Menehem and the Son of God 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Abstract
The Oracle of Hystaspes
At the time of Christ’s birth, the king of the Kittim (Romans) was the emperor Augustus, a man who considered himself the son of God—Julius Caesar having been made a god. In 44 BC, when Julius Caesar was murdered, his will made his niece Attia’s son, Octavian, his adopted son and heir. Octavian took the name Caesar after his new father, and sought and gained divine honours for him. As Julius Caesar was divine—a god—Octavian was the son of a god, and he took upon himself the title, divi filius, or “Son of God”, and put the title on the coins he had minted after about 40 BC. Octavian was not unchallenged, however, and a decade of civil war followed in which Octavian vied with his main rival Marcus Antonius, Mark Antony. Octavian ruled the western empire and Antony the east, including Egypt and Syria, where he famously associated with the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. Eventually, the eastern rulers were defeated by Octavian at the sea battle of Actium in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Alexandria and died by suicide.
Israel Knohl (The Messiah Before Jesus) makes the interesting supposition that the Oracle of Hystaspes is concerned with these events, which it describes. Several people early in Christianity speak of the Oracle of Hystaspes—Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lydus de Mensibus, Aristokritus and Lactantius, and their quotations from it are all that remain of it. They said it was Persian. It prophesies the arrival of a saviour, the overthrow of evil as embodied in the Roman empire, and the return of world rule to Persia. However, it seems primarily to have concerned the Jews and was a pseudepigraph written by a Jew, though it has genuine Persian allusions (J R Hinnells, Man and His Salvation, Eds Sharp and Hinnells, 1973). Hystaspes was an ancestor of Cyrus the Great of Persia to whom Jews owe their salvation in the biblical “return from exile”. It shows the closeness of Judaism with Persia, and suggests that an original Persian source was used for it.
Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century AD told us the Romans would kill anyone who read this prophecy because it foretold the end of the Roman empire. Justin, supposedly apologising but apparently intent on martyrdom, stated (Apologies 1:20) that “this whole system of incorruptibles will be destroyed by fire”, and (Apologia 1:44) that evil demons [the Romans] proclaimed death “against those who read the books of Hystaspes”. He admitted that he and his Christian friends enjoyed reading it!
Paul the apostle, according to Clement of Alexandria (Stomata 6:5:30), quoted from this oracle and recommended it. It helps us understand why the Romans did not think a lot about Christians. He wrote that Paul, the Christian apostle to the gentiles used to recommend that his followers should:
Take Hystaspes, read, and you will find the Son of God described much more luminously and distinctly, and how many kings should draw up their forces against Christ, hating him and those that bear his name, His Faithful Ones…Miscellanies 6:5
Lydus de Mensibus spoke of “the Chaldaeans of Zoroaster and Hystaspes”, identifying Chaldaeans with the Magi as the Holy Ones of Zoroaster, and equating Hystaspes with the Persian prophet. They sound like Persian philosophic or theologic schools.
Aristokritus tries to show that Pagan writers agree with the Christians. He identifies Hystaspes as king of the Persians or Chaldaeans. Hystaspes received a revelation of the divine mysteries of the saviour’s incarnation, a prophecy to be fulfilled after 6000 years.
According to the Magi, for three thousand years in succession, the one of the gods rules, and the other is ruled [Ahuramazda and Ahriman]. For the next three thousand they fight and war, and break up one another’s domains. But finally Hades is to fail, and men will become happy, neither needing food, nor casting shadows.J H Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism
It is the Persian and Jewish extent of the Time of Long Dominion—the history of the material world—explained in Psalms 89:5 as “a thousand years are with the Lord as one day, and in six days God made the universe, and rested on the seventh”. So, in parallel with the creation, the world will end after 6000 years—or 9000 to allow a millennium each for the three sons of Zoroaster who are Saoshyants.
Lactantius quotes from the Oracle of Hystaspes frequently (Divine Institutions 7:15,18; Epitome 73) often without being clear that Hystaspes is his source, though the context and content leaves little doubt about it. He says Hystaspes was a king of the Medes and reported a prophecy that the pious and faithful in the Last Age would “implore the protection of Jupiter”, and would be separated from the wicked whom Jupiter would destroy. Lactantius was a Christian and takes these statements as confirming that God would destroy the world. Lactantius included a detailed apocalyptic vision with several important non-biblical elements, the calamities to be expected. Scholars judge that these must have come from the Oracle of Hystaspes because elements like those do occur in Iranian works.
Among them is the eschatological fire to be experienced by everyone, righteous or wicked, but which only the righteous survive. Though the belief is incipient in Christianity, as a reading of the gospels shows, what emerged is that first there is a Judgement, and then the wicked are cast into the flames. Disastrous flooding is also mentioned in Lactantius, the result of three years of continuous rain. Of course, such a flood occurs in the Jewish scriptures but with a promise that it will never again happen. Disease is another manifestation of the tribulations of the End. God sent plagues in Zechariah and Revelation, but disease and disaster are signs of the End caused by the Evil Spirit in Zoroastrianism. Oddly, this list of calamities or woes is not certainly original to Zoroastrianism, in that it cannot be traced to the Gathas. Purification by fire and the coming saviour are attested, but not the state of the world at the time. Doubtless they were, elsewhere in the Persians sacred texts that were destroyed, but the evidence we have is Plutarch (Isis and Osiris 46), his source being Theopompus.
