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The Arian Witness
1875
The Arian Witness
by Krishna Mohan Banerjea
Why our edition. In the free scan at least 1 word in 40 is garbled. Ours corrects the damage. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of The Arian Witness, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s landmark work of Indian Christian thought, arguing that the sacrifices and doctrines of the ancient Aryan (Vedic) scriptures corroborate Biblical history and point forward to Christ. One of nineteenth-century Bengal’s foremost intellectuals makes the case for Christianity not as a foreign import but as the fulfillment of India’s own oldest religious inheritance.
The changed life
A high-caste Bengali Brahmin and star pupil of the Hindu College, he was converted under Alexander Duff in 1832 — dismissed from his Hindu-funded teaching post for it — and became an ordained Anglican clergyman and one of India’s leading Christian scholars, a genuine author who set out his own case in his own hand.
Summary
The Arian Witness is Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s landmark work of Indian Christian thought. Its full title — The Arian Witness, or, The Testimony of Arian Scriptures in Corroboration of Biblical History and the Rudiments of Christian Doctrine — states its thesis: that the ancient Aryan (Vedic) scriptures themselves bear witness to truths fulfilled in Christ.
Banerjea, a high-caste Brahmin convert and scholar of both Sanskrit tradition and Christian theology, argues that the sacrifices and doctrines of the Vedas corroborate biblical history and point forward to the gospel. He gives particular attention to the theme of self-sacrifice in Vedic religion, reading it as a foreshadowing of Christ’s atonement.
The book advances a ‘fulfillment’ rather than a ‘rupture’ account of the relationship between Hinduism and Christianity — presenting the Christian faith not as a foreign import but as the completion of India’s own oldest religious inheritance. It stands as a foundational document of nineteenth-century Indian Christian apologetics, written from the inside of both traditions.
Who was Krishna Mohan Banerjea?
Krishna Mohan Banerjea (1813–1885) was a high-caste Bengali Brahmin and a brilliant student of Calcutta’s Hindu College, part of the reform-minded ‘Young Bengal’ intellectual world. He converted to Christianity under the missionary Alexander Duff in 1832, losing his Hindu-funded teaching position as a direct consequence.
He went on to become an ordained Anglican clergyman and one of the foremost Indian Christian scholars of his century, writing extensively on the relationship between Indian religious tradition and Christianity. As a self-authored intellectual — not a subject written up by others — he set out his own case in works like The Arian Witness.
Which edition of The Arian Witness is this?
The Arian Witness was written in English, so no translation is involved — but the free scan of it is badly damaged, and that is what our edition fixes. The transcription in circulation was recognized around 2007 and renders the running head as “AEIANS, CASPIANS AND KASIAPAS”; it does not contain the phrase “Ahura Mazda” anywhere, though Banerjea uses it throughout. Ours was recognized afresh from the page images at higher resolution, which cuts measured damage by about a third. Banerjea’s Sanskrit needed a different remedy: no OCR can read Devanagari set in 1875 letterpress, so those passages are line noise in the free text. Where he cites the verse, we have restored it from the Rig Veda itself — the Aufrecht edition, in Unicode Devanagari — and every restoration had to prove itself: a distinctive word of the corpus verse must appear in the English he printed beside it. Ten passages meet that test, six of them proved by svasva, the word he renders “well-horsed” and on which his second chapter turns. Citations that could not be proved were left alone rather than filled with a guess. His translations are untouched; we have added none of our own. The free scan is linked below and is the same book; what differs is that you can read this one.
Common questions
- Who was Krishna Mohan Banerjea?
- Krishna Mohan Banerjea (1813–1885) was a high-caste Bengali Brahmin scholar who converted to Christianity under Alexander Duff in 1832 and became an ordained Anglican clergyman and one of India’s leading Christian intellectuals.
- What is The Arian Witness about?
- It argues that the ancient Vedic (‘Arian’) scriptures corroborate biblical history and prefigure Christian doctrine — presenting Christianity as the fulfillment of India’s own oldest religious tradition rather than a foreign faith.
A note on the text. The Arian Witness is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan runs about 7.4 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
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