158 REV. RICHARD COLLINS, M.A. 
3. But let us confine ourselves to the case of Krishna. He 
especially is claimed as one of the most prominent of the 
Hindu embodiments of the sun-myth, or as a prior Hindu 
development of certain religious ideas, which subsequently 
received a fuller Semitic development in the person of Jesus 
of Nazareth. 
Our simplest way will be to investigate the history of 
Krishna: and that, so far as we can, chronologically. 
Krishna is seen, in what would appear to be the original 
couception of him, in the Mahabharata. He is introduced in 
the early part of that long Epic poem as a relative of the 
heroes of the great war which it describes. There is much 
that is puzzling, and apparently inconsistent, in many of the 
records of his actions; as, for instance, that he gave up the 
whole of his own army to fight for the Kauravas, and yet showed 
a strong spirit of partisanship afterwards towards their kins- 
man opponents, the Pandavas, whom he ultimately aided as 
Arjuna’s charioteer. This is hardly like the work of a great 
poet. Shortly before the war he attended a council of chiefs 
of the Pandavas and Kauravas, as a mediator between them ; 
and then it was that, for the first time, I think, he showed 
himself as the Supreme Being. Duryodhana, the chief of the 
Kauravas, had plotted to seize and confine Krishna, since 
Krishna had previously suggested that he and three other 
chiefs of the Kauravas ought to be made prisoners (the same 
Duryodhana to whom he had given his army). Krishna, 
however, knew of that plot ; and thus addressed Duryodhana: 
“*O Duryodhana, perchance it was because you thought I was 
alone in this city that you thought to bind me; but behold 
all the gods and divine beings, and the universe itself, are 
present here in me.’ And at that moment all the gods 
issued from his body, and flames of fire fell from his eyes, 
nose, and ears; and the rays of the sun shone forth in all 
their radiance from the pores of his skin. And all the Rajas 
closed their eyes from the brightness of his presence. And 
there was a great earthquake, and all who were there trembled 
with great fear. After this Krishna threw aside his divinity, 
and became a mortal as before.” (I quote from Mr. Talboys 
Wheeler’s translation.) The whole account of Krishna’s con- 
nexion with these warriors of the Mahabharata bristles with 
inconsistencies ; and this extravagant picture of his divinity is 
quite unlike anything to be found in early Hindu imagery, 
but is quite akin to much that is to be met with in what is 
certainly much more modern. ‘There is no longer the poetry 
of personification of the grand or mysterious in nature, but 
sheer childish exaggeration, to strike the hearer with awe— 