The dualism of Persian religion saves God from any responsibility for human suffering. All of it is caused by the Devil. The Good Creation, static, ordered and perfect was spoilt by the Devil creating motion via time, and with it corruption and disorder, or entropy as we now understand it. Devils and demons rejoice in their final acts of destruction, but, as long as human beings are mainly on the side of Good, the evil spirits are doomed. When fire, flood and disease are among a catalogue of disasters, the original source is likely to have been Persian, and the final apocalypse is the ultimate battle of Evil against Good. Then God will send His Son to save the faithful and destroy the impious.
Who was this saviour, if the Oracle of Hystaspes was originally Persian? Was it Mithras, especially as he appeared to the Romans? The Oracle of Hystaspes is not known in the east. Alexander’s Macedonians deliberately burnt all the Zoroastrian texts when they torched Persepolis. So the book that survived in the west perhaps did so via Mithraism as it was practised in Anatolia, a heavily Persianized colony for 200 years. The idea fits the warrior god described in the Mithra Yasht.
Even better, of course, are the Saoshyants, who are specified as saviours, but are sons of Zoroaster or Zoroaster reincarnated, not sons of God. Followers of Zoroaster, in the east, are also metaphorically his sons, and Zoroaster was the founding priest of a school, so the meaning was likely to have been that the Saoshyants were meant to be members of the Zoroastrian priestly school. As the Saoshyant, in Persian tradition, offered the final Hom ceremony, he had to be a priest. How then was he a warrior? The problem is the same in Christianity where the Jewish tradition they inherited is that the saviour was a son of David, a warrior, yet Jesus was gentle (or was until the US fundies solved the problem by making him into Rambo!). The problem existed already in Judaism, as the Essene works show, and they solved it by expecting two messiahs, a warrior and a priest. Zaehner went further, offering evidence that Zoroastrians saw kingship and cultus as brothers, and the priestly and the princely savious of the Essenes seem to be a reflexion of that Persian tradition.
An argument against Mithras as the saviour is that Mithraism, at least in the west, was never considered as subversive by the Romans who evidently were suspicious of all apocalyptic cults as being against the Roman ethic. Christianity was considered as subversive, a cause of the so-called persecutions, because they considered the world order—the Roman world order in the west—as wicked and doomed, and the Oracle of Hystaspes has the same suggestion. Mithraism was a stabilizing influence in Rome, and so the emperors favoured it. Like Islam, submission was the central principle, and Mithraists were models of social conformity. The sect sought to assist the soul to rise above the world, and so no divine cleansing of it was expected or necessary. Mithraism does not seem compatible with a politically catastrophic concept of world salvation as Hystaspes envisioned, whereas the idea that the son of God was a Saoshyant was supported by three strong arguments:
- It is central to Zoroastrianism that there would be an ultimate saviour, the Saoshyant, at the apocalypse,
- Romans and Persians were enemies in the east, and so Zoroastrian oracles labelling Rome as a manifestation of Ahriman make sense,
- The person and work of the saviour were known in the west from works like the Oracle of Hystaspes and Syriac texts.
The link between the Persians and the west was the people of the lands that were originally Persian but became Greek then Roman, mainly Anatolia and Syria, but the people in Roman times who existed across the boundary were the Jews. Jews, who were Syrians and whose state had been set up by the Persians, were scattered everywhere and expected by many Romans to favour the Persians.
The Greek king, Mithradates Eupator, tried to resist the Romans in the first century BC, and could have used the anti-Roman sentiments of the Oracle of Hystaspes in his propaganda. Indeed, he seemed to present himself as a saviour, but it is unlikely Eupator originated the Oracle. The origin of it is to be found in the reactions of Persians to the Macedonian conquest. Under these circumstances, Persian propaganda against the Greeks and Macedonians—westerners—could be expected. A hypothetical proto-Hystaspes seems to have been composed before the second century, and was edited in succeeding generations after then to keep it topical. Some time in the late first century BC, probably in Anatolia, it was redacted by a Jew, and became more or less what we have now.
A True and a False Prophet
The oracle prophesied two kings, the first whose rule was intolerable, and who meditated “new designs in his breast”, among which was to “change the name of the empire and transfer its seat” of government. The second was even more terrible. He would destroy the first, call himself God, and son of God, and would come out of Syria. Christians who are obsessed with prophetic books, believing them to be some sort of truth and a proof of God, have made every effort to identify these two kings, but have failed. They are inclined to look for the kings in contemporary events, imagining that they will, like the Essenes, be able to see in these prophecies signs of the times, and especially that the end of the world is nigh!
