Christianity
History and Meaning of Salvation 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 17 February, 2008
Etymology of Salvation
J R Hinnells says that salvation, not belief in gods, defines religion. So, what is salvation? What are people to be saved from? The answer is whatever it is that oppresses them, often physical oppression by foreign colonials or a greedy power elite, social disintegration, or suffering in general—loneliness, depression, death. In short, the tribulations of life.
Our word, “Salvation”, is from the Latin “salvus” meaning “sound” in the sense of “whole” or “intact” and referred to people’s health. The expression “salvus sis” means “may you be well”, or, more freely, “good health” or even “bless you”, as we might say when someone sneezes, a sneeze being, in times past, possibly the first symptom of an impending death. The goddess Salus, “The Giver of Health”, was in charge of the health of Latins. The words, “salvare”, “to save”, “salvator”, “saviour”, and “salvatior”, “salvation”, are not classical Latin words but were Christian inventions by the time of S Augustine of Hippo. So a word for health in popular classical usage became a specifically religious word for Christians.
The Hebrew word for saving is from the root “yesh” which implies broadness or width, and so spaciousness and freedom from constraint—in fact, freedom! Words in the root, yesha, are remarkably common in the poetic forms of the Psalms. The verb form occurs over fifty times in Psalms whereas it hardly appears at all in the Pentateuch, and where it does is often a poetic passage possible added later. After Psalms, most instances of these words are in Isaiah. The same is true of the related verb form hosia. It is circumstantial evidence that the Psalms were written by the Essenes, whose name is from the same root, and whose entire raison d’etre is salvation. The Essenes had a literature of their own containing many psalms and hymns. So they were undoubtedly writing hymns like the Psalms, and few scholars now accept that the Psalter was written by David the king. Who then did write them, if not the Essenes?
The Greek word used in the Septuagint to translate words in the Semitic root yesh is sozein, “to save”, with soteria and soterion for “saviour” and “salvation”. But about 40 per cent of these words in the Septuagint translate other Hebrew words besides those in yesh. What are these words? They are “to help”, “to deliver”, “to rescue”, “to escape”, “to keep alive” and “to survive”. Evidently, the Jews had plenty of words that could only be rendered as “to save” in Greek. It suits Christians now to play down the sense of salvation in these Hebrew words in the Jewish scriptures, but there is no doubt about the meaning of the Greek.
Greek Salvation
Right back to Homer’s day, they had a divine connotation. Both Zeus and Kore had the divine title, soter, saviour, according to Xenophon and Aristophanes respectively (Oxford Classical Dictionary, sv soter). For the Greeks too, the salvation was often from some peril, such as oppression, invasion or plague. Sacrificial festivals commemorating a victory or salvation from some threat were called soteria, and had often began with a contemporary sacrificial gathering to plead with a god to be saved from the threat. One such was the Eleutheria, dedicated to Zeus for victory over Xerxes’ Persians in 479 BC. The festivals were at first dedicated to the saving god, but later ones were dedicated often to the leader who did the saving. Either way, they show that the notion was not simply spiritual, but had a real world, political dimension.
Eastern kings were often demi-gods to their subjects, being the person who brought from god the practicalities of kingship. In a passage from Psalms, we read, “Ye God, my king, is of old”, so God was the true king of the Jews, and the earthly ruler called the king revealed the God’s wishes on earth. Greek kings like Alexander the Great and his successors saw practical sense in this and declared themselves gods or demi-gods, and even a demi-god must seem like a god to a mere mortal. Antigonus III who ruled Macedonia about a century after Alexander, titled Euergetes, or Benefactor, while he was alive, was given the title soter after his death. In Egypt, the dynasty of Greek kings started by Alexander’s general, Ptolemy, used the title soter (Ptolemy I and Ptolemy VIII), and the successor of Alexander’s general Seleucus in Syria also used it (Antiochus I and Seleucus III). In Anatolia, Attalus I was the victor over the invading Celts, the Galatians, and he also took the title soter. In Smyrna, threatened by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus III, the people prayed to the goddess Roma for salvation from the Syrian king.
