Zoroastrian Influences on Judaism and Christianity I.3
Pre-Zoroastrian Iranian Religion
What right have we to neglect matters which concern not only the past record of our spiritual development but its present healthfulness?Lawrence H Mills
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 17, 2000
Abstract
The Person of the Prophet
According to the Avesta (Yasna 9:17), Airyanem Vahu, on the river Darya, the old sacred country of the gods, was the home of Zoroaster, and the scene of his first appearance. Now, according to the Bundahish, Airan Vej was situated in the direction of Atropatene, and consequently Airyanem Vahu is for the most part identified with the district of Arran on the river Aras (Araxes), close by the north-western frontier of Media. Other traditions, however, make him a native of Ragha. According to Yasna 59:18, the Zarathushtrotema, or supreme head of the Zoroastrian priesthood, had at a later (Sassanian) time, his residence in Ragha. Shahrastani thinks his father was a man of Atropatene, while the mother was from Ragha.
In his home, he saw the celestial visions and conversed with the archangels and Ahuramazda as the Gathas relate. According to Yasht 5:105, he prayed that he might convert King Vishtaspa. He then appears to have quitted his native district, and after many dangers and difficulties, depicted in legend in the later books, he found in Vishtaspa, apparently a prince of east Iran (according to later legend, king of Bactria, probably a king of Chorasmia or Khwarezmia, south of the Aral Sea in Central Asia), the powerful protector and faithful disciple of the new religion he desired. He joins the pre-Zoroastrian world of Iran with the new era of Zoroaster. In the Gathas, he appears historical. In Yasna 53:2, he is spoken of as a pioneer of the doctrine revealed by Ahuramazda. Vishtaspa seems to be the archetypal pious Persian king.
King Vishtaspa does not help much with the historical date of Zoroaster. Vishtaspa does not seem to have any place in any historical chronology, and the Gathas give no hint on the subject. Vishtaspa was long thought to have been the historical Hystaspes, father of Darius I, but it then means the Avestan geneaology is utterly mythical, to no obvious purpose. No one in the court of Vishtaspa can be identified as historical unless king Vishtaspa is king Hystaspes, and queen Hutuosa is queen Atossa, but in history Atossa was associated with Cambyses and Darius, not Hystaspes.
The only secure historical evidence shows that Zoroaster began to propagate his religion at some time before Cyrus the Great conquered Media in 550 BC. According to the Arda Viraf 1:2, Zoroaster taught about 300 years before Alexander the Great, but Assyrian inscriptions put him before then. Oleg Petrov, author of the Temple of Zoroaster website, tells us that, according to Zoroastrian tradition, he flourished in 588 BC, 258 years before Alexander, who conquered the Persians in 330 BC. Zoroaster is said to have converted Vishtaspa when he was 40 years old. If this is assumed to have been when he “flourished” then Zoroaster was born about 628 BC, and died about 551 BC, because tradition made him 77 years old when he died. Western scholars would date him much earlier on the basis of the Gathas, Mills thus judging them to be 900-700 BC. If Eduard Meyer (1908) is right, the name Mazdaka, a proper name of Medes in 715 BC, shows the Zoroastrian religion was already predominant in Media before then. Meyer, therefore, followed Dunker (Geschichte des Altertums) in dating Zoroaster at 1000 BC. Dr Mary Boyce dates him before 1000 BC on the basis of similarities in the Gathas to the Vedas, and the primitive pastoralism of them, suggesting that they were not written for a settled society. Whether this is going too early or not, Zoroaster belongs in the prehistory of Iran. Gautama, the Buddha, was born about 550 BC, Confucius about the same time and Lao Tse, if he lived at all, was about 600 BC, so Zoroaster predated all of these great thinkers.
If the late dates for Zoroaster are correct, the new religion, once launched, must have spread with the astonishing rapidity. It is more realistic to allow time enough for the religion to be significant by the time the Achaemenids took to it. The history of Persia and the Achaemenids before Cyrus is not well known, and nor is it that well known afterwards, considering the importance of the Persian conquest to the history of the world, but the evidence is clear that the Persian kings were Zoroastrians, and it seems safest to assume that some not too distant ancestor of Cyrus was converted. So Zoroaster will have lived at the latest around the eighth century BC.
