How Zoroastrian Is Judeo-Christianity?

Our topic this evening is how Zoroastrianism influenced Judeo-Christianity. This is a lecture that several of you have asked for, and it's something that I think is a really interesting question. So, as we look at the Abrahamic religions that emerged out of Second Temple Judaism, side by side with Second Temple Judaism, especially in the beginning of the Second Temple period, which is characterized by Judaism existing within the Persian Empire, this great world empire. The Persian Empire had not Zoroastrianism as a state religion, but as a religion that's patronized by the Persian Emperors, and it is practiced by the Persian leaders. The religion of Zoroastrianism. And the question is, to what extent did that religion, which was in such a powerful cultural position at that incredibly formative time for the Proto-Abrahamic religions, to what extent did that religion pass a lot of ideas into Second Temple Judaism and thereby into Christianity and ultimately Islam?

So there are Zoroastrians in the Gospels. In Matthew's Christmas story, in the Nativity Story found in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus as a little child is visited by men from the East, who are following a star. They are seeking the Messiah, the anointed one, or the king. And when they find him, they worship him and give him three precious gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. So, although Christian tradition numbers these men—he calls them three because of the three gifts and then also even names them—we usually call them the three wise men or the three kings. The Gospel itself calls them Magi. And the word Magi, which comes through the Latin, is the Latin version of the Greek *magos*, *magoi* in the plural, which is the Greek name for Zoroastrian priests. So what is meant here is three Zoroastrian, or not three, any number of Zoroastrian priests who are meant to have come and met the infant or child Jesus.

The Persian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, had patronized Zoroastrianism, like I say. So it's a Persian religion, and the imperial court, the king and his top courtiers, are Zoroastrian. Although the Empire itself has a policy, a general policy of religious tolerance, which is why the Persian Shah allowed the Jewish exiles in Babylon, who had been taken there by the Babylonians, when the Persians overthrew the Babylonian Empire, they allowed them to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple, but as subjects of the Persian Empire always. So they're not independent. So the Persian Empire, prior to being overthrown by Alexander the Great, helped this world religion to grow into a very important religion indeed, because of all the power they had, the Empire had. So by having the Magi visit Jesus, the author of Matthew essentially is making a claim that Jesus is recognized by representatives of this great religion as the universal savior. It's not simply going to be a messiah for just the Jews, but as the Christians understand, since God is the God of all peoples, so God's son is a messiah for everybody.

Our word "magician" and our word "mage" and "magic" all come from this word for Zoroastrian priest, *magos*. The Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, who wrote a very incredibly popular encyclopedic *Natural History*, and one of the reasons that was so popular—he—this is where we get all of these what we sort of think of as medieval legends about unicorns and all of these crazy medieval myths about animals and things like that. Pliny is the one who puts those all in his *Natural History*, and his authority is believed in the Middle Ages, anyway. Because Pliny never shied away from telling fabulous tales, his work was really popular and lasted into the Middle Ages. And he recorded that Zoroaster, which is the Greek name for the founder of Zoroastrianism, he said Zoroaster was the inventor of a monstrous craft, and the way he describes it, he would be saying is this is the guy who created what we think of as magic. And so, like I say, as a result, the word *Magus* evolved from meaning Zoroastrian priest to meaning things like mage and magician in English. But there's actually no association of Zoroastrianism and magic, or what we think of magic. Like I say, that Western association is actually even ironic because Zoroastrian priests, you know, are opposed to magic in the same way, you know, in theory Christian priests in the Middle Ages were also opposed to magic. You also have sometimes had a bunch of, maybe especially fundamentalist Christians, be very upset about Harry Potter because it's teaching witchcraft or magic or something, even though most people just understand that it's harmless fiction.

If we know anything today about Zoroastrianism, we may be aware of some of the kind of false reputations it has. So, for a whole long time, in the same way that early Romans and the pagans were concerned that Christians were cannibals because of the ritual of the communion, which is said to involve eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ, and they said, well, cannibalism. So no, that's obviously symbolic; it's not certainly not anybody's literal flesh and blood in, other than the sense of a, let's say, a theological sense. In the same way, because Zoroastrian temples include an eternal flame, a fire that is continually kept lit, and so they're often called fire temples, it made people who are not Zoroastrian think that the Zoroastrians are worshipping the fire, but it's simply understood that fire is an especially sacred symbol for God, and God is, as he is named, or as God is named in the Zoroastrian religion, Ahura Mazda.