But already in the Hellenistic age, people were seeing salvation as more of a personal freeing from the vicissitudes of life. The spread of astrology, magic, the mystery cults, Orphism and transcendental philosophies like neo-Pythagoreanism and neo-Platonism, Judaism and then Christianity, were all to do with salvation (H Jonas, The Gnostic Religion). Gnostics treated Christianity as expressing the myth of their heavenly man being incarnated as a divine redeemer of humanity from its captivity in the material world ruled by the Evil Spirit, the Demiurgos or Maker. For Gnostics, salvation was restoring humanity to its original perfection. All of the main elements of these beliefs originated in Persian religion, and came west in the random way they did because Alexander destroyed Persia, and its religious books, so what remained was transmitted orally in the schools of Magi, left unemployed by the fall of Persia, setting themselves up as self-employed prophets and magicians.
W G Oxtoby of Toronto University admits that a few scholars have, for over a century, been exploring the extent of Persian religion on Judaism and the Greeks, and via both on Christianity. D Winston has a short review in History of Religions VI, (1966).
The Persians were a world power and Judah a tiny principality, smaller than Wales. You have to believe the mouse can roar at the lion to think the Persians took their religion from Judaism, giving it more sense, and simultaneously ignoring the profound links the Avesta has with the Vedas. The bible, far from being divinely immune from alteration, has been repeatedly edited, especially in its early years when its history is largely unknown. The Iranian holy books were partly reassembled after Alexander had destroyed them originally, and also edited. Even so, honest scholars can use comparative studies of style and vocabulary to analyse these works, and know that parts of the Avesta are so similar to the Indian Vedas, that they must have a common root in a common era. The Jewish scriptures, on the other hand, were started in the period of Persian world dominance, when Persia ruled Judah, after the biblical “exile”. Everything points to Judaism being so massively influenced by Persian culture that it was actually invented to reflect it.
Oxtoby leads us here, but then typically disparagingly implies there is not much to go on:
…there is simply some final conflict, some last judgement, some ultimate reward of salvation for the righteous.
This can be accepted only in the sense we have no document date-stamped to 500 BC that tells us this for sure. All of these appear in the Zoroastrian books we have, even though many are late. After all, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the Jewish scriptures were just as late, but no one doubted they were older, and as noted above, whole books of the Avesta can be dated by the archaism of content, language and style. Caution in scholarship is quite proper, but the Christian motive in casting doubt on the antiquity of Zoroastrianism has nothing to do with scholarly caution, and entirely to do with their dread that Christ might be discovered in Persia! It is a well founded fear.
Jewish Salvation
We are expected to believe, and Jews and Christians, do believe, that a people deported off into captivity and slavery suddenly had the time and the incentive to devise countless improvements for their, now defunct, religion on the unlikely off chance that they might one day be able to return and put it all in place. And by a miracle of God, they do! In fact, colonists were sent in to Judah with a law expressly to set up a “restored” worship of Yehouah:
All the commandments which I command thee this day ye shall observe to do, that ye may live and multiply and go in and possess the land which the Lord swore unto your forefathers.Deuteronomy 7:1
God’s instruction to Moses to show the Jews how to live was the instruction of the minister of the Persian shah—the Lord—to the leader of the colonists being sent into Yehud. The leader is the “thee” and the colonists the “ye”, the instructions also being read out to the colonists in shrines and then the temple. The supposed law and prophecies of the exile were the instructions given to the colonists that the Persian government would back. Those who returned were not previously exiled Judahites but became Jews by doing as they were told and imposing the law of Yehouah. Later additions by the Greeks and Maccabees gave us the Jewish scriptures we now have.
But whether you believe God spoke these commands or a man in history, it is about the law that must be followed in life, not in death. The Christians made it life after death, thereby combining Judaism and Hellenism, but the Essenes had already made the transition, and Paul took his idea from them.
The God of the Jews often saved them collectively and severally in the Jewish scriptures, and the Pentateuch narrates many stories in which people are saved, but this salvation was always in this world and the verb itself was not used except incidentally. If the message was one of salvation, it never says what the people were to be saved from, it simply depicting them saved from various threats.
When Jews or Israelites were pressed or oppressed by their enemies, they would pray for help, deliverance, deliverance from oppression or the captivity implied by defeat by an enemy, and therefore for freedom. What good is help if it is insufficient for victory over one’s enemies? In the Jewish scriptures, a word (ezer) that often has the best translation of “to save” is habitually translated merely as “to help” by biblical scholars. Jews prayed for their God just to help them! Surely they would have expected more than just help from an almighty being. Of course. They prayed for deliverance not just for help, and deliverance by God is salvation. Moses sang:
I will sing to Yehouah, for He has triumphed gloriously.
