The Beginning and Timeline of Lord Krishna:
1. The cycle of folklore and popular belief which centers round Krishna, one of the most important elements in the neo-Brahmanical creed of modern India, forms an interesting chapter in the development of Hindu religious myth and culture. It is a faith without a definite creed, with no church, no pope, no convocation, catering to the needs of jungle-folk on the borderland of savagery and for the keen-witted religious disputants, the Vedantists of Mathura.
2. When we find that five and a half million people in the Punjab and North-Western Provinces profess devotion to Krishna, we may assume that a much larger number revere him as a member of the class of deities known generally as Vaishnava, or grouped around the personality of Vishnu.
3. We first hear of Krishna, son of Devaki, in the Chhandogya Upanishad, one of the supplements to the Sama Veda, which are clearly later than the Sanhitas or Brahmanas. In their present recension, they embody the views of that school of philosophical Brahmanism, which is of course separated by a long interval from the nature worship embodied in the earlier hymns. Krishna is here only a scholar, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, and perhaps a member of the military caste.
4. Passing on to the Epic period, in the Mahabharata, which was probably composed between the time of the Greek traveler Megasthenes (306-295 B.C.) and the second half of the first century of our era, we find that Krishna occupies a higher place, but still his divinity is not fully assured. Rama and Krishna are here at once gods. Krishna even worships Siva and wins boons from him.
5. Later additions to and interpolations in the text of the Epics assert his divinity; and in particular, this view of his nature finds expression in the celebrated philosophical poem known as the Bhagavad-gita, which is obviously a late supplement to the Mahabharata.
6. There seems, however, good reason to suspect that the elevation of Krishna to divine honors was coincident with the rise of the neo-Brahmanism on the decline of Buddhism. The older Brahmanism was too esoteric, much the faith of priests and nobles, to influence the masses. In its new alliance, it was not Vishnu but Krishna who was the predominant partner, and it was by its combination with the Krishna or other allied cults that Vaishnavism finally won its way to the affections of the masses in Northern India.
7. It has been supposed again that the episode in the Mahabharata where Narada the Saint visits Sweta-dwipa, "the White Island," implies early relations between Brahmanism and Alexandrian Christianity.
8. To put the story as briefly as possible, we find a branch of the great Yadava clan of Kshatriyas, who probably owed their origin to a Yu-echi invasion from Central Asia, settled on the banks of the River Jumna, with Mathura as their capital. Krishna, we are told, was the son of Vasudeva and Devaki. The former, by one interpretation of his name, is one of the old celestial genii, "the bright ones"; the latter, Devaki, "the divine one," has been identified with the seductive water-nymph of folklore. But more probably in Devaki and Krishna, we may see representatives of the world-wide group of the divine mother and the fateful child—Nana of Babylon, Isis and Horus in Egypt, Lucina and her child in Latin tradition.
9. At the time of the birth of Krishna, we find the rightful king, Ugrasena, like so many savage half-priests, half-monarchs, when their power of controlling the deities becomes abated, deposed by his son, the usurper Kamsa. He, we are told, cruelly persecuted his rivals, an incident in which some have recognized a conflict of cults, and some have gone so far as to call Kamsa a Jaina, an opponent of the neo-Vaishnava faith.
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