What is the evidence for Buddhist origins?

[Faid]

Glad you agree. Next time try to at least have a vague notion of the issues you try to argue about.

[shunyadragon]

Friends the oldest Buddhist texts datable at present are from the first century AD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandh%C4%81ran_Buddhist_Texts

The Senior collection was bought by R. Senior, a British collector. The Senior collection may be slightly younger than the British Library collection. It consists almost entirely of canonical sutras, and, like the British Library collection, was written on birch bark and stored in clay jars.[5] The jars bear inscriptions referring to Macedonian rather than Indian month names, as is characteristic of the Kaniska era from which they derive.[6] There is a "strong likelihood that the Senior scrolls were written, at the earliest, in the latter part of the first century A.D., or, perhaps more likely, in the first half of the second century. This would make the Senior scrolls slightly but significantly later than the scrolls of the British Library collection, which have been provisionally dated to the first half of the first century."[7] Saloman writes:
The Senior collection is superficially similar in character to the British Library collection in that they both consist of about two dozen birch bark manuscripts or manuscript fragments arranged in scroll or similar format and written in Kharosthi script and Gandhari language. Both were found inside inscribed clay pots, and both are believed to have come from the same or nearby sites, in or around Hadda in eastern Afghanistan. But in terms of their textual contents, the two collections differ in important ways. Whereas the British Library collection was a diverse mixture of texts of many different genres written by some two dozen different scribes (Salomon 1999: 22-55, esp. 22-23 and 54-55), all or nearly all of the manuscripts in the Senior collection are written in the same hand, and all but one of them seem to belong to the same genre, namely sutra. Moreover, whereas all of the British Library scrolls were fragmentary and at least some of them were evidently already damaged and incomplete before they were interred in antiquity (Salomon 1999: 69-71; Salomon 2000: 20-23), some of the Senior scrolls are still more or less complete and intact and must have been in good condition when they were buried. Thus the Senior scrolls, unlike the British Library scrolls, constitute a unified, cohesive, and at least partially intact collection that was carefully interred as such.[7] He further reports that "largest number of parallels for the sutras in the Senior collection are in the Samyutta-nikaya and the corresponding collections in Sanskrit and Chinese."[8]

© source where applicable

[moreta]

Just want to throw this in, (and possibly stir things up)...

The Hellenistic period emerged, approximately, (c.323-30BC).

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_period

Solomon's Temple, also known as the First Temple, was the temple in Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount (also known as Mount Zion), before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar II after the Siege of Jerusalem of 587 BCE.

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_Temple


Y'all keep talking about Solomon's Temple being a hellenistic building...Notice above...
The Hellenistic Period started about 250 years after the temple was destroyed.

[shunyadragon]

Just want to throw this in, (and possibly stir things up)...


http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_period

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_Temple


Y'all keep talking about Solomon's Temple being a hellenistic building...Notice above...
The Hellenistic Period started about 250 years after the temple was destroyed.

Welcome to Tweb!!

If your referring to Omniskeptical's rambling's, they are hardly relevant to the thread. He was probably referring to Greek influence. but the evidence of any major outside influence and technology in building temples would be Egyptian.