The horse and his rider He has thrown into the sea.
Yehouah is my strength and my song,
And has become my salvation (Yeshuah).Exodus 15:1-2
Yehouah certainly “helped” the Israelites but his “help” was salvation.
In Habbakuk 3:8, the RSV quite properly translates Yeshuah—the very name of Jesus—as “victory”! Salvation is an enduring security, a lasting freedom from oppression, and is gained by a victory. Without some sort of victory, there is no freedom, the perils being fought against cannot be removed, and so the source of oppression or captivity remains. God scored a victory over chaos when he divided the waters at the Creation and broke the heads of the dragons (Ps 74:12-14), acts described as “working salvation”. Jesus scored a victory over the Romans when he took Jerusalem temporarily, a victory now diluted into a miracle with pigs and a trashing of some money changers stalls. The cry “hosanna” called out to Jesus as he entered Jerusalem, is from the same root yesh and, being the imperative form, it means “free us”, and therefore “save us”. Jesus, the Saviour or the Victor, defended every jot and tittle of the law, and those who obeyed it absolutely were those who were certain of salvation, and had no need of repentance.
Theologians have tried to find a doctrine of sin or original sin in the Pentateuch, and the primordial couple do indeed disobey God, but that disobedience is not called sin or wickedness, evil or even rebellion, and God lies to Adam by saying, if he ate the fruit, he would die on that very day, but he actually lived to an exceptional age! It was the serpent, traditionally supposed to be the Devil, who correctly told Adam he would not die if he ate it. Still, mankind is condemned to die, having evidently been immortal in the Garden of Eden, but no salvation from death is spoken of. The human condition is permanent.
Then Genesis 6 talks of evil in the world but never mentions any salvation from it. Instead God decides to end His experiment with humanity, one that He must have known would fail, and destroy everyone for good and all. Then He decides to save Noah and His family, but there is no lesson or example drawn from this story. Even though he was a good man nothing is made of it, and his goodness was not genetic because his successors were not good, and again need saving. Adam’s wickedness was genetic but Noah’s goodness was not! Later, sin comes into it, but the route to salvation then is prescribed as appropriate offerings to God, though again the word used is not “salvation”. Before long God’s people are battling the Philistines, and now, in Judges and the early history books, words rooted in yesha are sometimes found, albeit in a military context, meaning “victory” or “relief”. A participle of the verb, mosia, is quite common, and is interpreted as “saviour” or “victor”.
But the emphatic use of salvation terminology is in the poetry, and here the need for salvation is explained. It is being saved from evil. According to the outlook of the Jewish scriptures, the main source of oppression is evil, and that is defeated by obeying God’s law, by being righteous. God has helped the Jews be righteous and therefore he saved them by giving them a measure or canon of righteousness, the law. Using the measure, they cannot fail to know when they are transgressing, and so have no excuse for doing it. The law was brought to them by Ezra, not by Moses—in Persian times!
Salvation language is common in the prophets, and again especially in their poetic parts. Jeremy richly expresses his prophecies of salvation, with foreign nations, notably Babylon threatening and eventually destroying Jerusalem. That is the point from which “a positive expectation of salvation for Israel begins to be proclaimed”, as James Barr of Manchester university puts it. This, of course, is precisely when the Persians colonized Judah.
Essenes had the concept from the Persians of an ideal kingdom. It was the kingdom of the Jews in this world, but one brought about by a supernatural act of God and His hosts of angels. They would clear wickedness and wicked people out, leaving the real world conjoined with heaven. So, their salvation was of the righteous from the wicked, but required an agent of God on earth—not God Himself—to prepare the Jews for the transition, by having them repent their sins. John the Baptist and Jesus were such men, considered as messiahs, but both died without seeing the heavenly hosts. Christians are still waiting.
S Mowinkel (He that Cometh, 1956) knew this, and that it makes God, and God only, the saviour, as He repeatedly insists in Isaiah, for He decides when the hosts come, and anyone, even the messiah, who presumes to second guess Him is in error. The Essene notion of the messiah was provisional, rather like the scriptural definition of a prophet. Essenes believed their leader would be the messiah, but they did not know which one. Only the one in post when God’s angels stormed through the great split in the Mount of Olives to save the world from sin actually was the messiah. Jesus thought he was, but he wasn’t!