Another thing you might have heard about in Zoroastrianism is the different idea of dealing with the deceased, with the dead bodies. And so there was a practice in Zoroastrianism of creating towers of silence, where bodies are left to be consumed by carrion birds because of purity concerns or ritual purity concerns. And so, because in Zoroastrianism and other religions, dead bodies are thought to ritually pollute things, because fire is so sacred, you don't want to cremate the body and thus desecrate fire, and likewise you don't want to bury the dead into the ground or into a body of water because you would be desecrating the earth or the sea. And so this was the solution to that. It's not easily able to be practiced very much anymore; there are very few Zoroastrians left anyway, but in part because there's insufficient number of vultures, you know, these days, and also we can't do this in places like Canada, for example.

So, as I say, Zoroastrianism thrived under Achaemenid sponsorship. So the Persian Emperors supporting it, and then when the Persian Empire fell to Alexander and his successors, the religion faced challenges, to say the least, under the rule of Hellenistic monarchs who were attempting to spread instead Greek ideas and their belief that Greek ideas represented civilization and everybody else's ideas were not civilized. And so those were privileged in the time period under the Hellenistic rulers of Persia. The Seleucids, when they slowly lost control of the Iranian territory to the Parthians, who are an Iranian people but not a Persian people, there would have been a little bit of a resurgence of the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism because it would be a little less suppressed than the Hellenistic were doing. But it's really only when the Parthians are overthrown by a new Persian dynasty, the Sasanids, that the religion has a real resurgence because the Sasanids then make Zoroastrianism the state religion, and this occurs in the 3rd Century.

So, as we know from all of the studies that we've done of Christian history and Islam and others, a religion really gets going when it gets to be a state religion. So if it hadn't been for Constantine converting, Christianity wouldn't have had the future in history that it did have. It might have been that it was already maybe the state religion in Armenia, and maybe it would have been in Ethiopia or something like that, and so it would be a very different, smaller religion if it hadn't ended up taking over a really big state like the Roman Empire. Likewise, Zoroastrianism, because it was the state religion of a big state like the Persian Empire, was once again important.

So if we just look at the two—the East Roman Empire after the West falls, eventually becomes called by historians the Byzantine Empire, just for clarity's sake. What that refers to is, since it doesn't always own the city of Rome, its capital is Constantinople, whose original name was Byzantium. So that's where historians call it that, but essentially there continues to be, from the foundation of the Sasanian Empire in 224, you know, all the way up till 628 or so, four centuries of a great rivalry where the Byzantines and Sasanids continually fought little wars with each other. The frontier went back and forth, and in the end of that period, in the 7th Century, the Byzantines really had a low moment. The Sasanids, the Persians, were able to conquer Syria and Egypt and hold both for about 20 years at great cost. The Emperor Heraclius was finally able to fight them back and take it all over, leaving both empires absolutely pretty much devastated as they each fought each other to the death. And then what happened immediately after, in the 7th Century, you can see that there are these vassals you can see in the Arabian Desert where the Ghassanids work as mercenaries for the Byzantines and the Lakhmid's work as mercenaries for the Sasanids. They both get converted by Arabs from Arabia further south, and they all burst out of the desert and conquer vast swathes of territory from these two exhausted empires.

So the Sasanian Empire was invaded by Muslims in 633, and two decades later it was completely destroyed, wiping it out. The Byzantines again lost Syria and Egypt, but were able to maintain themselves for another 800 years or so. So after the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrianism went into decline. So initially it remains the majority religion in Iran, but many adherents converted to Islam. Some of the stories say that they are converted forcibly; others, it's by economic—and you know, you don't get taxed, and you get tax incentives for converting, or you also have advantages with the government, the royal court, and there's also intellectual preaching. There are reasons that you may want to, as a matter of course, join a different religion. So although usually the leaders of Islam recognized the Zoroastrians as in the special category of "People of the Book," alongside Christians and Jews, which means you're technically not supposed to persecute them, or at least excessively persecute them, nevertheless, you know, that doesn't always work. So Christians are also not supposed to persecute Jews, but obviously Jews did get persecuted all the time under Christianity, and same thing here. So Zoroastrians have been subjugated, subjected to persecutions periodically, and sometimes these are very violent. And so today in Iran itself, in the heartland of the religion, the former heartland, there are probably a lot fewer than 25,000 Zoroastrians left. About maybe a thousand years ago or so, many of them had all fled to India, and there's maybe 60,000 there, which is sort of the center, and then there's a diaspora all around the world, including here in North America.

