Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism, by T. W. Rhys Davids, (the Hibbert Lectures , 1881) (Williams & Norgate, London 1881)
Page 147. ‘All this is of peculiar interest from the comparative point of view. It is an expression from the Buddhist standpoint, which excludes the theory of a Supreme Deity, of an idea very similar to that which is expressed in Christian writings when Christ is represented as the manifestation of God to men, the Logos, the Word of God made flesh, the Bread of Life. And it is not a mere chance that heterodox followers of the two religions have afterwards used the Buddha and the Logos conceptions as bases of their emanation theories. It is only a fresh instance of the way in which similar ideas in similarly constituted minds come to be modified in very similar ways. The Cakka-vatti Buddha was to the early Buddhists what the Messiah Logos was to the early Christians. In both cases the two ideas overlap one another, run into one another, supplement one another. In both cases, the two combined cover as nearly the same ground as the different foundations of the two teachings will permit. And it is the Cakka-vatti Buddha circle of ideas in the one case, just as the Messiah Logos in the other, that has had the principal influence in determining the opinions of the early disciples as to the person of their Master. The method followed in the early Buddhist and early Christian biographies of their respective Masters was the same, and led to similar results; though the details are in no particular quite identical in the two cases.’