Zoroastrian Influences on Judaism and Christianity I.1
PreZoroastrian 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
Introduction
Beyond all doubt, in Iran, hundreds of years before Christ died, a prophet arose whose life and teaching left an indelible but nowadays ignored impression. The Greeks saw him as a philosopher, mathematician, astrologer or magician, while Jews and Christians saw him as an heretical prophet and a magician. He was known in Greece as Zoroaster, a Graecization of the Iranian Zarathustra. Zoroaster’s conception of God has interested modern biblical scholars because of the similarities between his teaching, and Judaism and Christianity. Some authorities deny claims that Zoroastrian ideas influenced Greek, Roman, and Jewish thought, but they are quite wrong—these claims cannot be disregarded by anyone who is interested in true history as opposed to the arrogant exclusivism of modern Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians.
The Persian religion Zoroaster founded, and whose priests were called the Magi, has had an influence on the world which today is unrecognized. Zoroastrianism is the first revealed religion to have appeared on earth and so, if any dependency of one revealed religion on another is to be found, Zoroastrianism is to be the donor not the receiver. The Reverend Matthew Black, writing as long ago as the middle of the twentieth century could declare unequivocally in Peake’s Commentary:
What we know as Judaism, as distinct from the ancient religion of Israel, is a post-exilic phenomenon.
Being “post-exilic” meant that it was indebted to the Persian Zoroastrian kings and administrators who provided for the Jews to “return” from exile. The Reverend Black was not the first to state this view. Lawrence H Mills was an American professor at Cambridge who translated much of the Avesta and published Zarathustra, Philo, The Achaemenids and Israel, in 1903 and Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia in 1913, both of which revealed the indebtedness of Judaism to Zoroaster and the Persians. Even further back, C W King writing in 1887 said that the Jews had their angels, the immortality of the soul, belief in a future life, the Last Judgement and the idea of rewards and punishments after death, “the latter carried on in a fiery lake”, from the “Zoroastrian scheme”. G F Moore in 1927 concluded:
Many scholars are convinced that this whole system of ideas was appropriated by the Jews from the Zoroastrians.
Is it worth asking why this should have been known well over a century ago but is still never taught in schools, in synagogues or in churches? A most prominent Christian scholar and cleric can tell us that many scholars know this but they are not willing to tell their flocks. We simple non-Christian types look on with incredulity. Surely these Christian scholars and gentlemen are irresponsibly but deliberately giving the wrong history of God’s plan to their bleating lambs. Surely they must be worried that God will not forgive them for such a huge porky-pie when they get to the balmy place—perhaps they will not even get into a place with such a narrow gate having such a huge blemish in their account. Doesn’t that scare them?
Not a bit! They know quite well heaven and hell are baloney whether or not they come from Zoroastrianism, and are only for the consumption of idiots. If they thought otherwise, they would have cause for concern. They display none.
Some critics say that the Judaism was not indebted to Zoroastrianism, but that Zoroastrianism was indebted to Judaism. If true, all the more reason to ask why such a wonderful fact is not being trumpeted in the schools, churches and synagogues. What a religion is this Judaism, that it should take over and dominate the rulers and priesthood of the greatest empire yet known by the world? And that those who spread it were a tiny number of pious Jews held in captivity by a preceding vast and influential empire.
No Jew or Christian trumpets it because it is absurd, does not stand up to the facts, and once these were realized would draw too much attention to the real, non-revealed, origins of these modern religions themselves. Since the truth is that these religions depend upon Zoroastrianism, the priests and ministers, the scholars and rabbis of these religions central to our culture are neglecting their true origins, but it is safer for them to ignore Zoroastrianism—and Persian history—than to decry it or uphold it. So, they say nothing, hoping that eventually, out of neglect, it will go away.
Canon George Rawlinson, a Victorian authority on old cultures and religions, pretends that there is no debt at all, although Zoroastrianism is pretty noble for Paganism. The religion of the ancient Medes and Persians was “of a more elevated character than is usual with races not enlightened by special revelation!” Though this is thoroughly arrogant and racist, there are few Jews or Christians who will disagree with the learned Canon. In his researches, Rawlinson probably had discovered the same truth that people like Mills had discovered but dare not speak it. You can read it here in these pages. Black is undoubtedly correct—Judaism is indebted to Persian religion.