This is a picture we took of the Zoroastrian temple here in Toronto when members of our Encounter World Religions group went there a few years ago. We go every year and visit the Zoroastrian community there, which is always very interesting as they are busily working on—you can see kind of the flame that's lit there—but they're working on having a much more higher level type of fire, eternal fire, that will allow them to ordain priests here in North America. Zoroastrianism as a religion is influential, or was influential, beyond its present size. You know, with that tiny number, 100,000 or so, 200,000 people left today, Zoroastrianism compared to Christianity and Islam being very, very large obviously to this day, the two largest religions in the world.

So what are some of the ideas that might have been original to Zoroastrianism that moved on? Some religious scholars have argued that Zoroastrianism—the religion—although this is complicated because not all scholars agree that Zoroastrianism—the religion—so there's also a possibility or an argument to be made that Zoroastrianism was actually a dualist religion, or again, as a henotheistic religion, that is to say a religion that has a supreme god but lesser gods as well, and so that's open to argument. People have also used the categorized—maybe it's the first world religion, which is to say this kind of nebulous category of what does it mean when you move away from traditional polytheism, worship of all the gods that was quite common in the previous stage of human religion pretty much across the planet, as now there is a focus less on clan and on rituals that are designed to keep the world functioning, and instead there are new issues that people are concerned with about individual identity, the ancient idea of self, concerns about life, death, afterlife, individual survival, those sorts of things.

So unfortunately though, that is also kind of a nebulous category because many, let's say, modern world religions, let's say Hinduism, had a very direct evolution from what had been a regular, you know, regular ancient polytheism or paganism, in part because of the contact that Hinduism had with all of these other early world religions: Jainism, Buddhism, and ultimately Christianity, Islam, and other world religions. So what does it exactly mean to be a first in these circumstances? And in some ways it's kind of like creating a category, and it depends on if you draw the circle around it to do that. So other scholars have also argued that Zoroastrianism is a source of ideas that became central to the Abrahamic religions. This includes ideas of a cosmic devil, ideas that this imperfect world that we are in right now has a finite timeline in history and it will literally end, it'll end in a final battle or an apocalypse, that at that time there will emerge a savior, there will be resurrection of the dead, there will be a time of final judgment, and those who are righteous will receive an eternal reward, and those who are wicked will receive an eternal punishment. So all ideas that exist in Zoroastrianism and there are certainly ideas that are part of Second Temple Judaism, or different sects within Second Temple Judaism at the end of the Second Temple period, and are therefore pretty central to Christianity as it goes forward. But the question is one again of priority: how much are these simply side by side and both are—these are these are the kinds of ideas that are in the mix, and both groups are maybe simultaneously coming up with these, or how much to can we decide that this very influential contemporary religion is having ideas that members of the smaller religion are absorbing at the time?

In terms of the first monotheistic religion, there are other potential claimants. Atenism, the monotheistic, or monolatristic religion founded by the Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th Century BC, is very early and it's another claimant for a title—first, if it's monotheistic. But Atenism, as interesting as it is, was wiped out a generation or so after its foundation, and it probably didn't have any ability or time to directly influence anybody else. So the development that we've looked at already in many other lectures of Israelite monolatry, you know, stages that precede Second Temple Judaism's development of monotheism, full-on monotheism, you know, the beginnings of that occur some seven centuries after Atenism was eliminated. And so there's really, really not any potential for a, anyway, for a direct connection for the one causing the other. I know that people would like to make one by hoping that they could figure out how to understand the Exodus, for example, as an actual historical event, but we've gone into why there's no record of that. Again, it's so many centuries later that the first stories of that are told that that is also not, you know, a historic event.

