© 2005 Jan Herca (license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
We know that Alexander the Great arrived at the gates of India, and that he was determined to conquer it, if it were not for the fact that the fatigue of his men and the many months of expedition had noticeably weakened his army. He established new cities along the route he took, so that a hint of Hellenistic influence spread throughout the region. But, several centuries later, in the time of Jesus, did this influence continue in northern India?
In the chapter «Didactic exercises for young people» of The Long-Awaited Beginning[1] a contact is narrated that took place in the village of Capernaum with some travelers from far away lands. The inspiration for this story comes in part from The Urantia Book (UB 129:1.7), which tells us about a caravan stop that Jesus used to frequent, and in part from Jean-Noël Robert’s book From Rome to China, where the historian investigates the relations in the time of Jesus between the eastern and western peoples, giving an account of the most important archaeological discoveries in this regard.
Among these discoveries, perhaps the most notable was the excavation in the middle of the last century of the ruins of a small palace in present-day Begram, the ancient city of Kapisi, about 70 km north of Kabul. There, in the ancient capital of the Kushan kingdom, a bewildering treasure was found containing luxury items of all kinds: Indian ivory, Chinese lacquers, Roman bronzes, Greco-Roman silverware, Egyptian and Syrian glassware… Many of them dated to the middle of the 1st century AD or even earlier, that is, to the time of Jesus.
Among the objects discovered were works of art from the Roman Empire: bronze balance weights depicting Mars and Minerva; bronze lamp stands; Roman perfumers and statuettes; plaster medallions (about 20 cm in diameter) with classical or mythological representations, including the story of Eros and Psyche, some gods of mythology, the grape harvest, etc., intended to serve as models for silver trays for goldsmiths; statues with Greco-Roman faces (straight nose, slight smile, Apollonian gaze); warrior heads like those of the Gauls sculpted in Pergamon; Laocoon dressed in western style spurring Trojan horses; heads of adolescents resembling Antony…
But the question immediately arose: how did such an artistic explosion occur at the beginning of our era? Why is it that no similar remains have been found anywhere in India? We know that there were Greeks in that area at the time of Alexander, and some experts have wanted to see in this art a legacy of Macedonian influence. But not all historians are convinced by this explanation. Many years passed after the death of the Greek conqueror for such a long-lasting influence to have lasted. Moreover, many of the works were of undoubted Roman influence, and even from some vases similar to those in Pompeii it has been possible to determine the date of their arrival, never before the middle of the first century.
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The hypothesis that has been most strongly supported is that there was a close commercial relationship between this kingdom of Kapisi, called Bactriana, where the Kushan tribes lived, and the Roman Empire. The result of commercial exchanges was a constant movement of products, especially works of art, which travelled from the Far East, along the Silk Road, to the West, and vice versa, from western ports such as Alexandria, Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon or Seleucia (the port of Antioch in Syria), to the East.
It was during the time of Jesus that a flourishing kingdom arose in that region, the Kushan Kingdom, which shortly thereafter experienced its moment of greatest splendor under the rule of King Kanishka. From this king onwards, evangelization began in a new type of Buddhism, called “the great vehicle”, which began to represent Buddha as a god and to increasingly concern itself with achieving not only individual salvation through the so-called liberation or nirvana, but also collective liberation. Therefore, imitating the Western Roman and Greek peoples, who spread their culture through art, architecture and urban planning, the Kushan people began a type of art, called from that moment on “art of Gandhara”, with clear Greco-Roman influences.
In this art, Buddha is depicted with features reminiscent of Greek sculptures: almond-shaped eyes, an Apollonian face, a serene smile and a hairstyle that forms waves down to his shoulders. Only one characteristic was particular to these sculptures: the somewhat elongated earlobes.
From the 2nd century onwards, the similarities with Roman Antonine sculpture become truly striking. The scenes from the life of Buddha are not shown in a disorderly and continuous manner as in India, but each episode is inserted within a single painting with its own particular decoration, following the typical Roman narrative process. (From Rome to China, Jean-Nöel Robert, p.283)
From all these investigations I got the idea of fictionalizing[1:1] a possible encounter between Jesus and these Kushan people who had come on a journey from their distant kingdom of Bactra. It was during the time of Jesus that this kingdom began to gain importance, so it is reasonable to imagine that they were already engaged in artistic exchanges with the West, travelling along the northern silk route and avoiding the Parthians, then heading along the sea route or via Maris to Alexandria, where they would sell their goods to merchants who would bring them to Rome. In turn, on the way back, they surely did not return empty-handed, but rather bought Roman, Egyptian and other artistic objects from peoples they passed through, to then sell them in their own country.
Although Buddhism, known as the “great vehicle,” may have been just beginning to germinate at the time of Jesus, I have chosen to introduce it into the story because it offered an opportunity to show Jesus’ open attitude toward other religions, in which he also found elements of interest that he did not hesitate to use in his teachings, even if only in private. It is worth remembering that Jesus made a long trip to Rome in the company of two citizens of the Hindu empire. (UB 130:0.1)
¶ References
- Jean-Noël Robert, From Rome to China. Along the Silk Road in the Times of Ancient Rome, Herder Publishing, 1993
¶ External links
¶ Notes
This is one of the parts of the novel «Jesus of Nazareth», a biography about the Master based on The Urantia Book that is in preparation by the author. ↩︎ ↩︎