Ramakrishna, Jesus, Friedrich Max Müller: A Peril of Comparativism

Abstract What happens when, in a non-Western, non-Bible-based, British-colonized, Christian-missionized culture, the legend, biography, or hagiography of a prominent modern non-Jewish, non-Christian, “native” saint yields an anecdote about him that seems to parallel, structurally and thematically, a well-known biblical tale? And what if the tellers of that anecdote, disciples of the saint, while being aware of the Bible, and perhaps of the anecdote’s biblical analog, deny any etiological connection between the Bible and the saint’s story? This article considers one such coincidence: the parallel between an anecdote about young Ramakrishna among a gathering of pandits, and the Evangelium infantiae , as noted by Friedrich Max Müller. The reaction to Müller’s comment, as this article demonstrates, can reveal the potential hazard of comparison as an interpretive enterprise, especially in view of what some scholars today view as the imperialist thrust of the academic enterprise of “comparative religion” as Müller pioneered it.