“Zarathustra” seems to be a compound of “Zara” meaning “golden” because it is the bright quality of the sun (surya) and “Ushtra”, possibly adopted from Babylonian (Ishtar) meaning star. To translate it as meaning “having many camels”, or “having aged camels” (Avestan, ustra, camel) seems unlikely despite Zoroaster’s herdsmen community, unless the whole is meant to be a pun, or was later read as having a more noble meaning. So Zarathrustra is a Golden Star, or possibly, if Zara simply means sun, the “Star of the Sun”, or if Zara means spirit or deity, God of the stars or heavens. Mithras was the sun as justice, but Ahuramazda was the sun beyond the sun—the God of the Heavens—the power behind the Cosmos who wore heaven as his “massy cloke”. The “Star of the Sun” is the morning star that heralds the rising of the sun. Thus Zoroaster is the herald or prophet of God whether as Mithras or Ahuramazda.
According to Diogenes Laertius (Pro 6:8), the Magi claimed that ‘Zoroaster’ was the Greek translation of his Persian name. Zoroaster’s name meant ‘priest of the stars’ or ‘diviner by the stars”. In the Clementine Recognitiones (4:28), Zoroaster’s name is said to mean ‘living star,’ and in the Homilies (9-5), supposedly his correspondence with Jesus’s brother James authenticated by a letter from Peter, the name represents “the living influence of the star”. Diogenes Laertius (Pro 2:2) adds that some Magi who flourished before the time of Alexander the Great had the name Astrampsychos, ‘the living star’ or ‘incarnate star,’ perhaps another translation of ‘Zoroaster.’
Indeed, Zoroaster might be a word that came to mean a god-sent “prophet”. At Rhages there are hints at more than one Zoroaster, and he is sometimes referred to as the best or highest “Zoroaster”—Zarathustrotema. It implies an order of prophet-priests either in a hierarchy, or possibly a group of them at community level led by a Zarathustrotema. The priestly caste were called the Magi (equivalent to the Brahmins of India) whose leader was considered a direct successor to Zoroaster.
The miraculous and the legendary are absent from the Gathas, Zoroaster being a thoroughly human and fully emotional man, making the Gathas quite acceptable to rationalists, but the legends that are written about him later get more and more biblical. In the Vendidad, as one of the original Nards, a book that precedes Alexander the Great’s destruction of Persepolis, 331 years before Christ was born, Zoroaster was born of a virgin impregnated by a supreme god, who sent an emanation of himself (“khvarena”) to fertilize her, just as Yehouah sent the Holy Ghost to cover the Virgin Mary. As soon as he emerged from his mother’s body, he laughed loudly, showing that life is good and the material world is part of God’s Good Creation, not a domain of wickedness. Zoroaster is tempted by Satan! He was threatened with death by a king as a baby, started his ministry at 30, was tempted, healed and taught. He championed the oppressed, lived an ascetic life, was persecuted and finally was murdered.
J Bidez & F Cumont say the Jews claimed that Zoroaster was a Jew and wrote in Hebrew. The story is that Zoroaster was an Israelite, whose true name was Baruch. He was born in the colony of the northern tribes which, according to the Jewish scriptures (2 Kgs 17:6,18:1), had been transported to Media. The Magi claimed to be a Median holy tribe. They insisted that their blood was transmitted through females hence their famous dogma of “xvaetvadatha” by which it was holy to have intercourse with a mother or sister. The original Jews of Yehud might have been Magi, but there is no clear evidence that the Magi were Jews.
He was born into a noble, possibly priestly, family the Spitama, the “White Ones” traditionally at Rhages (Ragha) in Media near Tehran, though truthfully further east. The people were settled stockholders troubled by nomads from the north-east, like the Persians themselves, who frequently raided and were therefore thought of as devils.
Zoroaster grew up with a love of wisdom and righteousness but seems not to have been specially educated. According to tradition, Zoroaster remained at home until he was twenty, when he retired into a desert for ten years. One morning, when he was thirty, he went at dawn into a river to bathe and fetch fresh water for a cup of haoma, a sacred drink thought to have been an infusion of the mushroom Amanita muscaria. Emerging suitably purified from ritual lustrations, he had a vision of an angel in the form of a shining being called Vohu Manu (Good Purpose), an Amesha Spenta (archangel). Guided by Good Purpose, Zoroaster encountered a theophany of the supreme god, Ahuramazda, at the top of a mountain. Enthroned in glory and attended by the six Amesha Spentas, the agents by which He effects his commands, Ahura Mazda revealed to Zoroaster the True Religion and made him its prophet.
