In a message dated 97-12-08 03:14:44 EST, you write: << My point is not to attack religion, only a blind faith. I suppose that's bad enough, though. Brendan >> heh... blind faith is what you're demonstrating in your sources :) If there's no copies of a text, or no quotes of it in ancient documents, or any reference at all to it or its contents in ancient documents, you can't "prove" the existence of the text. Hearsay isn't proof. Back then, as now, it was Nigh On Impossible to completely eradicate all copies of any manuscript--especially documents so Copied and ReCopied as the New Testament (or the Hebrew Scriptures for that matter--The Dead Sea Scrolls are proof of that. The oldest copies of the Hebrew Scriptures we had until their discovery this century were from about 900 AD. Imagine that...copies of the books of Isaiah, Deuteronomy, etc, as well as documents relating to the Qumran community layed around for over 1900 years in clay pots before being discovered by a sheperd boy throwing a rock into a cave. You think something as radical as Jesus' homosexuality is going to be easily hidden?). There are literally Thousands of copies, as well as fragments and quotations scattered about, of the Christian Scriptures. I mean, why don't you apply that type of scepticism to the Vedic materials? What has been left out of them, or added spuriously? Brahman as a later addition and corruption of the ancient documents, added as Christian missonaries carried the gospel into India as early as the 1st century AD (according to church tradition since the 4th century AD)? Abraham as the basis of the existence of Brahman (which, I think, would be incorrect to identify with a single person anyhow...)? If we're gonna guess, we can guess anything we want. There's good scholarship out there and bad. Anything that makes radical claims is probably bad.... Jim