The point of salvation for the Jew was to obey God’s law. It was obeying the law—being righteous—that saved them. Salvation was doing particular things and acting in a particular way, observing divine ordinances (Dt 4:1; 8:1; 30:15-16; 19-20; 32; 46-47). The Jewish myth is that God has chosen the Jews as His people, and by that they are saved, with one condition, though—that they obey the law. The Jew brings about his own salvation by living righteously. Christianity, at least in the modern day, among fundamentalist sects particularly, utterly abandoned this idea by seeking guidance from Paul and not in the words and life of Christ.
Christianity—Myth or History?
S G F Brandon was an unusual Christian in that he did not put his “confessional prejudices” before “exact scholarship, scrupulous investigation of the evidence, and single minded regard for historical truth”, as H C Snape of Oxford university put it. In brief, he said plainly that proper scholarship demanded that Jesus and the gospels could not be divorced from their political context. Brandon stoutly promulgated the view that Jesus could only have been crucified because he was involved in Judaean politics directed against the Romans. Is there anything impossible about the suggestion? In the succeeding century, Jews rebelled several more times, leading to the destruction of the temple and the exclusion of the Jews from Jerusalem. Thus the original Jerusalem Church was scattered, and Christianity was able to spread unconstrained by the true beliefs and teaching of the proper church, thus metamorphosing from a Jewish sect into a gentile religion.
Needless to say, conventional biblicists looked away, pretending Brandon was not there. Some Jewish scholars, however, were more sympathetic because Jesus was reinstated as a patriotic Jew, and not the Jewish apostate that the Christians had made him. Brandon did not say that Jesus was a Zealot, merely saying he was a “zealotic figure” sympathetic towards them, but pure historical logic necessitates it.
Religions, Brandon thought, divided naturally into those which accepted death as final, and those which did not. Buddhism accepts death as part of a reality which included decay and suffering. Christianity is one which elevated death to a supernatural afterlife free of decay and suffering for those who were righteous, that is obedient to God’s laws in life. Those who were not righteous were sinners, and proper and final death or a perpetual torture in hell was their experience of death.
Darwin brought everyone, apart from Christian fundamentalists, round to evolution. S G F Brandon brought everyone, apart from Christian fundamentalists, round to realizing that Jesus lived in the real world, and, was inevitably involved in the main political reality of Judaea at the time—the Roman occupation. Brandon’s genius was expressed in his conclusion that, for Christians to claim their faith was superior in being based on actual history, they had to accept what historical research revealed, however uncomfortable it might be. The point is that Jesus was not peculiar in apparently resisting Romans at the time. The New Testament even, in the Acts of the Apostles, mentions others, and Bar Kosiba sprang up a century later, with yet more mentioned in Josephus. In the mid-twentieth century, the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a whole sect opposed to Roman rule, and it is the very sect suspected from Josephus’s description of them to have been closest to Christ’s values and lifestyle.
Christians have always, and still do today, blamed the death of Jesus on to the Jews, even though it was Romans who ruled the country and did the deed. Brandon (The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth, 1969) refused to simply accept Christian propaganda, and carefully examined the whole circumstances. Jews had no power to kill or order the death of anyone. Romans were the judges and the executioners, and the gospels do not show the contrary. They admit that Jesus was tried and condemned for sedition. The gospels at best can accuse the Jewish authorities for conniving in the condemnation, but the perfidious Jews manipulating an innocent Pilate just does not stand up to honest scrutiny. Most Christians are not interested in honesty in these matters, but only faith, even if it is dishonest.
In the political realities of Judaea, Jesus offered Jews a salvation from Roman occupation—a practical political expulsion of the usurper in favour of the correct ruler of the country, God. The Jews considered Judaea as the kingdom of God. Jesus promised to save the Jews from their oppressors, and return the land to its proper theocracy. That is why Jesus was crucified, when he was caught as the “king of the Jews”. James M Fenelly, in a review, “Primitive Christian Values of Salvation”, admits that this was an early Christian notion of salvation, “salvation by warfare”, but finds many other kinds. This one, he says, was conducted by Christian zealots who:
Fought for their kingdom, anticipating divine assistance by a Lord who would return to lead them in a final battle. this would include Judas Iscariot and the zealot described by S G F Brandon. They would be similar to those of Qumran who anticipated an actual war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. The highest honour would be to usher in the messianic kingdom, and, if it were at the cost of one’s mortal life, it would be to the benefit of ones eternal glory. The enemy was Rome and the kingdom of God was a free Palestine. Emotional needs were satisfied in military-political action.
