It is generally well known that Christians don’t tend to hold favorable views towards the founders of other religions. At least historically, Christians have generally seen founders of non-Christian religions as heretics or false prophets. This is why, for instance, as I discuss in this article from June 2020, in his poem The Inferno, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (lived c. 1265 – 1321) portrays Muhammad, the founder of Islam, being tortured in Hell with his torso split open from his chin to his anus and his guts spilling out, dangling between his legs.
For this reason, many people may be surprised to learn that Siddhārtha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, has actually been honored as a saint in Christianity for well over a thousand years under the name Ioasaph, which is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word bodhisattva. It’s a bizarre, fascinating story of religious cross-culturalism that demonstrates how surprisingly interconnected the cultures of the Old World were during the Middle Ages.
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