Introduction

The Author

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin (1852–1904) belongs to that generation of Russian churchmen who set out to meet the sweeping intellectual currents of the nineteenth century not by retreating from them but by mastering their terms. Born in the Saratov province and educated first in the Saratov seminary, he entered the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1874 and never afterward severed his tie to it. Even as a student he was known for an appetite for languages and for the wider world of learning, and it was this combination of piety and cosmopolitan curiosity that would shape the whole of his working life.

His formation was unusually broad for a Russian academic theologian of the period. In 1879 the young Lopukhin was appointed reader at the Russian church attached to the mission in New York, and the two years he spent in the United States left a lasting mark. He returned with a firsthand sense of a religious landscape utterly unlike Russia’s—a country of competing confessions, revivals, and free-ranging speculation—and turned that observation into his first substantial scholarship, including the master’s dissertation on Roman Catholicism in North America that he defended in 1881. Having taken his degree, he was made professor of comparative theology at the Academy in 1883, and two years later moved to the chair of ancient civil history, which he held until his death. The comparative discipline in which he first taught—the study of Christianity set beside the other religions and confessions of the world—is precisely the ground on which the present essay stands.

Lopukhin was, above all, a builder of institutions and a popularizer in the best sense. He edited or guided a series of the leading church periodicals of his day, among them The Wanderer (Strannik), Church Herald, and Christian Reading, and he conceived and launched two of the great reference projects of pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodoxy: the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia and, above all, the Explanatory Bible that still bears his name. Only the first volume of that vast commentary appeared in the year of his death, and colleagues carried it to completion between 1904 and 1913; Lopukhin himself lived to annotate only the Pentateuch. Yet it is for this monument of accessible, verse-by-verse biblical exposition—the “Lopukhin Bible”—that he is chiefly remembered, together with a widely reprinted Biblical History that ran through many editions before the Revolution. He was a scholar and a layman of the Church, never a canonized figure, and it is as an editor and biblical popularizer, rather than as a systematic theologian, that his name has endured.

Christianity and Buddhism belongs to a lively vein of his output that he chose to publish under a pen name, “A. Mityakin.” Under that same pseudonym he also wrote on the philosopher-orientalist Max Müller, whose work stands at the center of the present essay—a small but telling sign of how attentively Lopukhin followed the European conversation about religion and its origins.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The essay was written and published in 1894, and its occasion is as precise as a newspaper’s dateline. In that year the Paris house of Ollendorff issued a French book by a wandering Russian journalist named Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, which claimed to fill the long silence of the Gospels concerning Jesus’ youth. According to Notovitch, a Tibetan manuscript preserved in a Buddhist monastery near Leh recorded that the boy Jesus had traveled to India, studied Sanskrit and Pali, read the Vedas and the Buddhist canon, and only then returned to Palestine to found a new religion drawn from what he had learned in the East. The book was a sensation. By Lopukhin’s account it ran through some ten printings within months and was translated into several languages—a commercial triumph that he takes to be as revealing of the age as the claim itself.

Lopukhin’s purpose is twofold, and the two aims are inseparable. The immediate task is to expose Notovitch’s book as a fabrication. But he treats that fabrication as a symptom, and his larger concern is the cultural mood that made such a hoax so eagerly welcomed. He opens not with Notovitch at all but with a diagnosis of the times: an educated society that had recently prostrated itself before materialism, found that materialism could not answer the deeper questions of the spirit, and then—instead of returning to Christianity—swung to the opposite extreme, into spiritism, hypnotism, theosophy, and above all a fashionable enthusiasm for the religions of the East. The vogue for Buddhism in particular, Lopukhin observes, had taken on almost epidemic proportions, fed by Edwin Arnold’s celebrated poem The Light of Asia, by the traveling marvels of Madame Blavatsky and her Tibetan “Mahatmas,” and by a scholarly tendency—traced back to Schopenhauer and pursued by writers such as Seydel and Brodbeck—to derive Christianity itself from Indian sources. Notovitch’s book, in this reading, was simply the boldest and crudest attempt to supply documentary proof for a thesis many were already primed to believe.

