This is the hashtag STR-esque podcast. Welcome to you. And this is the podcast where Greg Kokel and I, Amy Hall, answer your questions.

And this first question, Greg, this one, it's funny, this used to be a really popular question.

I haven't heard it so much anymore, but I know it's still around.

And it comes from Tim.

I read the Christian's story of his birth, and there was a star at

Krishna's birth. How can that be just a coincidence that Jesus had a star at his birth, too,

written about after the Krishna birth account? Also, at Krishna's birth, many babies were killed

just like at Jesus' birth, and Krishna's father went to pay taxes just like Jesus' father.

Also, Krishna was transfigured like Jesus.

This troubles me.

All right.

Well, there's a lot going on here.

And I don't know hardly anything about Krishna, all right.

But I do know the Bhagavakita, which is the main text for Hinduism, for Vedantic Hinduism,

I guess, and Krishna is the main character.

It makes no pretense to being an historical account, all right?

There's no pretense at all.

It is a fable.

They know that, but it's communicating spiritual

truth. In the case of Jesus, we see something different. And what we see there is, at least

minimally, the pretense of writing an historical account, which, by the way, is the reason

that historians of the period use these primary source historical documents

...