Judaism
How Persia Created Judaism 4.4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 30, 2001
Friday, 03 February 2006
Abstract
Persia and the Essenes
Zoroastrian parallels with the Qumran documents are huge. The Damascus Document condemns those who enter the New Covenant but then leave to join the Liar. The Habakkuk Commentary enlarges on the theme of the Liar, telling of trouble within the community when the Liar secedes from the order and comes into conflict with the Teacher of Righteousness. In 2 Corinthians 11:31, Paul is insistent that he “does not lie” apparently answering an unpleasant criticism of him. The choice of language in these instances stems from Zoroaster.
The Qumran Community was an apocalyptic sect. They were expecting the end of the world just like Zoroaster. The Jewish messianic ideal of a Deliverer came from Persia. The Enoch Literature is Persian of about the fourth century BC. Apocalypticism seems to owe everything to Persia and the flavour of Persian religion on Judaism stems largely from the apocalyptic writers. The Qumran library proves that Apocalypticism was a considerable movement in Judaism not merely a fringe interest. Christian theologians used to believe that the anticipation of God’s kingdom to come was uniquely Jesus’s message. Now we see it was hundreds of years old, had come out of Persia with Cyrus’s “returners” and had been perpetuated by the Essenes.
A dualistic doctrine was almost unknown to the Jews. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin notes, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, that the doctrine of two spirits was only sporadically attested in Jewish literature. In Judaism, the spirits under God’s command were not always good. God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem, and Saul was troubled by an evil spirit after the “spirit of God”, and presumably therefore good, departed from him.
The Qumran documents speak of Good and Evil, Light and Dark, the Way of Darkness and the Way of Light, the Spirit of Darkness and the Spirit of Light, The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light, Truth is Light, Falsehood is Darkness. The Teacher of Righteousness is opposed by Belial, the Demon of Evil. The Way of Good leads to salvation, the Way of Evil leads to torment. Of the four gospels, John reflects this terminology most accurately showing its Essene links. Good and the evil spirits are opposed to each other, in apocryphal, Christian, and rabbinical work. In the apocryphal Gospel of Judas (second century AD), three spirits appear!—the spirits of truth and error that serve men, and “in their midst is the spirit of intelligence, able to turn wherever he chooses”. In Hermas, the holy spirit and the evil spirit dwell together in man. But, the Manual of Discipline (Community Rule) of the Dead Sea Scrolls has a short account of the two spirits. The fact that God created all things is followed by, “God created all things”, then:
He created man to have dominion over the world and made for him two spirits, that he might walk by them until the appointed time of his visitation. They are the spirits of truth and error. In the abode of light are the origins of truth, and from the source of darkness are the origins of error. In the hand of the prince of lights is dominion over all sons of righteousness. In the ways of light they walk. And in the hand of the angel of darkness is all dominion over the sons of error. And in the ways of darkness they walk. And by the angel of darkness is the straying of all the sons of righteousness, and all their sin and their iniquities and their guilt, and the transgressions of their works in his dominion… But God in the mysteries of his understanding and in his glorious wisdom has ordained a period for the rule of error, and in the appointed time of punishment he will destroy it forever. And then shall come out forever the truth of the world.
These words call to mind the Zoroastrian doctrine of the two spirits, as embodied in the ethical and eschatological dualism of the Gathas. But the Qumran works are not slavishly gathic in origin. Thus the good and evil spirits are identified with with light and darkness respectively, a later doctrine. The critical difference is that, in the Gathas, Zoroastrian doctrine specifies free choice, but the Qumran sectarians seemed to believe in predestination. Now the thesis presented on these pages is that Judaism was a religion imposed on the people of Canaan by the Persians, to oblige them to be obedient to the Shahanshah. Obedience cannot involve choice, so the imposed religion could not be the same as the Zoroastrian religion of the Persians themselves, which did. Thus one vital difference between the religion of the masters and the religion they imposed on their subjects was this very matter of free choice. The subjects had none. They were obliged to accept what God had prescribed for them, and to disobey it was eternal death and torture. It seems that the Gospel of Judas was making an attempt to reintroduce the ideal of choice with its the notion of the third spirit of intelligence.
Duchesne-Guillemin explains that the identity of the spirits with light and darkness is an invention of Zurvanism, usually considered to be a later development of Mazdayasnaism. The Zurvanists held that the two spirits, Ohrmuzd (light) and Ahriman (dark), were created by a supreme God of time, Zurvan. Zurvanism prevailed in Iranian religions in the first century BC when the Essenes were active. Along with this change, predestination replaced free choice. Josephus wrote:
The sect of the Essenes holds that Destiny is master of all things and that nothing happens to men but what has been decreed by it.
