CHAPTER VI

THE NEW TESTAMENT IN TOUCH WITH THE EAST

THERE are a few passages in the New Testament which seem to bear on the subject we have in hand. I propose to touch upon them in this chapter.

The visit of the Magi will at once occur to the mind of every Christian reader as having (or as being intended to have) some bearing on the relations of Christianity to the country or countries from which the Wise Men came. The account given in St. Matthew presents many difficulties owing to the apparent impossibility of giving a scientific explanation of the star which is said to have guided these Eastern sages to the cradle of the Infant Saviour, and many, even devout, Christians are disposed in consequence to treat the visit as unhistorical. We have not at the present day the evidence required to prove the historicity of the story, and it would not therefore be wise to lay too much stress on the account of the Gospel record. But certain deductions are evidently legitimate. It is quite clear that St. Matthew believed the story when he inserted it in the forefront of his narrative. Or, if it be maintained that the narrative forms no integral part of the original Gospel, it is evident that the later interpolator recognized the story as having some important bearing on the preaching of Christ in the Orient. St. Matthew's Gospel--thanks, it may be, to the Jews of the Dispersion, for whom he wrote quite as much

as for the Jews of Palestine, early met with favour in the remote countries where the Mahayana took its birth. Pantaenus of Alexandria found it in India when he went to that country as a Christian missionary at the end of the second century, and the story of the visit of the Magian pilgrims to Bethlehem evidently had a vogue of its own in Central Asia. An expanded version of the story has but recently been recovered from a sand-buried ruin in Turkestan, and given to the world of students. It is true, it may be argued, that the Magi were Parthians, and that the Parthians have had but little proveable connection with Indian forms of religion; but we know that there were Parthian Buddhists, and must remember that, besides the great Parthian Empire with which the Romans of the period so often came into conflict, there were at the time the Indo-Parthian satrapies in the Indus Valley, which were almost as good as independent sovereignties, and in parts of which the followers of Zoroaster lived side by side with those of S'akyamuni.

The second point is evidently the selection of