He answered God’s call and returned with the truth he had to tell to the whole world, but his teachings aroused opposition from traditionalists. This is some 1200 years minimum before Mohammed, and 600 years minimum before Jesus, and is even before the Jewish “prophets”, who only the most died-in-the-wool Jews and Christians now think are genuininely dated by their own works, because they are really pseudepigraphs written in the Persian period!
It will all sound familiar to any Jew or Christian because it is the framework of Moses’s theophany with Yehouah, and ultimately of the Transfiguration and mission of Jesus. Christians will laugh at the name of the angel, saying it is like Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress, but Bunyan did not dream up the practice. Jews know what most Christians do not, and that is that many scriptural names also illustrate some characteristic of their owner, though even Christians must know that Jesus means the “Saviour of God” just as his devotees claim him to be.
Saviours typically disdain women, but Zoroaster was an exception. Jesus was not an exception. He condemned sex and despised women, even his mother, whom he addresses curtly as “woman” and informs that he will have nothing to do with her. When Zoroaster had established himself at the court of King Vishtaspa, he married, eventually having three wives, of whom the third, Hvovi, was the daughter of the King’s Prime Minister.
Later tradition credits him with having married his seven sisters and the sister-daughter that his mother conceived by him. That was undoubtedly invented by the Magi to support their dogma of “xvaetvadatha”. The legitimacy of marriage between brother and sister has to be accepted by religions which teach that human beings descended from a primal couple. The myth of Adam and Eve must mean that Eve incestuously copulated with her sons, and her unmentioned daughters with her sons and husband. Zoroastrian theologians make the first pair of proper humans the twins, Masi and Masanl. Women were created equal to males in the Zoroastrian religion, and not as an afterthought by a God with no forethought, proof, if any be needed, that the Hebrew God is not the Supreme God, who has forethought.
The Magi invented the doctrine of “xvaetvadatha” to justify marriages with sisters, mothers, and daughters by which they preserved their bloodline. It is this preservation of the bloodline that required the drastic action of Ezra in the Jewish bible, of dismissing the local wives that the initial colonists had taken on, and it is the same that causes Jews still to deplore marriages outside their faith, and to consider as jews only children of Jewish mothers.
When Zoroaster was engaged in coitus with Hvovi, waiting angels (fravashis) stole his semen and took it to to Lake Kayansih, where 99,999 angels guard it until an unsuspecting virgin bathes in it and is impregnated. Her son is the new saviour, Zoroaster reincarnated—the Saoshyant. In the lake, the holy semen glows in the depths like three lamps. Saviours, as in Christianity, have a habit of being late, and theologians have then to revise their arcane theories. Zoroaster gives the impression, in the Gathas, he expected the Last Judgement in the near future, but it did not arrive on time. So, Magian theologians prophesied three sons for Zoroaster, by the semen of each lamp with successive bathing virgins, separated by millennia. Similarly, early Christians invented the millennium of Revelation when Jesus failed to appear on cue. As Zoroaster is the son of Ahuramazda, so will his third son become the last saviour, the “Saoshyant”, who will deliver the world from evil, resurrect the dead, preside at the Last Judgement, and “abolish space and time” to inaugurate an era of perfect, unchanging happiness for truthful people.
Zoroaster did not try to overthrow belief in the older polytheistic Iranian religion, but placed Ahuramazda at the centre of it as the most high god promising his desirable kingdom of immortality and bliss to the righteous. He described Heaven as a green place, a beautiful meadow or a Royal Park—in Persian, paradise. Zoroaster, like Christians, wanted to convert everyone—he even sent missionaries to India. The Christian scholar, James Hope Moulton has written:
Zoroaster taught nothing about God which a Christian would not endorse and much that a Christian should add.
But besides the promise of eternal life for the righteous, the religion of Zoroaster related to the everyday lives of the Iranian cattle and sheep rearing smallholders and peasants. Though they regarded the maurauding nomads as devils, they had only recently settled themselves and many were probably still semi-nomadic but grazing a fixed locality.
