Megasthenes 

The most important and earliest non-Indian literary record of ancient India is found in the book, Indica, written by Megasthenes. Sometime in the third century BC, Meghastenes journeyed to India. The King of Taxila had appointed him ambassador to the royal court at Pataliputra of the great Vaisnava monarch, Chandragupta. Evidently while there, Megasthenes wrote extensively on what he heard and saw. Unfortunately, none of Megasthenes’ original book survived the ravages of time. However, through Megasthenes’ early Greek and Roman commentators, like Arrian, Diodorus, and Strabo, fragments of his original work are available to us today, as well as Megasthenes’ general message. Dr. Hein reports that Megasthenes "described Mathura as a place of great regional importance and suggested that it was then, as now, a center of Krishna worship."

Christian Lassen was the first Western scholar to bring Megasthenes into the debate on the "borrowing theory." He noted that Megasthenes wrote of Krishna under the pseudonym of Heracles and that "Heracles", or Krishna, was worshipped as God in the area through which the Yamuna River flows.

A respected Indologist, Richard Garbe, agreed with Lassen’s analysis and called the testimony of Megasthenes indisputable. Soon, scholars like Alan Dahlquist, who had formerly supported the "borrowing theory," changed their minds and admitted, in Dahlquist’s words, that Garbe had "exploded Weber’s theory once and for all." The life of Krishna and the religion of Vaisnavism had not been influenced by Christianity, but had appeared autonomously on Indian soil and was already well-established by at least the third century BC.

With Megasthenes’ proof in hand, the credibility of Indian literary sources became enhanced. The great grammarian and author of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali, who lived in the second century BC, wrote that Krishna had slain the tyrant Kamsa in the far distant past. Raychaudhari tells us the exact words were "chirahate Kamse’ which means that Kamsa’s death occurred at a very remote time." In the fifth century BC, the greatest Sanskrit grammarian, Panini, mentions that Vaisnavism "was even in the fifth century BC a religion of Bhakti," writes Raychaudhari. The Artha-shastra of Kautila, from the fourth century BC, also refers several times to Krishna, while the Baudhayana Dharma Sutra of the same century gives twelve different names for Krishna, including popular ones like Keshava, Govinda, and Damodara.

Since Krishna is mentioned in the pre-Buddhistic Chandogya Upanishad we must conclude that Krishna lived before Gautama Buddha (563?-?483 BC). The scriptures of the Jains push Krishna’s life back farther still. Raychaudhari writes, "Jaina tradition makes Krishna a contemporary of Arishtanemi… who is the immediate predecessor of Parsvanatha…. As Parsvanatha flourished about 817 B.C., Krishna must have lived long before the closing years of the ninth Century B.C." Of course, the Srimad Bhagavatam and Mahabharata themselves place Krishna’s life at about 3000 BC. Still, whatever the exact dates of Krishna’s earthly appearance and disappearance, because of the abundance of evidence of Krishna’s antiquity, The Cambridge History of India definitely states that Krishna worship predates Christianity by many centuries.