Krishna, which means dark, plainly suffers huge losses, cursed as he was to lose the whole of his people and to die alone and miserable. The only death of Krishna now in the Mahabharata is to be shot him in the sole of his foot by a hunter’s arrow while practising yoga in a forest. It seems odd, to the western way of thinking, that a man who had seen everyone he knew, including most recently his brother, Balarama, killed off under a curse, should be peacefully practising yoga in the forest. That is the way of mythology. It gave Krishna, by sitting crosslegged—possibly a remnant of the original myth—a way of receiving an unlikely wound in the sole of his foot, just as Achilles was killed in his heel. Christians will say that crossed-legs can hardly be seen as an indication of crucifixion, but they are indeed symbolic of the equinoxes, as the symbolic torchbearers of Mithras’s icons show. The uplifted torch with right leg over left is the bright summer sun, while the downturned torch with left over right is the dark winter sun. The hunter, Jar, who killed Krishna only has to be identified with the brother, Balarama, to restore the original myth—the summer sun killed the winter sun by crucifixion.

Hindus had a motive to suppress any crucifixion myths—to avoid parallels with Christianity that might have lost proselytes to the missionaries. Editors of the Hindu sacred texts will have altered the legend in the present era—when Christianity reached India with the heretical Christians called Nestorians—to avoid any implication that they had derived it from Christianity, or indeed to eliminate any possibility of Krishna being mistaken for Christ that might have assisted Christian proselytizing. The Krishna legends were still changing in the Christian era, as is shown by the accretion of the legends of Gopala to those of Krishna in the early centuries AD.

If this is true, Christians argue, it would have been better for Hindus to have kept Krishna crucified. Having their own crucified saviour would have stopped the Nestorians from making converts among the Hindus, whose crucified saviour was much older than Christianity itself, and who had existed long before Christians ever came to India. The assumption is that the crucifixion of Krishna had the same import as the crucifixion of Christ. Naturally, it would have been important as the god’s ultimate sacrifice, but Christians made it central to their outlook—Hindus probably did not. Indians attracted to the idea of crucifixion, and the success of Christianity shows it is an attractive idea, will have been more prepared to turn to Christ if they saw him as an aspect of Krishna, or even as another avatar of Vishnu. For most sun gods, crucifixion seems to have been an essential but not always the central part of the god’s myth.

There is nothing surprising about any god with a solar aspect being crucified or suffering some equivalent fate, and so we should not be surprised to hear that there is or was such a legend about Krishna. And it would not help to ask a Hindu what they thought the original legend was, or whether they counted Krishna as a sun god. A Hindu cannot enlighten us about the true origins of Krishna, once it had been suppressed, any more than a Christian can enlighten us about the suppressed history of Christ. Both have their preferred mythology that they will believe despite any evidence to the contrary.

Krishna is considered to have been a historic figure, like Christ, living about the time of the Indo-European conquest of India in 1000 BC. But he has acquired the attributes of a sun god just as Christ did in his elevation. He was an avatar of Vishnu, a sun god, who creates Krishna the dark twin and his brother Balarama the light twin from two hairs of his head, one dark and one white. He also had the patronymic Vasudeva, signifying he was a sun god.

The Romans saw Christ as a sun god and put the control of the solar religions of Rome in the hands of the bishops. No one can deny that Christian iconography shows Christ as a sun god. Later religions might have syncretized with Christianity by adopting a crucified saviour, but Christians do not like the fact that crucifixion was an earlier syncretization of ancient mythology with Christianity. Paul and others realised the value of having a newly crucified example of an old phenomenon.