By contrast to that, Zoroastrianism, as patronized by the powerful Persian Empire to which Second Temple Judaism was subject in the first half of the Second Temple period, was very well positioned anyway to influence the Proto-Abrahamic religion very directly. So unfortunately, though, as we are looking at this, unlike Egypt whose history is incredibly well recorded and datable, which allows us to reestablish king lists and decide more or less when, what years the kings, the pharaohs reigned and so forth, dating Zoroastrianism presents a lot of difficulties, and they actually really big difficulties in terms of when any of this happened. And so we'll look at that. So we've talked about this a little bit when we're talking about the survival of ancient texts. It's something that you have to sort of actually proactively be working on. So if you're not going to carve everything in stone and frankly bury it like the Egyptian pharaohs did, or put things into pots and bury them in the Egyptian desert, preserving texts historically requires a program like the medieval church had in the West, where monks and nuns spent a bunch of time copying texts, older texts, and including secular texts from Roman and Greek antiquity, especially Roman, in order to have them survive, or the very deliberate program of saving Greek texts that Muslim caliphs had in Baghdad. In other words, you have to actively want to preserve these texts for them to continue, rather than having an active preservation. Unfortunately, of the Persian inheritance, Persia's many conquerors were actively engaged in destroying Persian texts usually. So Persian manuscripts suffered the opposite fate. Alexander the Great burned Persepolis, the capital of the old Achaemenid Empire that he overthrew, and we're told, and with some of the reports that the Muslim caliphs also burned the Persian library at Ctesiphon, the Sasanian Empire. So whether or not a lot of these library burning stories are legendary, but whether or not that happened, the texts were not maintained and they weren't copied. So either way, unfortunately, the Persian inheritance, compared to, let's say, the Greek inheritance or the Egyptian inheritance, the Persian inheritance that we have today is really, really meager because nobody preserved all of this Persian stuff. Largely, this is one very significant exception that we'll have here in Zoroastrianism.

We've had a couple lectures before when we are dealing with trying to establish historicity of ancient figures. And so when we access a religious leader, there are some difficulties we have in actually getting to the underlying historical figure. So for a modern figure like Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saint movement, the founder of Mormonism, since he lived in, you know, in modern times, in the 19th Century, surrounded by people who, you know, kept journals and who wrote newspapers, who published all kinds of things, we know just an incredible amount of stuff about him. He's a very well-established historical figure. As we've looked at the historical Jesus, we have to look through a much more cloudy lens of the later understanding of Jesus in Christianity, you know, as the risen Christ, to try to access the historical Jesus. We have something pretty similar for the historic founder of Buddhism, and we've also talked about the problems—I'm just talking about the problems of, you know, the traditional founder or the traditional author of the Torah in Judaism, the Pentateuch, the five books attributed to Moses, is Moses. But Moses didn't write those books, and so they're written many centuries after when that figure would have lived if he was a historic figure. And so with Zoroaster, with Zarathustra, we also have problems that are similar to these other ancient figures, but they're also a little bit different.

Like I say, for Joseph Smith, this is just the volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers, so things that Joseph Smith and his contemporaries all wrote, and they've now been edited in the scholarly volumes by the history department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it's just more than you'd ever need to know. So it's just this wealth of sources, primary sources, things he wrote himself, eyewitnesses, contemporary eyewitnesses, including people who were his allies, people who had been his allies who he broke with, and so they have—they write tales—we have people that were his enemies the entire time, and we also have just neutral observers. And so we can know so much more about this modern person than we can about almost anybody from antiquity, even the best-known person whose huge portion of his writing survived, like Cicero. You know, we—you know, writings of his enemies survive and all those sorts of things. It's nothing though like the kind of volume that we have available to us in modern times.

So we've looked at, for example, how do we access the historical Jesus? So if we look at sort of a timeline, you know, traditionally Jesus is born maybe in around 4 BCE and lives till either 30 or 33 when he's executed under Pontius Pilate. The earliest Christian texts are written just a decade later, and then the earliest manuscripts of those texts are from the 120s, let's say. So we don't have—we don't have the original text, right? So if Paul has written a letter, we don't have the autograph version of Paul's letter; we only have copies of that. But again, these are still a very quick composition date for some of these writings that happen right after the historical Jesus's lifetime. The earliest Gospel, Mark, is composed some 40 years after Jesus's death, the historical Jesus's death, and that's the first one that has any wealth of biographical details. And of course, our earliest author, Paul, you know, is writing right after Jesus's death, although he never met Jesus, and before Paul's texts, and so really it's not a lot of years. Half a decade, Paul's getting going after Jesus's death, the writings are 10 to 20 years later, we have a biography 40 years later. So we are very close in terms of accessing the historical Jesus. Paul, this earliest writer whose texts survived, you know, has met personally, he says, Jesus's brother and also two of Jesus's historic apostles, Peter and John. So although Jesus, like Socrates, left no writings of his own, his followers began writing about him within a few years of his death. And so, like I say, the sources that we have bring us relatively close, but not all the way up to the historical Jesus. Our sources leave us much further removed from the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama.