Zoroaster preached his revelation from God for ten years, encountering the persecutions and temptations that all subsequent saviours also had to endure. When he despaired or needed encouragement each of the six Amesha Spentas appeared to help him, but he failed to convert anyone. Then his cousin accepted his message. Accompanied by his first convert, Zoroaster continued to work fruitlessly for two more years. Finally, he was thrown in prison in Bactria and languished there until he had the chance to cure one of the king’s horses. This king of Bactria, Vishtaspa (Greek, Hystaspes), is unknown to history but was so impressed that eventually he too accepted Zoroaster’s message after two years of persuasion, and quaffing drafts of “haoma”. Vishtaspa was converted to Zoroaster’s teachings, and Zoroastrianism had the bridgehead it needed. Vistaspa, inspired by his new visions, offered his subjects the choice of being righteous or being dead, and they chose to be righteous. The prophet does not seem to have objected.
An historical Hystaspes was the father of the Persian King, Darius, and a governor of Parthia from about 550 BC, who worshipped Ahuramazda. He was probably a Zoroastrian, as was his father Cyrus, but it seems unlikely that this Hystaspes was the legendary one. Zoroastrianism seems already to have been a religion of the Medes in the time of the Assyrian king Sargon II, about 715 BC, implying either that Zoroaster lived earlier or that there were Zoroasters before Zoroaster!
If Hystaspes was not the legendary figure, at least the fact that he was called Hyspaspes—presumably after the legendary king of Chorasmia—is evidence that the earliest Achaemenids were Zoroastrian. But, if the Persian kings were Zoroastrian, the religion had already begun to decay from its highest initial ideals. They certainly revered Ahuramazda as the universal god but increasingly recognized “other gods”.
From the Zoroastrian records, names associated with Zoroaster’s mythology begin to appear in the royal line. Arsames, cousin of Cyrus I, called his son Vishtaspa presumably after Zoroaster’s patron. It was a rare name among the Achaemenids but commoner in the east. Others appear including women’s names. These names suggest that the Achaemenids were devout Zoroastrians by the sixth century BC. The Achaemenids might have been easterners who came west bringing their religion with them and married into the Persian nobility when they settled in Anshan. Equally, a Zoroaster from Rhages could have converted Vishtaspa, just as in the legend, but this Zoroaster was a late member of the line, while the one in the Gathas is his ancestor, or predecessor. This latter explanation would allow for Media always being considered as having a longer Zoroastrian tradition than Persia.
Scholars guess that Zoroastrianism barely existed in a pure form anywhere except in Zoroaster’s writings. When the emerging nation of the Persians with their new religion, had their first victory over their fellow Iranians, the Medes, the well-established Median priesthood called the Magi were strengthened. The Achaemenid kings were keen to forge unity and interested in religion mainly for practical and political reasons.
Zoroastrianism was the national religion of Turania besides Persia, and spread to Armenia and Cappadocia, thence to the whole near east. It was the state religion of Persia under the Achaemenid kings when, before the Romans, they ruled the known civilized world, the Arsacid kings, the Indo-Scythian kings, and was revived by the Sassanid kings. In this revival it influenced the sect founded by Mani, the Manichaeans, Bogomiles and thence, the Albigensians.
The possibility of influence on the foundation of Buddhism and Chinese philosophies seems not to have been widely propagated, though Persian tradition has it that Zoroaster travelled both to India and China. In some passages in the Gathas Zoroaster calls himself the “One who Knows”, “Vaedamna” (cf Veda), a title that might be translated as “Buddha” or “Gnostic”. Even the name, Avesta, of the Zoroastrian bible means “Knowledge” from the verb “Veda” (past participle, “vista”), the same root as “Buddha”.
Zoroaster is also supposed to have travelled to Babylon, which is not unreasonable. Berossus, a priest of Bel-Marduk in Babylon in the reign of the Seleucid king, Antiochus II, about 250 BC, wrote a history of Babylon in which he claimed that Zoroaster founded a dynasty there in 2000 BC. Berossus was fitting his history into a fixed cycle just as the writers of the Jewish scriptures did. Berossus used a cycle of 36,000 years from the first man to the conquest by Alexander. Unfortunately there seems to be no relationship between the kings listed by Berossus and the king lists found on cuneiform tablets, so we must assume that Berossus did not really have any reliable sources for his histories. In any case, whatever he wrote has been destroyed in the Christian era, and all we now have are fragments preserved in Josephus and Eusebius containing this tradition.
He is also supposed to have gone to Anatolia, allowing for the possibility of an early influence on the Greek philosophy of the Ionians, like Thales of Miletus. An indirect influence seems certain. In 530 BC, the Greek philosopher, Xenophanes is telling us that there is a single apparently transcendental god. Pythagoras himself was said to have learnt from the Magi of Babylon, and the Neo-Pythagoreans’ doctrines of immortality and dualism owed much to Magian belief. The playwright, Aeschylus, takes for granted a belief in one supreme god. Plato mentions Zoroaster in Alcibiades, describing him as a son of Oromazdes—the God Ahuramazda (later called Ormuzd).