Does it ring any bells? It should because it continues today, but the ones who are fighting their oppressors are the Palestinians and they see the USA as the modern Roman empire. Christians habitually reject “salvation warfare” without a moment’s thought as the source of their religion. Yet it is the only hypothesis with credible roots and substance in the place and prevailing political conditions, that meets the gospel account in every important respect, bearing in mind the need of gentile Christians to tone down the true nature of their god’s career, or be seen as complicit in terrorism themselves.
Fenelly lists another ten salvific hypotheses of early Christianity he has managed to scrape together, adding that someone more ingenious could invent more. More than half of them are not original beliefs at all but ones that arose later. They were not the motives of those who took part in the gospel events, or even passive witnesses to them. Whatever someone in Corinth or Rome later thought Jesus was or was not trying to do is irrelevant if they do not fit the circumstances from both the disciples’ view and that of contemporary history. Those evidences support the view expounded on these pages.
Others of Fenelly’s supposed hypotheses are actually variations or details compatible with the zealotry hypothesis once it is realized that Jesus and his followers were not merely like the Qumran Essenes, but were a branch of them. Thus Fenelly lists an encratitic salvation that rejected marriage in favour of sexual continence, as Paul did in principle. The Essenes of Qumran had exactly the same view. Celibacy was the ideal, but marriage was not banned. It was necessary, but those who would be perfect did not marry, preferring to be like the angels, but others could marry as long as they were decorous and righteous.
Ascetic salvation was another of Fenelly’s options, but again it simply reflected the attitude of the Essenes. Hellenistic Judaism was another form of salvation that Fenelly lists, it being a pre-existing set of beliefs akin to Christianity and held by people like Philo of Alexandria. Again the people with this postulated view are known as the Essenes and their related sect of the Therapeutae, whom Philo described, though they might have been Essenes by an unfamiliar name. Another category offered is doing good works as the “brother of the Lord”, James, advocated in the epistle that Christians considered sufficiently Christian to include in the New Testament, but almost universally reject now. It was a branch of Christianity called by Paul, the Judaizers, by which he meant the ones who taught what Jesus taught, and rejected Hellenistic “improvements”. The whole of the testimony of the incarnated God, Christ, in his actual life, is that salvation depended on people doing something—loving their neighbour, and not accumulating unnecessary wealth. That is what James emphasized in his epistle, and what Paul rejected in favour of faith.
None of these alternatives answer the question of why the Romans would want to crucify Jesus as a traitor who claimed to be the king of the Jews in defiance of the authority of Caesar. They all have to believe that Romans were fools, easily manipulated by the clever Pharisees, who deliberately dropped Jesus in it, even though Jesus was an exemplary Jew. Romans were certainly not inclined to be merciful when faced with military opposition, but otherwise had a strong sense of justice, a good legal system, and were interested in promoting peace not fomenting trouble. The method of Jesus’s death and the inscription on the cross show that the Romans took Jesus to have been a traitor, a seditionist. Plainly Romans saw Jesus as a serious threat to peace, had opposed the rule of the emperor and had behaved unlawfully in various ways.
The gospels actually confirm all this, though Christians ignore it. It was illegal for private citizens to carry weapons but his band were armed. He had led a riot in a public place thereby defying the local authorities who acted on behalf of Caesar. The admission of these in the bible, but in a ridiculously toned down way, show that the gospel writers were conscious of the seriousness of the crimes. The band carried only one sword between them, though Jesus had told them to sell their cloaks to buy the weapons, and then settled that two would be enough. Jesus runs riot in the temple court, turning over tables, and no temple police stop him while he whips the money changers, but the whip is merely a few reed withes or cords. Jesus could not have done this alone, but even supposing he did, it was sufficient to be classed as perverting the nation. These are transparent gospel ameliorations of obviously far more serious crimes, but finally, the gospels admit that he was acclaimed as a king when entering Jerusalem. To accept such an acclamation in Roman law was to acknowledge the acclamation as true. By accepting that acclaim, he was agreeing that he was the king, and that was manifestly treason. Incidentally, he was accused of refusing to pay tribute, another crime, and so he did, though Christians ingeniously try to maintain otherwise.