It is time that the real influence of Zoroaster was recognized and properly researched. The problem is to decide what was Zoroaster’s original teaching. This has two aspects:
- how to distinguish between the reforms of Zoroaster and the religion of the Iranian tribes beforehand;
- how to distingish the religion of Zoroaster from the religion set down in the Zoroastrian books we now have, like the Avesta.
These issues are not fully resolved, but enough is known with enough confidence to embarrass both Christian and Jewish religious bigots. The Jewish religion—and therefore the Christian and Islamic religions—has its roots in the Persian conquerors who set it up to justify their position as kings of the world.
The Background of the Aryans
Iran is the ancient name of Persia, and it is derived from the root “Arya” or Aryan, the Indo-European branch of peoples who settled in that land. From the lost “seedland of the Aryans”, the Indo-Europeans moved to upper India, Iran, Russia and the nations of Europe such as Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Scandinavia, England, Scotland and Ireland. Sanskrit, Latin, Avestan are all sister languages, and the present day upper Indian, Persian and European languages are related. Baradar in Persian is Brata in Sanskrit and is Brother in English. “Persian” is a late European term for the “Farsi” language of Iran.
The kings of ancient Iran were very proud to call themselves Aryans—their rock edicts proving it: “I am an Aryan, the son of an Aryan”. The word Aryan occurs time and again in the ancient scriptures of the Aryans. Nothing is known about the beliefs of the conquered people but they will have formed a servile peasantry, just as the Saxons did for the Normans, and the Aryans were a minority ruling class.
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, Daevas (Divas) and Ahuras. As a tradition of pastoral culture, it was natural that Iranians worshipped the heavens. God spread above their heads from one horizon to the other, dressed in his heavenly cloak, and, like the heavens, all Iranians gods could not be confined to “houses” but covered the whole world. Iranians had no built temples and no images, worshipping in the open.
Stone age society identified the sky with stone, the substance used by men and warriors to make their weapons, but then metals arrived on the scene superior to stone. The priests had to find an answer and it was that the sky was made of a particular stone—crystal, which appeared in veins in rocks just like gold and metallic ores. Crystal was therefore the same as stone and metal unifying the two. At the end of time the metal of the cosmos would melt engulfing everything destroying it unless it is righteous.
When the Iranian warriors established themselves as a nobility, they sought a distinctive and superior god of their own, not suitable for ordinary herdsmen and farmers. They decided it was wholly appropriate that the shining (deva) sky of bronze was the god of warriors, and the earth the goddess of peasants—and women. Spenta Aramaiti is the protectress of the earth and of women: “This earth then, we worship her who bears us, and women (Y 38:1)”. Her consort is Khshathra Vairyu, Desirable kingdom, Lord of the Sky. Here is the basic dichotomy of patriarchal religions: Khshathra, Sky, Kingdom (power and authority), Man—Aramaiti, Earth, Devotion, Woman.
So, the Aryans were worshippers of a Father Heaven and a Mother Earth among a variety of nature gods and goddesses. Those that shine and were immortal (amesha) were the heavenly bodies, and in the old Aryan background, these were gods, whence deus, zeus and theus, daevas and devils. The earlier Aryan invasion of the Greeks brought the father god, Dyaus (Zeus) Pita or Jupiter and his sister, a mother god with a name of similar structure, who became Demeter. She might also have had, in Persian, a name like Ahura Mata that simplified to Aramaiti.
The Persian god of heaven was called Ahuramazda. In several east Iranian languages, Auramazda—seeming to mean a sun god—appears as Urmaysda, Remazd, and such words. The Greeks called the god, Oromazdes, and the Pahlavis later called him Ormuzd showing that the “h” was scarcely pronounced. Ahuramazda was the God of the Avesta as revealed by the ancient prophet Zoroaster, centuries before Christ.
Moses and Exodus