The apocryphal Book of Tobit seems to contain a lot of Magian allusions including the Holy City of Zoroastrianism, Rhages. In the story, the young Tobiah and the angel Raphael went on a trip to Rhages with Tobit’s dog. When they returned to Nineveh, the dog ran ahead, bringing the news of their return and “showed his joy by fawning and wagging his tail”. Esther is set in the court of the Persian king. There seem to be links between the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria and Zoroastrianism. The Neo-Platonist leader, Appolonius, came from Tyana, a Cappadocian city where Persian influence was strong. Judaism and Gnosticism were indebted to Persian religion.
The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran Community had an astonishing flavour of Persian religion, and from its Essene origins as well as the later influence of Mithraism so does Christianity. The appearance of the Wise Men of the East, considered to be Magi, in the gospel of Matthew offering gifts to the infant god seems to be a symbolic recognition that here was the Zoroastrian Saoshyant. It implies that the writer was aware of a link, and a need to demonstrate to others who might notice it that the Magians accepted it.
The Persian Religion
The Gathas were written in a primitive society when herdsmen had to practice as warriors when called upon to do so. In the Zoroastrian Gathas, there is no mention of agriculture, seed sowing or harvesting, though these appear in the Younger Avesta. All of Zoroaster’s imagery is that of a cow herder. Even the Younger Avesta is ancient, being “younger” only linguistically, but is still full of ancient Pagan pre-Zoroastrian ideas. It was not as revered as the Gathas. The Gathas, however, suggest a settled community! So, the pastoral imagery might have been a religious convention of the poetry and hymns. It seems the long tradition of pastoralism in the steppes had established conventions and these were preserved through the period of the move to the south.
In the heroic Iranian Bronze Age, warriors separated as charioteers and joined local chiefs who were simply bandits. “Rathaester” is a chariot rider, and is a word that could be argued appeared in the name Zarathustra, before it was corrupted in a punning way—an ancient “Surya Raethester” morphs into Zarathustra. The impetus for the change could have been Zoroaster’s enemies sneering, “This charioteer of the sun is more a herder of many camels”. Guffaw!
The more primitive tribes, such as Zoroaster’s own, that lacked the technology for advanced weapons, were plagued by attacks from the raiding bandits, whom Zoroaster said preferred “the rule of tyrants and deceit rather than truth (GY 32:12)”. That the society of Zoroaster seemed settled might suggest he lived in a society of early migrants from the steppes, and had been among the first to settle, perhaps in Chorasmia. The misery and injustice of these times must have led Zoroaster to envisage a future time of justice and retribution to redress the evils of his own day. He became the first apocalyptist.
The various tribes of Persia were, like the Aryans that had gone before them into India, nature worshippers, worshipping a pantheon of lesser gods and spirits, called daevas. Some of the differences between the Rig-Veda and the ideas in the Gathas are typical of those introduced by religious reformers. Indian religion is, or was, notably sensual and Yasna 44:9 declares that the purification of religion from sensuality was a basis of Zoroaster’s mission. The Gathas mention no female deity sharing Ahuramazda’s rule. The religion of Zoroaster was markedly puritanical. Later religious reformers took their cues from Zoroaster.
Spirits in the Rig-Veda are “daevas” but in the reformed religion of Zoroaster, the “daevas” are devils. The way to put people off old gods when trying to introduce a new one is always to categorize them as devils. Zoroaster originally favoured one god, Ahura Mazda (Zoroaster used the words separately and in either order), so the others—often household gods depicted as idols, the teraphim of the scriptures and the Babylonians—were demonized and their priesthood denounced as idolators. Eventually daevas (devils) increased in numbers as their old identities were forgotten until there were millions of them, all manipulated by the Evil Spirit from hell.
Christianity made most of the old Pagan gods they met into devils. If that ploy eventually failed to put people off them, the bishops made them into Christian saints. Perhaps this is what the Magi did. A few daevas could not be demonized, they were too well regarded, and were retained as assistants to Ahuramazda, and eventually re-introducing as the much loved gods of the Indo-Europeans, but inferior to the Most High God, Ahuramazda. It seems Mithras was one such who emerged as an independent cult.
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Moses and Exodus
