Coincidence or conspiracy?

[struggle4progress]

18. It's scarcely worth an exhaustive debunking, so let's just take a quick indicative peek:

"Acharya" wants to cite "scholar of Buddhism and Sanskrit Dr. Christian Lindtner" as telling us "Everything that Jesus says or does was already said or done by the Buddha" and in particular "It was king Gautama — not Jesus — who was crucified"

The proof of that last statement, for "Acharya", is given in the footnote "In private correspondence, Dr. Lindtner informed me that there were three sources for the crucifixion story of Buddha: the Lotus sutra, the Mahaparinirvana sutra and the Samghabhedavastu"

Now, there are several points to be made:

(1) If all of the Jesus stories were versions of Buddha stories, then the whole Buddhist world would have been telling the West that continually for several hundred years, since there was certainly no less historical self-knowledge in the East than in the West

(2) The sources "Acharya" says that "Dr. Lindtner" pointed to, are not at all impossible to obtain: the Lotus Sutra (for example) is well-known and available in multiple translations -- so why not actually give us a definite reference and a quote, if the Lotus Sutra actually told us "king Gautama was crucified"? That, after all, would be the standard scholarly approach -- rather than telling someone vaguely "Look through this long text and you'll find it somewhere"

(3) But, of course, "Dr. Christian Lindtner" seems to be a man who mostly enjoys controversy: in particular, he has from time to time made a notable name for himself as a holocaust denier

Lindtner is a Danish Holocaust denier from Copenhagen University who spoke at the Iranian Holocaust denial conference on the topic “Danish media and the Holocaust”.

http://www.antisemitism.org.il/eng/Notable%20Holocaust%20deniers