So Siddartha—there may have been a historical Siddhartha who lived either in the sixth or fifth centuries BCE, but the stories that we are told of him that you might watch in a movie or something like that or read about, where he is born a prince who is sheltered from all of the world's suffering until he goes outside the walls of his father's palace and sees people who have become aged and sick and who are dying, so that he makes his great understanding that life is suffering, those are late and mythological, not referring to whoever the actual historical founder would have been. So like we say, maybe here in the 6th Century BCE is when Siddhartha, the historical Siddhartha, would have lived. The earliest Buddhist texts are maybe from the 300s. The first manuscripts that we have though are hundreds of years later. The reign of Ashoka, the Emperor of Maurya, who is the—who again, where we have essentially Buddhism becoming like a state religion or a patronized religion, so Buddhism gets really going, are themselves a couple centuries after the historic Buddha would have lived.

And then the first time someone actually sits down to write a biography of the Buddha is very late indeed, and so most historians think, you know, that historical Siddhartha is possible, um, but and if we read these very earliest Buddhist texts, we can reconstruct a few basic details about that historical figure's life. But the biographies are so far removed. When I was talking about that, um, idea that he's a prince who, uh, grows up in those ways, or when he's a baby he walks around and lotuses appear, those sorts of things—these are, are, um, so far removed from historical figures that they actually are preserving, um, they're being written in order to explain the figure's beliefs as opposed to the other way around. So, rather than histories, their foundational myths, identity stories for the religion.

So we're in a similar situation with Moses. Um, as I say, Moses is the traditional author of the Torah, the five books attributed to Moses, but he is not the author of those. Um, the earliest components of these books were composed centuries later than a date the historical Moses might have lived, if there was one. And so while there might have been a historical figure named Moses, um, maybe one of the Priestly Clans, uh, that existed at the end of the first temple period, trace their ancestry to Moses, um, nevertheless, once the, um, stories of the Torah were being written down, um, there none of the details of that historical figure's life will have been preserved and are therefore mythological as opposed to, um, historical.

And so if we go to just to show how far these are, um, the rabbinic Judaism assigns, uh, the dates for Moses in the 13th and 14th, 14th and 13th centuries BCE. The earliest date for the composition of the early parts of the Pentateuch are probably in the 7th Century—so hundreds of years later. Um, the earliest manuscripts, uh, are hundreds of years after that. And so we're looking at too far for, um, a memory to have survived without, um, an oral tradition that includes, um, you know, something like Homer where we're having epic poetry or something memorized, some kind of poetry. Instead, we have these prose texts that are written 600 years later. So we have a somewhat different but still difficult problem for accessing the founder of Zoroastrianism.

So Zarathustra, which is translated into Greek Zoroaster, so that's why we call it Zoroastrianism, is, um, understood to have composed the earliest parts of the Avesta, the, um, sacred text or the sacred, uh, book of, uh, Zoroastrianism. And some details of his life can be found in the Avesta, uh, in the same way that we can reconstruct some, uh, details of the life of, uh, the Buddha, the historic Buddha, from early Buddhist writings, and we can try to reconstruct what the historical Jesus might have been like based on, um, uh, some of his early teachings and different, um, you know, by looking at the different early sources that we have. Um, but the difficulty here then though arises in dating the Avesta. So the Avesta may well have been composed by Zarathustra, but he may not, um, but when was it written? So as it exists today, um, the Avesta is a compilation of various sources, um, like the Christian Bible, um, these come from a wide range of different times, and so obviously all the later parts were not composed by Zarathustra. The texts are composed in the language of Avestan, which is a, uh, ancient Iranian language, um, but there's a significant difference from the oldest part that is written in what's called Gathic Avestan from the Younger Avestan language which evolved from a separate dialect of Indo-Iranian and later dialect. So the Gathas composed in Gathic Avestan, like I say, these are attributed to the historic Zarathustra; they're the oldest section of the compilation. And the really interesting thing is that Gathic Avestan is this very archaic Indo-Iranian language which is very, very closely related to Vedic Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit is the archaic language of the Rigveda, which is the oldest component of the sacred texts in Hinduism. And so, um, these are very related languages, uh, of Avestan and, uh, Vedic, and they separated maybe, maybe, you know, when as the as the Indo-Europeans are, are, uh, expanding as they did from wherever their Heartland to the different places where they ended up, um, it's possible that the Indo-Aryans who went to India and the Iranians had divided maybe just 300 years before, um, the composition of the Avesta and the composition, uh, of the Vedas, because the languages are that, uh, closely related.

