"He passed a life, according to the Indians, of a most extraordinary and incomprehensible nature. His birth was concealed through fear of the reigning tyrant Kansa, who, at the time of his birth, _ordered all new-born males to be slain, yet this wonderful babe was preserved_."[166:4]
In the Epic poem Mahabarata, composed more than two thousand years ago, we have the whole story of this incarnate deity, born of a virgin, and miraculously escaping in his infancy from the reigning tyrant of his country, related in its original form.
Representations of this flight with the babe at midnight are sculptured on the walls of ancient Hindoo temples.[167:1]
This story is also the subject of an immense sculpture in the cave-temple at Elephanta, where the children are represented as being slain. The date of this sculpture is lost in the most remote antiquity. It represents a person holding a drawn sword, surrounded by slaughtered _infant boys_. Figures of men and women are also represented who are supposed to be supplicating for their children.[167:2]
Thomas Maurice, speaking of this sculpture, says:
"The event of Crishna's birth, and the attempt to destroy him, took place by night, and therefore the shadowy mantle of darkness, _upon which mutilated figures of infants are engraved_, darkness (at once congenial with his crime and the season of its perpetration), involves the tyrant's bust; the string of _death heads_ marks the multitude of infants slain by his savage mandate; and every object in the sculpture illustrates the events of that Avatar."[167:3]
Another feature which connects these stories is the following:
Sir Wm. Jones tells us that when Crishna was taken out of reach of the tyrant Kansa who sought to slay him, he was fostered at _Mathura_ by Nanda, the herdsman;[167:4] and Canon Farrar, speaking of the sojourn of the Holy Family in Egypt, says:
"St. Matthew neither tells us where the Holy Family abode in Egypt, nor how long their exile continued; but ancient legends say that they remained two years absent from Palestine, and lived at Mataréëh, a few miles north-east of Cairo."[167:5]
Chemnitius, out of Stipulensis, who had it from Peter Martyr, Bishop of Alexandria, in the third century, says, that the place in Egypt where Jesus was banished, is now called Matarea, about ten miles beyond Cairo, that the inhabitants constantly burn a lamp in remembrance of it, and that there is a garden of trees yielding a balsam, which was planted by Jesus when a boy.[167:6]