Krishna

The historicity of Krishna is a genuine question and it has a precise shape. There is strong early evidence for a cult, and no independent evidence for a person.

The cult evidence is good. Panini's grammar refers to Vasudeva and Arjuna as objects of worship. The coinage of the Indo-Greek king Agathocles, around 180 BC, shows Vasudeva-Krishna with conch and discus, and is described as the earliest unambiguous image of the deity. The Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh, of about 113 BC, records that Heliodorus, son of Dion, a Greek from Taxila and ambassador of King Antialcidas to King Bhagabhadra, set up this Garuda-standard of Vasudeva, the god of gods. A Greek diplomat calling himself a Bhagavata in central India in the second century BC is a very solid datum. What it shows is contested at the edges: Edwin Bryant reads it as conversion, Harry Falk as the ordinary Greek practice of dedicating to local gods.

The person evidence is thinner and disputed. The Chandogya Upanishad at 3.17.6 names a Krishna Devakiputra, Krishna son of Devaki, which is the later Krishna's matronymic. Max Muller and others treated this as a possible source of the figure; the objections are that the verse could be an interpolation and that the name may belong to someone else entirely. W.G. Archer answered that the coincidence of the two names in one verse is not easily dismissed. That argument is live and unresolved.

Beyond that, claims escalate quickly. Guy Beck has written that most scholars accept Krishna's historicity and that he likely lived before 1000 BC, while conceding enormous contradictions in the chronology. That goes well past what the material evidence supports, and it belongs to Beck rather than to the field. The defensible statement is narrower: a Vasudeva-Krishna cult is securely attested by the second century BC, and a historical individual behind it is neither established nor refuted.

Murdock's specific parallel claims fail against the same primary sources this atlas already cites for each figure. For Horus, she leans heavily on a scene at the Luxor temple depicting the divine birth of a pharaoh, read as a virgin nativity; the historian Richard Carrier, who himself argues Jesus was not a historical figure and so has no religious motive to defend, has separately examined and rejected her reading of that inscription, which shows the evidentiary problem is independent of any apologetic stake in the outcome.

For Mithras, Murdock's Suns of God repeats claims of a virgin birth and a 25 December date; the Roman cult's own central myth instead has Mithras born fully grown from solid rock, and no surviving Mithraic evidence fixes 25 December as the god's own festival date earlier than evidence for the Christian date itself. For Krishna, she asserts a crucifixion; the Mahabharata and the Puranas instead record Krishna's death by an arrow shot by the hunter Jara, who mistook his exposed foot for a deer, and his mother Devaki conceived him by ordinary marriage to Vasudeva as her eighth child, not virginally.

Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (2012) reviews this entire family of claims and rejects them on the same grounds argued here: not one Zeitgeist-popularized parallel survives a direct check against the actual ancient sources for Horus, Mithras or Krishna.

Krishna is worshipped in two registers that sit oddly together, and the tradition has spent centuries deciding which is primary.

The first is the Gita Krishna: the charioteer at Kurukshetra who, when Arjuna refuses to fight his own kinsmen, delivers a discourse on duty, action without attachment to its fruit, and the paths of knowledge, works and devotion, and then reveals a universal form that Arjuna cannot bear to look at. This Krishna is a teacher and a revealer, addressed in awe. The Bhagavad Gita's dating is unsettled, with estimates running from the fifth century BC to the first or second century of the common era and clustering around the second and first centuries BC, and turning partly on whether it was original to the Mahabharata or inserted later.

The second is the Vrindavan Krishna: the child who steals butter and is tied to a mortar by his exasperated foster-mother, and the youth who plays the flute at night so that the cowherd women leave their houses and their husbands to dance with him. This Krishna is not addressed in awe at all. He is teased, scolded, longed for and quarrelled with, and the emotional vocabulary of the devotion to him is drawn from parental love, friendship and erotic longing rather than from reverence.

Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the tradition of Chaitanya in sixteenth-century Bengal, made the second register decisive and built a theology on it: Krishna is not an avatar of Vishnu but the source of whom Vishnu is an expansion, and Radha, absent from the Bhagavata Purana and arriving through later poetry, is his own pleasure-potency and the model of the devotee. The relationship is illicit, and the tradition insists on that, because a love that risks reputation is held to be worth more than one that does not.

Both registers are alive. The same person may recite the Gita in the morning and sing about the butter thief in the evening without feeling any strain.

Almost everything narrative that Hindus know about Krishna's childhood and youth comes from the Bhagavata Purana, and almost nothing about when it was written is agreed.

The general problem is structural. Ludo Rocher put it flatly: it is not possible to set a specific date for any Purana as a whole, and proposed dates continue to vary widely and endlessly. Cornelia Dimmitt and J.A.B. van Buitenen noted that the manuscripts are encyclopedic and that it is difficult to establish when, where, why or by whom they were written. The reason is that a Purana is not a book that was composed once. It has an oral prehistory, it accreted material over centuries, and it was revised by people who did not mark their revisions. Asking for its date is asking a question the object is not shaped to answer.

For the Bhagavata specifically, modern scholarship generally places it between the sixth and the tenth centuries, with many putting the final redaction in the ninth or early tenth. Sheridan argued it was composed by learned brahmin ascetics, probably in South India, and shows the influence of the Tamil Alvar poets. Two things pull in opposite directions. Vedic archaisms and pre-Gupta dynastic lists pull the date early, and Edwin Bryant and D. Dennis Hudson have argued for the Gupta period, between the fourth and seventh centuries, Hudson on iconographic grounds from the Vaikuntha Perumal temple. Against that, the tenth- and eleventh-century South Indian Vaishnava theologians Yamuna and Ramanuja do not cite it, a silence that is hard to explain if the text was already authoritative.

Wendy Doniger's approximate datings for other Puranas give a sense of the spread: Markandeya around 250, Matsya between 250 and 500, Vayu around 350, Vishnu around 450, Linga anywhere from 600 to 1000. None of these is a publication date. They are estimates of when a text reached something like the shape it now has.