The Dead Sea Scrolls generally confirms this, clearly regarding life as a lottery:
According to each man’s inheritance in truth he does right, and so he hates error, but according to his possession in the lot of error he does wickedly in it, and so he abhors truth.
Thou has cast for man an eternal lot.
But they seemed to try to square the circle by making choice possible too in that by choosing righteousness, men could overcome the destiny written for them.
Duchesne-Guillemin goes on to say that the Middle Persian word “menog” has meanings strikingly similar to the meanings of the Hebrew word “ruach”, used in the sectarian documents for:
- the two spirits,
- the two opposing forces in man,
- various other human characteristics or abilities.
Apparently citing R C Zaehner’s Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma, Duchesne-Guillemin writes:
The complex of notions associated with the idea of “menog” forms part of a coherent system in Iran, and stands in complementary opposition to the term “getig”, while in Judaism the development… never comes to form anything like a coherent system.
Ahuramazda had forethought whereas Ahriman had none, the only distinction between them. Ohrmuzd knew the destiny of the world but his opposite did not. A description of God in the scrolls is El de’oth, the God of knowledge, suggestive of the origins of Gnosticism. A fifth century Armenian creation myth has Zurvan addressing Ahriman with the words:
I have made Ohrmuzd reign above thee.
Some such justification must have been used to make Ahuramazda into the God of the spirit (menog) while Ahriman remained the god of the material world (getig), thus cementing the base of Gnosis.
At Qumran, the present age is dominated by the evil spirit:
So shall they do year by year all the days of the dominion of Belial… And [the world] has wallowed in the ways of wickedness in the dominion of error until the appointed time of judgment which has been decreed.
There is also a single allusion to belief in physical resurrection, a Zoroastrian doctrine, in the Qumran scrolls, in hymn 17:
For the sake of Thy glory Thou hast purified man of sin… that… he may partake of the lot of Thy Holy Ones. Bodies gnawed by worms may be raised from the dust to the counsel [of Thy truth]… that he may stand before Thee with the everlasting host.
Philo is thought to have been close to the Essenes and their brothers and sisters, the Therapeutae. Yet, Philo’s religious allegories are considered to have been influenced by the Gathas, with which they have significant similarities. The six Dunameis of Philo, sort of angelic rays of god linking him with the world, are the Amesha Spentas. They fill the world with God’s presence and keep it in harmony. He calls them the six Cities of Refuge, which links the concept with the romance of Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth being interpreted as meaning “City of Refuge” after her return from apostasy to the Jewish god.
Philo was influenced by Persia just as the Essenes were, though western scholars in their usual arrogance have tried to make out that the Persians were influenced by Philo! Mills was more honest:
Philo drank in his Iranian lore from pages of his exilic Bible, or from the Bible books which were as yet detached, and which not only recorded Iranian edicts from Persian kings, but which themselves were half made up of Jewish-Persian history.MIL-ZPAI
When God says: “Let us make man”, (Gen 1:26) Philo rationalizes the “us” as God addressing his Dunameis. Philo made the creative instrument of god, the Logos, as an aspect of the Father, but there were other Logoi who had roles akin to those of the Amesha Spentas. Plato had the same idea, god leaving the creation to a craftsman, the Demiurgos. There is not the least reason why these ideas should not have derived from Persian religion.
The Essenes used a solar calendar of twelve months of 30 days. The Persians used a similar calendar, the difference only being that the remaining five days were all collected together in the manner of the Egyptians rather than the Essenes. The year started at different dates for different purposes, just as the Jews had a religious year and a commercial year starting at different times in the year. The Persian reformed calendar is thought to have been introduced in 441 BC (or 481 BC). So, Ezra or Nehemiah could have brought it as part of their reforms to Yehud.
The Persians considered leprosy a severe punishment for falsehood, for “lying against the sun”—breaking a promise. The Essenes might have used the same terminology, regarding the Jerusalem priesthood as breaking their promises given to God, and therefore being called lepers.
Christianity as a Mithraic Cult
Christianity adopted these doctrines from the pro-Persian factions—baptism, communion (the haoma ceremony), guardian angels, the heavenly journey of the soul, worship on Sunday, the celebration of Mithras’ birthday on December 25th, celibate priests that mediate between man and God, the Trinity, Zvarnah—the idea that emanations from the sun are collected in the head and radiate in the form of nimbus and rays, and asha-arta, “the true prayer”. Centuries later in Greece this became Logos or “true sentence” and like in Persia it was associated with fire.
Mithraism is widely considered to be a syncretistic religion, that is, a combination of Persian, Babylonian and Greek influences. However, the Greek influence seems to be limited to the identification in Greece of Mithras with the Greek god Perseus. The Babylonian influence is said to have been astrology, but the Persians were also interested in astrology. Zoroastrians worshipped at altars on hills and had a whole class of professional Magi or priests who had lots of time on their hands to do astrological research.