So so if we look at this then we can see, uh, we're in a in a kind of a different universe. I talked about how, um, how few Persian manuscripts have survived, and so the earliest surviving manuscript we have of the Avesta comes from the Middle Ages, right, so 1300s—that is long after the fall of the Sasanian Empire and of course much longer from the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the early Persian Empire. And so, um, what we can say based on looking at those manuscripts is that the corpus of the Avesta was only committed to writing during the Sasanian Empire. So the manuscripts we have are much later than that, but they can be traced back to a source that was would have been written down, uh, under the Sasanians, but that gets us a long time period requiring an oral transmission. So in general, the latest possible date that scholars imagine, uh, that Zarathustra might have lived was at the very beginning of the Achaemenid Empire, since the leaders of the Achaemenid Empire patronized Zoroastrianism, uh, and so if that's the case, um, you know, it still would require that maybe, let's say the 500s BCE is when Zarathustra would have lived, and that still then requires that the, uh, Zoroastrian priests would have had to memorize, uh, uh, the Avesta for, you know, passing it on to each other for a thousand years of oral transmission before it's committed, uh, to writing—or not quite a thousand.

Um, however, it may not have been that late; that's the latest date that anybody suggests. Um, an earlier date possibly would be, let's say in the 700s; that would require, in other words, where, um, the Avesta predates the foundation of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian Empire, um, and that would require even longer oral transmission. But one of the reasons why, uh, people think that seems likely is that, um, the Avesta doesn't seem to be aware of the, for example, the boundaries of what the Achaemenid Empire is going to be; it focuses entirely on, uh, the northeastern part of the Empire, this original kind of Heartland, uh, where the Indo-Iranians are coming, or the Iranian part of the Indo-Europeans are coming. And because, like I say, the Avesta is composed in this extremely archaic Iranian language, some linguists conclude that it has to have been composed at a far earlier date because, um, it seems to be maybe at best 300 years separated from, uh, from the, uh, the Vedic Sanskrit. And so what you have to have, either either you have to have a very early composition of the Avesta in this, um, Vedic language—I'm sorry, in this Avestan language—or, um, and then you have to have it be transmitted orally and memorized orally for all of this incredible amount of period, or you have to have had the priests, um, maintaining this archaic language amongst themselves as an ecclesiastical language for many, many centuries and then composing this text in it, you know, much later. So either way, uh, it requires—it's harder to have that happen, um, you know, without you to maintain it an ecclesiastical language without writing like that, um, usually they would be evolving too. So presumably what's happening is that, you know, at some early date—well, maybe not this early, but somewhere in this pre-Achaemenid time—um, the text is composed, it's memorized, and then everybody's language changes around them, but this part, uh, you know, but the the text itself freezes because, um, it's committed to memory that way.

So, um, how do we do that? It's hard for us to believe, um, you can memorize a whole book and have it be, U, uh, and have it be memorized and repeated. Um, we might be pretty familiar with the, um, ancient Greek epic tradition where, um, The Iliad and the Odyssey, these very, very long epic poems, um, were transmitted orally before they were ever written down. Um, but I think people who've studied that, um, believe that these were not just simply memorized, but rather the fact that there were things like ornamental epithets where the different, um, characters and and different lands and cities and things were given, um, repeated, uh, descriptions that became like a formula, and this would allow the, uh, ancient Greek bards to, as they're sort of telling the story, to extemporize a little bit. Um, and so that means that the text wasn't memorized precisely but probably changed every time it was told a little bit. And, um, scholars of, um, this kind of oral tradition, um, studied up into the modern era, um, uh, epic poets in the Balkans—so Albanians, uh, and Serbs—there had been traditions of being able to tell po, um, you know, long epic poems this sort of way, and they studied how people did that, and they assume that that may be what was going on with, uh, ancient Greek epic poetry—The Iliad, The Odyssey, the poems of Hesiod and so forth. Um, but it's also possible to memorize long texts and transmit them via memorization. Um, the Quran was also, um, composed orally, and there are thousands of people around the world who commit the entire Quran to memory, um, in the same exact way that, um, that we're talking about the Avesta having been memorized and composed and transmitted this way for, um, you know, over a thousand years. Much of the Rigveda Samhita, the oldest component of the Vedas from India in Hinduism, uh, the Rigveda is likely composed in the Northwestern part of India between 1500 and 1200 BCE, and its words were again memorized and transmitted, or father to son or teacher to student for a thousand years and again are only written down in 500, you know, of the Common Era. So, um, once again, this, um, Vedic Sanskrit is an incredibly archaic language; all of the Indo-European languages around it were then evolving into later Indian languages between 1500 and 500, but the memorized, um, text of the, uh, Vedas, you know, continued to preserve this very archaic language. So it's a remarkable thing, and this is part of the why this is a difficulty with dating, but, um, the argument is that Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan, um, some possibly as early as 1500 BC, possibly as late as 1200 or 550 BC, um, is when the texts of the, uh, The Gathas of the Avesta were written down—I'm sorry, were composed, and then they were then not written down until, in both cases, until around 500 of the Common Era. And in both cases, we don't have manuscripts until the Middle Ages that have survived to us.