Christianity in Rome
In Roman history, the phase of the gradual disintegration of the republic saw eastern salvific religions introduced to Rome, and then the establishment of the empire, just a few decades before Jesus was born, saw Octavian proclaiming himself the saviour through law and the poems of Virgil. After the second century age of good emperors, the empire went into decline and it was just when Christianity began to take hold, the salvific religion par excellence, offering:
- Life after death in heaven, hell being reserved for sinners.
- Victory over evil, where evil is the religious expression of anti-social behaviour, especially selfishness. But the victory is an empty one, being post mortem.
Jesus dying to atone for our selfishness means nothing in reality. We have to be dead to realize this salvation, and no one can confirm that it is genuine. The mystery cults of which Christianity was a copy, offered salvation from the vicissitudes of life by offering bliss after death, in a spirtual union with a god. If life was awful but certain conditions of behaviour within it are fulfilled, then the believer could look forward to a heavenly reward, and, of course, concentrating on fulfilling the conditions distracted from the burdens of living. Usually the conditions necessary had social and political consequences in helping to stabilize society, and persuaded the believers to accept their lot with stoicism.
Each of the eastern cults that arrived in Rome was a concern for the authorities until they were accommodated, but the concern about Christianity lasted longer than most, because, after the initial fear of Christians as a terrorist organisation, the Christian expectation of the End of the World was seen by Roman rulers as continuing to be anti-Roman. The reason was that Christians welcomed calamities as signs of the End, and often refused to serve the state and to respect it by burning incense to the emperor, the Roman equivalent of saluting the Stars and Stripes. Rulers wanted loyalty to the state just when barbarians were regularly assaulting the borders along the Rhine and Danube, and many of them had been admitted into the empire as foederati. Christians who worshipped a crucified rebel, were suspected of being disloyal, and, indeed, they took pride in demonstrating their loyalties were elsewhere. The suspicion about Moslems in the west today is a good parallel to Roman suspicions about Christians then.
What happened was that Christianity, over three centuries, adapted to Roman culture, and then the Romans adopted Christianity as their state religion.
The conversion of Constantine to Christianity could not have occurred had it not been preceded by the conversion of Christianity to Roman culture.J R Hinnells
Salvation in Persian Religion
The dominance of Persia for 200 years just when the Greeks and Jews established their characteristic world views, and their close involvement with both, makes an influence certain, but Christians, always fearful that the basis of their beliefs might be exposed, have resisted it tenaciously, and have succeeded in suppressing the idea because of the “respect” everyone has for Christian sensibilities. It was Alexander’s destruction of the Persian bibles that let them succeed, then Christians destroyed more, Rabbinic Jews destroyed more, and the Moslems destroyed even more, so all that remained were isolated groups of Parsis, mainly in India, and the scattered and distorted legacy we have in the west. It is not circumstantial evidence we lack, but solid, sound evidence, and Christians will believe nothing except what they have received even if it is proved conclusively. Zoroastrianism, Persian religion, has all the central elements of Judaism but linked by a more logical theology and cosmology.
Zoroastrianism has a developed doctrine of a saviour called the Saoshyant, “He who brings deliverance”, who would be virgin born, of the seed of Zoroaster divinely preserved in the sacred lake where the virgin bathed. The age was coming to an end, and the Saoshyant would lead the final cosmic battle to defeat evil, then resurrect the dead and judge them, destroy the wicked and restore Ahuramazda’s original good creation as a static perfect paradise with a balmy noonday sun continuously shining, and everything set in its appointed place. Yet, though there is everything important here that turned up in Christianity and more, Christian “scholars” will not be convinced.
They whinge that there is no precise time or place of contact, even though the Persians had lived as rulers in the eastern Mediterranean region from Greece all the way round to Egypt, places basic to the spread of Christianity. Though the Greeks took over the whole area when Alexander defeated Persia, 200 years of Persian influence did not evaporate. The Persian colonists in Anatolia, Syria and Egypt did not suddenly stop being Persians, nor could they go back to Persia, because the whole empire was now Greek. In particular, every Persian colonial family had a family priest, a Magus, and suddenly most were out of a job. They were thrown on to the open market with Zoroastrianism as their only “unique selling point”. They gave rise to the word, magician, setting themselves up as independent prophets and wise men (Greek, goës, a wizard), attracting attention and a following in market places by conjuring and juggling, and also getting a bad reputation as imposters and even seducers, if 2 Timothy 3:13 (KJV) is to be taken literally.