Rather than a syncretistic religion, it would be more proper to call Mithraism a Zoroastrian subcult or heresy. The center of the Mithraic cult was in Tarsus in Cilicia, Southeast Turkey. This is whence Paul, the founder of the Christian church, came as a young man. By one of the perpetual coincidences of Christianity, the popular festival of the Mysteries of Mithras were celebrated at the spring equinox.
The New Testament was written, 300 years before the Persian empire had scuttled from Alexander, yet it is remarkably Persian in some of its crucial terms.
- “King of Kings” and “Lord of Lords” were Persian titles for their Shahanshah—literally, King of Kings
- Paul insisted that the women of Corinth should wear a veil in church, but he called it an “exousia” or an “authority”. This was the name of the veil worn by Persian women to show they were under the authority of their father or husband.
- The agent of the Persian king was the “man sent” by him—his “apostle!” Only the man sent directly from the court of the Shah at Susa could override the authority of the satrap. In this sense Ezra was certainly an apostle.
- John’s gospel calls an official, refered to as a centurion in Luke and a Chiliarch (colonel) in Matthew, a Basilikos, or a “Royal”, a Persian rank.
Paul’s insight on the road to Damascus was that instead of treating Jesus as a false saviour, he could be identified as the true saviour if combined with the new idea of “the second coming”. That would cure the embarrassing fact that nothing had come of Jesus’s time on earth. The rest was simple, Paul identified Jesus with Mithras and taught a modified Mithraism. That got Paul branded as a heretic by the true church and James the brother of Jesus. Mithraic ideas were so generally attractive that they eventually won out.
In 2 Corinthians 11:12-15, Paul criticizes the archapostles as disguising themselves as “Servants of Righteousness” and uses the sentence “Satan disguises himself as an Angel of Light” both betraying Qumran and therefore Persian influence and apparently deliberately used against the upholders of the Community tradition.
If Ahuramazda originally created two spirits, rather than simply being one of them created by Zurvan, he is responsible for evil in the world. He cannot be a purely good god, though the later development of the religion identified Ahuramazda with the Good Spirit. Christians like to think that their Father god, in heaven is purely good too, but they do not read their bibles. Amos asks:
Shall evil befall a city and Yehouah hath not done it?
The author of 1 Kings says it is Yehouah’s will to send a lying spirit into the mouths of 400 prophets.
Christians like to say that Zoroastrianism is dualist unlike their own monotheism, yet there is not the least difference in practice between them, and to invent doctrinal differences is pure sophistry. Judaism and Christianity postulate a good god opposed by an evil god but ultimately the good will triumph. All forms of Zoroastrianism are the same. However the good and evil came about is irrelevant. The fact that good will triumph is the encouragement to people to be good and finish up on the winning side, otherwise the three systems are entirely dualist in practice and everyone, as Zoroaster says, has an equal choice between choosing good or choosing evil.
Zoroaster accepted fire as the symbol of the divine, as the ultimate purifying agent. Jews and Christians can have no objection to this symbolism. Deuteronomy declares:
For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.Dt 4:24; 9:3
And to remind Christians Hebrews repeats it:
For our God is a consuming fire.Heb 12:29
Moreover, if Mithras, seen as the Holy spirit and also the sun, took on the attributes of Ahuramazda as a god beyond the sun, then the Jews must accept that at the time of Ezekiel and later still, if the Essenes are to be considered, themselves worshipped the sun:
He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.Ezek 8:16
Christians have no need to feel superior because their most famous apostle essentially did the same:
Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour.Acts 10:9
The time given is noon, so Peter is praying at the highest station of the sun, a meaningful time for him to pray as it was to the Essenes, but otherwise an add place and time to pray. And it was so hot it gave him hallucinations. Elsewhere (Acts 3:1), the “hour of prayer” is the ninth hour. It seems likely that the Essenes marked each of the stations of the sun with hymns and prayers.
When, in his letters, Paul speaks of the third heaven:
I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven,2 Cor 12:2
he is suggesting that there were different levels to the cosmos below the highest heaven. The Persians thought that there were seven levels or zones to the world, the seventh being the highest, whence our expression that bliss is being in seventh heaven.
If Christianity was revealed, it is time Christians found out properly when it was and who by.
- For a short readable account of the Persian empire at CAIS, search Google for:
+"(HAKHÂMANESHIÂN) The Empire of Achaemenid Dynasty (550-333 BCE)" +CAIS
Drag and copy highlighted text to paste into the Google bar while connected to the web.
