16. Was Jesus a myth based on Indian Bhagavan Krishna?
In the 1860s, a French legal scholar and lecturer named Louis Jacolliot published a work which he titled, La Bible dans l”Indie, Vie de Iezeus Christna (The Bible in India, the Life of Jesus Christna). Jacolliot had spent years living in India, where he compared the story of the life of Jesus, as recounted in the gospels, and that of Bhagavan Krishna, as part of a study he conducted searching for the links between Hindu mysticism and the occult in the west. His comparison was done from a legal scholarly viewpoint, rather than a theological one, and from it, he concluded that the gospel stories of Jesus were myths based on the story of Krishna. He further concluded that Christ was derived from Krishna, and wrote it as Christna as a consequence.
Thus Jacolliot postulated that Jesus hadn’t lived in India as a young man, but was instead a mythological creation based on Krishna, as the many similarities between the two attested. The myths evolved in Palestine over the years based on the stories shared by traders and travelers from the mysterious East. His work was immediately attacked as being fraudulent, heretical, divisive, and lacking in any scholarly value by Christian fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy in France, as are most writings which express doubt in biblical texts.