The first king seems likely to have originally stood for the Persian empire, and the second Alexander the Great who destroyed Persia. A Jewish redacter towards the end of the first century BC, saw that the allusions almost fitted the current situation in the Roman empire, and tweaked the text here and there to make it fit better. The edited version fits Octavian and Antony respectively. When Octavian revealed Antony’s will after the latter had divorced Octavian’s sister, Octavia, it emerged that Antony had expressed the wish to be buried in Alexandria, with Cleopatra. Octavian insinuated, and the Senate concurred, that Antony planned to move the capital of the empire to Alexandra, if he had emerged as the victor in their rivalry, and been able to unite the empire under his rule. Dio Cassius (Roman History 50:4:1) confirmed that Romans feared Antony planned to move the capital to Egypt, and Antony’s coins of the period also suggest it. Romans were outraged and increasingly backed Octavian in the civil war. In the Oracle of Hystaspes, the first king’s plans matched Antony’s. The second king, who destroyed the first, fits Octavian, who took the title divi filius.
Hystaspes adds that the second king would be a false prophet who would bring fire from heaven, an accusation that brings in Revelation where the same imagery is used. The basis of Revelation is previous legendary history, probably preserved by the Essenes because of their interest in prophecy. They will have copied books like the Oracle of Hystaspes with added comments some of which which subsequently will have been incorporated into the main text. Thus the comments drawing attention to the parallels of Persia and Alexander with Antony then Rome, and Octavian will have been read by later less scrupulous or more ignorant authors as part of the original text. The mixing up of eras and legends has made the end product less clear than it once was, but Knohl seems to have found parallels that seem hard to ignore. In Revelation 13, two beasts are described, matching in some respects the two kings of Hystaspes. The first beast had seven heads and ten horns, but one head was gravely wounded. Everyone in the world worshipped this beast. The second arose from the earth, with two horns like a lamb but with the voice of a dragon. It made fire come from heaven and persuaded people to make an image of the first beast and worship it. The description is that of the false prophet in the Oracle of Hystaspes.
The second beast, speaking like a dragon but with lambs horns was doubtless originally Alexander, but the first century BC author saw close similarities between this beast and Octavian Augustus, who had adopted the sign of Capricorn, the sign of his conception, as symbolic of his divinity, and put it on his coins. Capricorn represented the ANE storm god of winter who fertilized the parched soil. One instance of this god is Yehouah, the Jewish God and Oannes or John, identified with Ea, the Babylonian water god. Suetonius and Dio Cassius say Augustus’s mother, Attia, had spent a night in the temple of Apollo where she had dreamt she had had intercourse with Python, the serpent or dragon associated with Apollo at Delphi. The story had impressed Julius Caesar, Attia’s uncle. Apollo was, of course, the sun god, the fertilizing sun, whereas the dragon is its opposite the destructive winter sun of the north or summer sun of the ANE. After his victory over Alexander at Actium, Augustus built a new temple to Apollo, who had allegedly fought on his side, on the Palatine Hill, with a statue of the god in the emperor’s likeness. Coins were even minted in Asia with Augustus represented as Apollo. Enemies of Augustus suggested he was not Apollo but the dragon, and nor was he the oracular dragon of Delphi, but a false prophet. A Yarbro Collins sought to show (The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation) that the author of the original myth of Revelation, a first century AD Jew of Asia Minor had seen Augustus in this light, but wanted to demonstrate it was wrong and the true prophet was the messiah of the Jews. The author of Revelation, John, if it was he, adapted the earlier author.
The second beast of Revelation persuaded the whole world to worship the first beast, but now this beast was not Antony, the first king in the readacted Hystaspes, but something all together bigger than the earlier two beasts, the Roman empire, worshipped in the image of its emperors, as R H Charles showed. The beast’s heads were the actual emperors thus far, dating the redaction, and one, the first, Julius Caesar, was mortally wounded, threatening the life of the beast itself, but it recovered. This dates the redaction to the rule of Galba in 69 AD when the Jewish war was being fought, the original purpose of it being anti-Roman bitterness and propaganda. Not only did the heads, the emperors, represent the beast, the empire, but Augustus had statues of the goddess Roma, erected in temples built in his honour. So, it was perfectly correct in Revelation to say that images of the beast, the Roman empire, in the form of the goddess Roma, were made to be worshipped. The older Oracle of Hystaspes was used as a vehicle to parody Augustus and the Roman empire as dragons opposed to the true God and Son of God of the Christians.
The Oracle of Hystaspes described how a great prophet would come and turn men back to God. In the context suggested by the Persian name of the title, this prophet must have been the Saoshyant, an incarnation of Zoroaster, but the idea was passed on to the Jews who preserved it when Alexander destroyed Persia as an independent state. Lactantius, in his version of the Oracle of Hystaspes, notes that the false prophet, the wicked son of God, overcame the true prophet, and left him unburied for three days before he was lifted up to heaven. As Jesus was, for Lactantius, the true prophet, Augustus was again the false one.
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Moses and Exodus
