come to expect from “copycat” theorists, who rely on broadly generalizing subject matter in order to achieve parallels.
There is also the standard tactic of not revealing specifics – indeed, avoiding them as much as possible. If you want quotes of some of these Buddhist documents, that’s not going to happen much if at all. Instead, here’s the sort of thing we’re given: The emphasis on mere faith in the Buddha as sufficient for salvation, and the idea that tricks, puns, symbolic language, codes, parables etc., should be used by Buddhist missionaries to convert all living beings to the secret of the Buddha, derives directly from the SDP [Buddhist document, the Saddharmapundarîka-sûtram].
There’s a few obvious problems here. The first is that “faith” refers to loyalty, and that’s what any religious leader would expect – whether Jesus or Buddha or Jim Jones. The parallel here is a universal, one the author of the article (who is not named) dishonestly obscures by playing upon the common perception of “faith” as something uniquely demanded by Christianity. But that is not at all the case.
The second problem is one of lack of definition as well. What is meant by “salvation”? As we have remarked in other context, “salvation” has not been, as it is today, uniquely Christian language. “ It is not even so in the New Testament. The word for “saved” (sozo) is used in the context of a person being healed from disease (Matt. 9:21), of Peter being rescued from drowning (Matt. 14:30), of Elijah rescuing Jesus from the cross (Matt. 27:49) – and so on. I do not know much about Buddhism, but I know with certainty that “salvation” in Buddhism is not achieved by means of trusting in Buddha’s atoning death for remission from sins. After some non-specific reference to alleged “Sanskritisms” in the Gospels (a claim that mainstream scholarship would find rather amusing), and an equally vague claim that “[t]he Greek text of the Gospels is often obscure, ambiguous or otherwise odd” – again, no specifics offered – it is claimed that there is “an old Bactrian inscription that reproduces the standard homage to the Buddhists Trinity.”
I have little doubt that in this, there is no legitimate understanding of what a “Trinity” actually is, especially within Christianity. Are there hypostatic elements associated with Buddha in Buddhism? Unfortunately, rather than try to explain how the doctrine matches, we are awarded only more vague claims of alleged “puns on the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of the SDP.” Finally, in the first part of the paper, we are told of an alleged parallel between a Sanskrit text and “Revelations 13:18”: a-rith-mos gar an-thrô-pou es-tin provides a perfect and typical imitation of sad-dhar-ma-pun-da-rî-ka-sût-ram It does? Apparently, only for those with eyes to see: “If you have a bit of sophia, as required, you cannot fail to see that the Greek imitates the sense, the sound and the numerical value of the Sanskrit, for the numerical value of pundarîka is, of course, 666. So the Man is the Pundarîka.” This is simply contrived nonsense. It would hardly be difficult to find such a short phrase between two texts with an equal number of syllables. Statistically, such a match is meaningless. In terms of “numerical value,” the missing point is that textual criticism indicates that 616, not 666, is the original reading of Revelation (note: no “S”), and if “the numerical value of pundarika” is what is being used, then there’s a bit of fudging here of the sort Edgar Whisenant would be proud of – why not use the “numerical value” of the whole phrase (“sad-dhar-ma-pun-da-rî-ka-sût-ram”)? It is asked to close the section, “Who, then, can deny that SDP is a part of Q?” The irony is that using the same sort of techniques, various eschatological authors have asked, “Who, then, can deny that Jesus will return on [this date]?”
Lindtner claims that Matthew 1:1 (“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”) provides such evidence. How?
The first argument of Lindtner is to try to make the text incoherent as it is. It is said:
One person cannot possibly be the son of two different fathers belonging to two widely different periods of time. The son of David, the son of Abraham not only has two fathers.
Quite frankly, this is a grade school error. The word for “son” (huios) has long been recognized, as any lexicon will indicate, to be able to refer to any male descendant – on through grandson, great-grandson, and so on. This is so elementary that it indicates that Lindner has little interest in serious Biblical scholarship (but his stance on the Holocaust could have told us that too).
Once past this, an alleged solution to this non-problem is offered. It is claimed that Matthew is imitating a Buddhist document called the Mûlasarvâstivâdavinaya, which also offered a listing of persons that is numerically identical with Matthew’s. But even if he were not a manifest quack, Lindtner would have much more he needs to prove for this argument to be accepted. By his own admission, this document is not available in translation yet. I have confirmed that this remains the case. As it is, we only have his word that this is what the document says. We also have nothing to show that this document pre-dates the New Testament. Lindtner hints that it is part of the Gilgit collection of manuscripts, but these date to the 5th or 6th century AD.
But would it matter if it was true? Not really. It seems that Lindtner arrives at his total of 42 for the Buddhist document by combining a list of 35 kings with a list of 7 Buddhas. That’s clearly an artificiality to reach the Matthean total.
Following this, Lindtner offers some commentary about alleged numeric value correspondences and alleged correspondences between Matthew’s Greek and Sanskrit in terms of “syllables and consonants.” For example, we are told that a “king” in Sanskit is deva, and that this “is nicely is nicely assimilated [sic] to the king David.” “Abraham” is also connected to the Sanskrit word “Brahma”. Since this all relies upon Lindtner’s supposed expertise in Sanskrit to be proven, and his own word regarding the contents of the Buddhist document, and since Lindter is a proven quack, there is little reason to accept his authority on this connection, especially since there is no indication that he has any authority in the Greek language. Moreover, it is patent that this is an attempt to prove a correspondence using English translations from both languages.
In sum: Lindtner’s conclusions should be ignored unless verified by a more credible authority.
Here -- article by Lindtner is which he frankly aligns himself with the Holocaust revisionist camp as though he were just picking daisies