The essay thus sits squarely within Lopukhin’s lifelong project of comparative theology and Christian apologetics addressed to the general reader. It is not a technical monograph but a compact polemical article of ten paragraphs, written for the educated public that was itself the object of its concern, and it aims less to instruct the specialist than to arm the ordinary Christian reader against a particular and timely deception.

Argument & Structure

The essay moves in a single, unbroken arc from cultural diagnosis to specific refutation to a closing moral. It can be read in three movements.

The first movement sets the scene. Lopukhin surveys the spiritual restlessness of the late nineteenth century and the turn eastward that he regards as its most striking expression. Here he names the phenomena—the poets who crowned the Buddha with a halo of greatness, the Parisian temples, the theosophical “miracles” that dissolved on inspection into English paper and English ink—and the scholars who had lent the enthusiasm an air of learning. The passage is brisk and pointed, and it establishes the frame within which the Notovitch affair is to be understood: not as an isolated curiosity but as the natural product of an age that had lost, in Lopukhin’s phrase, even the capacity for sound discernment in the things of the spirit.

The second and longest movement is the case against Notovitch himself. Lopukhin lays out the claim fairly and in detail—the broken leg outside the Hemis (Gimis) monastery, the enforced convalescence, the discovery among the manuscripts of a “Life of the Holy Issa, Best Among the Sons of Men,” the summary of its contents that turns Jesus into an Indian sage. He then dismantles it point by point, drawing openly and generously on the great Oxford orientalist Max Müller, whose article “The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India” had appeared in The Nineteenth Century that same autumn. The arguments accumulate with a lawyer’s method. The tale requires that Jewish merchants passing through a vast country should have happened upon precisely the people who had known Jesus in India, and should then have recognized in that Indian pupil the man later crucified under Pilate—a chain of coincidences that strains all probability. The philology does not hold: names and details survive the passage from Hebrew through Pali into Tibetan in ways that make no linguistic sense. Most damning of all, the manuscript is nowhere to be found. The Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist canons had by then been catalogued in detail—Lopukhin cites the great Kanjur and Tanjur collections, the Tibetan catalogue of Csoma de Kőrős, and the Chinese Tripitaka index prepared by Müller’s pupil Bunyiu Nanjio—and in none of these exhaustive inventories does any “Life of Issa” appear. To these external objections he adds the internal ones: Notovitch’s self-flattering and mutually contradictory tales of cardinals offering bribes and missionaries destroying documents, and finally the plain testimony of European residents at Leh—capped by a letter to Müller from an English lady who had just visited Hemis—reporting that no Russian had ever come there, that no one had been nursed with a broken leg in fifteen years, and that no such manuscript existed.

The third movement draws the moral. Having shown the book to be, in his words, a literary farce, Lopukhin returns to his opening theme. The scandal, for him, is not merely that a forger should have practiced his trade, but that a society which had prided itself on the most sober and merciless criticism of the Gospels—the age of Strauss and Renan and their assault on the “mythical element”—should then have swallowed so crude an invention whole. Unbelief, he concludes, had made complete brotherhood with superstition; skepticism toward the sacred and credulity toward the sensational had turned out to be two faces of one disorder.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

For all its topical occasion, the essay engages a question that outlived Notovitch and remains alive: the relation of Christianity to the other great religions, and specifically the recurring claim that the Gospel is a borrowing from the East. Lopukhin’s answer is not a comparison of doctrines—he does not, in these pages, weigh Buddhist teaching against Christian teaching point for point—but an insistence on history. His deepest conviction is that Christianity rests on real events, publicly attested and open to examination, and that this historical solidity is exactly what distinguishes it from a religion of speculation and legend. The forgery offended him so keenly because it attacked Christianity at that point of strength, offering a fabricated document where the Gospels offered a two-thousand-year public record.

There is a genuine apologetic principle at work beneath the polemic, and it is one that later scholarship has borne out: extraordinary historical claims require ordinary historical verification, and a source that cannot be produced, catalogued, or corroborated cannot bear the weight of a revolution in the life of Christ. Lopukhin’s method—test the chain of transmission, consult the catalogues, interview the witnesses on the ground—is sound, and it is the same method by which the modern scholarly consensus has confirmed his verdict.

