Parallel Sayings

Section Six deals with the sayings in common attributed to the Buddhist and Christian godmen. These “Sayings of Jesus” are also deemed the “Logia Iesou” or “Logia tou Kyriou,” the “Sayings of the Lord.” Buddha’s purported sayings are well known in many Buddhist texts, such as the famous Dhammapada . In reality, sayings of gods, goddesses, godmen, saviors, sages and heroes have been compiled and recited since remote antiquity and are not exclusive to Buddhism or Christianity.

In the pre-Christian Jewish text included in the Catholic Bible called “Ecclesiasticus,” also known as “The Wisdom of ben Sirach” or “The Wisdom of Jesus,” the name of both of the supposed originator of the sayings therein, as well as of the grandson compiling said logia , is “Jesus.” Hence, this pre-Christian text is full of Logia Iesou or “Sayings of Jesus,” a number of which are comparable to the sayings in the New Testament. Other cultures such as the Egyptian likewise possessed “wisdom sayings” or, perhaps, “dark sayings of old” (Ps 78:2) that evidently served as part of the mysteries.

Since mystery schools existed from Ireland to China, and all around the Mediterranean, at the time in question, i.e., the first centuries around the turn of the era, it is not surprising to find similar wisdom sayings in numerous places. Obviously, the sayings were pronounced by someone in the past—many people , in fact—and it is clear that they did not originate from the “mouth of God” but were passed along for centuries to millennia. Lockwood’s study of commonalities in the Buddhist and Christian sayings underscores this point and illustrates that there remains little startlingly new or exclusively sagacious about the purported logia of Jesus in the NT and elsewhere, such as the apocryphal gospels.

Lockwood (82-85) highlights some of the major parallel logia which reveal similar sentiments, a number that suffices to show a pattern or tradition of wisdom sayings among religious sages or mythical figureheads such as gods, et al.