But the Greeks could not hold on to Persia itself, and inside a century another Iranian tribe, the Parthians won Persia back and Persian religion was reinstated. By the time of Christ, the Parthians had also reconquered Babylon, and had even sponsored a rival to Herod the Great in Palestine in the century before Christ. Many Jews favoured the Persians and Parthians over the Romans. The Christian plea of there being no point of contact of the west with Iran is not just absurd, it is outrageous. It only perpetuates because few people are anything but ignorant about this whole period of history. This ignorance itself is peculiar except as a symptom of western refusal to accept that Persia was actually an important influence on us via Greece, as well as via Judaism and Christianity.
However contact was made with the west, W G Oxtoby concludes that the features of the Iranian saviour…
…are compatible with the type of portrayal which the early Christian sought to provide for the salvation offered in Jesus, including a new world order, a new creation, a new condition of existence for man… The streams of Semitic, Greek and Iranian usage converge in the New Testament.
Yet the synoptic gospels hardly use the word, soter, and its derivatives, though the epistles do use it and so does John.
In Persian religion, salvation is expressed in words derived from “baog”, a root pertaining to divine things. The root “baog” does not appear in the Gathas at all, but it begins to in later works along with the words “buxtis” and “bozisn”, both derived from “baog”. The Saka tribes in the east of Persia, quite possibly a branch of a tribe some of whom continued westwards rather than southwards to become the Saxons, gave Mithras the title bozaka, saviour.
Salvation, in Persian religion, on both the human and the cosmological scale, is by “relentless struggle” against evil. The Good Spirit constantly fights the Wicked Spirit, and the victor was not prescribed, the battle could go either way (Y 44:15). But Zoroaster’s intention was that everyone should believe they had a crucial role in it, through their own personal struggle to be good (Y 31:20). Zoroastrianism saw morality as an internal struggle against our own demons, not just as a struggle against demonic forces oppressing us externally. So, salvation was just like that of the Christians, being saved from wickedness.
Certainly, Iranians were to defend themselves against their earthly enemies (Y 31:18), but the Iranians were a free people. They were not a subject people yearning to be liberated, and their enemies mainly were other Iranian tribesmen moving south from the steppes. Their material militant thoughts were of defense, not rebellion against an imperial power. Salvation implies liberation from oppression, and the Zoroastrianism of the Gathas seemed not to have any such notion.
In Roman Mithraism, the god Mithras is a saviour as his title salutaris (Greek, soter) on inscriptions confirms. In Persia, Mithras was also considered a god, and his name dominated theophoric forms, just as Jesus is now the dominant name of God in Christianity, though he is effectively an aspect of God as the Son. Mihr (Mithras, Mica) is a divine name in theophoric names like Mihrboxt. Biform names like Mihrbog and Mihrbozet seem to mean “Mithras is my Salvation”, and Matbog means “Mother is my Salvation”. As Mithras seemed to be God, scholars have assumed that names like Bagabuxsa or “God is my Salvation” referred to Mithras. Mat or Mother meant Anahita, perhaps a source of confusion for Herodotus. Ahuramazda never appeared explicitly in theophoric names, adding to the suspicion that Ahuramazda was the heavenly Mithras, though Baga might have meant Ahuramazda rather than Mithras, the explicit name being too sacred to use in names.
The words for “salvation” and “saviour” passed into Manichaeism as bozisn and boxtar. In the Spirit of Wisdom (Menok Xrat) is found words meaning body (tan) and soul (ruvan) being in some sense opposite. The word used for soul by the Manichaeans was jan not ruvan, suggesting a Zurvanite influence getting close to the Christian interpretation of body and soul as opposites. Though Zoroastrianism tries to find value in the body, Zurvanism treats the body as inferior to the soul, just as Paul did, and the truly wise man can save his own soul, offering a Persian link with Gnosis. It is the soul, always ruvan—though there is the other word for it, “giyan” or “jan”—that is saved when the body corrupts away. What then is the soul to be saved from? In a passage influenced by Parthian, the Spirit of Wisdom answers that, having put on the necessary “spiritual armour” the soul could “come to Paradise and the vision of the gods (yazatan, yazdan) where it was safe from Ahriman and hell. Note that Yazatan is a plural, but is typically rendered as God, just as Elohim, the word meaning “gods” is nearly always rendered God in the Jewish scriptures!
