164 REV. RICHARD COLLINS, M.A. 
historical evidence as to the centuries before Christ. With 
the Jews themselves not till after the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. However clearly their ancient prophecies declared 
it, when read in the light of the life of Jesus, it does: not 
appear that the Apostles during His lifetime had apprehended 
the truth that He was “God manifest in the flesh.” Nor 
had the Jewish Rabbis ever so interpreted the prophecies as 
to the Messiah. Divine, indeed, they expected Him to be; 
but they had not in the least apprehended the doctrine of 
Christianity, that the Messiah must be “very God and very 
man.” 
7. How, then, did the Hindus first reach the idea of the 
Deity incarnate in the man Krishna? Had they embraced 
this doctrine before the Jews saw it in the person of Jesus 
Christ? This is a question of overwhelming interest in the 
history of religions, because the whole question of Jewish 
belief in reference to the Messiah, whether illustrated by the 
- teaching of the Rabbis, or the attitude of the Apostles them- 
selves before the resurrection, seems to imply that there is 
something in human nature which forbids the conception of 
a true incarnation before the actual fact is fully before the 
eyes of men. It would, I suppose, be impossible to absolutely 
prove that the human mind could not originate the idea of an 
incarnation of the Deity ; but it seems in the highest degree 
improbable. ‘The heathen poets had, indeed, often described 
_the gods as coming to men in human form—as we read, for 
instance, in Homer and Ovid. They had also endued men 
with divine powers, and the men of Lystra said of Paul and 
Barnabas, “The gods are come down to us in the likeness of 
men.” But this seems to be a very different conception from 
that of the incarnation of the Supreme Spirit in a human 
person.* 
8. Perhaps the only actual proof that this picture of 
Krishna was subsequent to the history of Jesus Christ is the 
strictly chronological one—when was the Bhagavad-Gita 
written? Mr. Telang thinks that “ the latest date at which 
the Git&é can have been composed must be earlier than the 
* Very different, too, are the “stories of god-descended persons among 
the Greeks,” quoted by Mr. Spencer as parallel to the story of Jesus Christ 
in the Gospels (Heclesiastical Institutions, page 702). “ Alsculapius, Pytha- 
goras, Plato,” did not claim to be “‘ very god and very man ;” nor have they 
any claim to divine descent, except in accounts written long after their 
actual existence ; in the case of Aisculapius, for instance, by Cicero ; and 
in the case of the two latter by Diogenes, Laertius, and others, long after the 
commencement of the Christian era. A‘sculapius is not a divinity in Homer, 
but simply the “blameless physician.” Even in his fabled descent from 