It is important to read the essay as the document of its moment that it is. Lopukhin writes as a convinced Christian defending his faith, and his aim throughout is apologetic; he is not offering a disinterested account of Buddhism, and he does not pretend to. Some of the language of the debate—including the dismissive descriptions of Tibetan monks in the traveler’s letter he quotes—carries the condescension of nineteenth-century European attitudes toward the religions of Asia, and a modern reader will rightly hear that tone for what it is. Yet Lopukhin’s actual argument does not depend on disparaging Buddhism, and at points he is careful to grant what is true: that Pali was indeed the language of southern Buddhism, that Buddhism did reach Tibet by way of Nepal, that the Buddhist canon is a vast and well-ordered literature whose very thoroughness is what convicts the forgery. His quarrel is not with Buddhism as a faith but with a fraudulent attempt to press a forged Buddhist text into service against the Gospel. Read in that light, the essay is less an assault on another religion than a defense of historical honesty against a sensational lie—a defense that a Buddhist scholar, protective of the integrity of his own tradition’s canon, might in his own way have shared.

Reception & Influence

Lopukhin was writing in the first heat of the controversy, and events soon vindicated him beyond anything he could have known in 1894. Müller’s article, on which he leaned, was followed within two years by a decisive coda: the English scholar J. Archibald Douglas traveled to the Hemis monastery, interviewed its chief lama directly, and published the abbot’s flat denial—no European with a broken leg had ever been received there, and no “Life of Issa” existed in its library. The forgery has been regarded as settled ever since, and modern historians of early Christianity continue to cite the Notovitch affair as a textbook case of a modern gospel fabrication. Lopukhin’s little essay thus stands on the right side of a question that scholarship has closed, and it preserves for Russian readers a lucid contemporary record of how the hoax was exposed while it was still fresh.

Within his own corpus the piece is a characteristic minor work—one of the many occasional interventions through which this indefatigable editor sought to bring current European debate before an Orthodox reading public and to answer it in plain terms. Its lasting interest lies less in any originality of argument, since the substance is drawn candidly from Müller, than in what it documents: the anxieties of a Christian society at the century’s end, and the confidence with which a Russian biblical scholar met one of the age’s more colorful challenges to the faith.

The Text & This Edition

Christianity and Buddhism first appeared in Russian in 1894, published under Lopukhin’s pen name, “A. Mityakin.” This edition presents it in a new modern English translation prepared from that Russian original. In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is restored to its true author: it appears under the name Alexander Lopukhin, with the pseudonym recorded as a matter of history, and the translator is credited as a translator and never as the author.

The essay is short—a single continuous chapter of ten paragraphs—and it is presented here complete, including the author’s own footnotes, which are integral to the piece: it is in those notes that Lopukhin gives his bibliographical evidence, quotes Müller’s English directly, and cites the parallel critiques that appeared in the German, French, and Greek press. Citations and references have been set in the modern style used throughout this series, with scriptural and numerical references given in Arabic form. The translation aims to carry Lopukhin’s own register into readable modern English—the measured, faintly ironic voice of a learned churchman addressing the educated public of his day—without smoothing away the polemical edge that is part of the essay’s character. This is a fresh English rendering offered for study and accessibility; it is presented as a working modern translation rather than a definitive critical text.

Suggestions for Reading

Readers will find the essay easiest to follow if they keep its double purpose in view. On the surface it is a demolition of one particular book, and the middle paragraphs, with their catalogues and cross-examined witnesses, read almost as detective work; enjoyed that way, they move quickly. But the frame around that investigation—the opening diagnosis of a restless age and the closing reflection on unbelief and credulity—is where Lopukhin’s real subject lies, and it repays a slower reading. It helps, too, to remember the vantage from which he writes: a convinced Christian scholar of 1894, defending the historical claims of the Gospel against a forgery, and doing so in the confident idiom of his time. Taken together, the essay offers both a vivid snapshot of a genuine literary scandal at the close of the nineteenth century and a still-pertinent lesson in how an extraordinary claim about the past ought to be tested before it is believed.