Nevertheless, um, the linguistic evidence is really compelling that they are very, very old. Um, like I say, they're composed in this very archaic Indo-European language, and the language only exists—it's only known from the texts themselves, um, since they're the only extent examples of an otherwise extinct language. Um, so the memorized words would have been translated, uh, as the languages fell out of general use and became only religious languages, liturgical languages. So, you know, the Indo-European language family—we're pretty familiar with the linguistics; it has shown us that all of these languages, including English, Uh, Russian, French, so on, um, Sanskrit are all related and had a common, uh, original language which is extinct and also lost; it's only been able to be, um, what it would have consisted of is is created as a hypothetical, um, by, uh, linguists. But essentially the major branches are are the Germanic branch, the Romance, Slavic, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan, and then there's smaller branches—Greek and Armenian and the Baltic languages and so forth—Albanian. So, um, that kind of reconstruction, you know, you look around at all of the living and all the extinct that are known, um, uh, Indo-European languages, and we can say, okay, the word, uh, two, the number, number two in English, we pronounce—we spell it T-W-O, but we pronounce it two, you know, it goes back to a Proto-Germanic root, and then you can see all of the other Germanic languages how they say it in Norwegian and Icelandic and German and Yiddish and so forth, and goes back to, you know, a European, a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European original, and it's related then, you know, through how the, uh, consonants and vowels and everything shift in each one of the different branches, and we can look over on the, um, on the Indian version as it goes to Sanskrit dva, and the Proto-Iranian duva, which gives us the, um, the Avestan and the Vedic versions of this, um, and all of these go around, and those are all related in that way. You can see how the natural evolution, just with this one word. So Vedic Sanskrit predated the advent of written Sanskrit by several centuries, um, and like I say, because of Vedic similarities to Avestan, uh, some linguists estimate that Proto-Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian only separated around the year 1800 BCE—so maybe three centuries before, uh, the Vedas and the Avesta are written, the oldest part of each one. So, um, in that earliest period, the Vedic tribes, you know, have entered into the Indian subcontinent; you can see them here in this, uh, location, which is where they—the place names of what they're talking about. Likewise, in the Avesta, the earliest place names, uh, are where the, uh, the Iranian Indo-Europeans are entering in from the Northeast, and so therefore they, um, the place names in the Avesta is clustered over there as opposed to encompassing the entire Achaemenid Empire if it was something that was composed later under the sponsorship of the Persian Emperors. So, um, this is an argument anyway in favor of an earlier composition date than that very later one because it seems like if the Emperors, um, were creating this world religion in order to maintain control as opposed to simply adopting a world religion, it seems, um, strange that they would ignore the western part of their empire.

So what do we know from about Zarathustra from what the, uh, Avesta tells us? So Zarathustra, in scripture, was born into a priestly family, the Spitama clan, and from childhood, very young, he was trained to be a priest. Um, this would have been a priest though of the, uh, ancient Iranian religion—essentially Iranian paganism that predated Zoroastrianism. He became a priest of that religion around the age of 15, and he left his family behind to go around, uh, his the region to learn from diverse teachers beginning around the age 20. And then at the age of 30, um, Zarathustra experienced Revelation, he says, during a religious festival where he was at a riverbank, and he, uh, saw before him a shining being. He says the shining being revealed himself as Vohu Manah, which is to say Good Purpose. So, um, many of the, um, divine beings in Zoroastrianism have, um, names that in the, uh, Avestan language, um, just directly mean things like, like Good Purpose or, uh, you know, they're they're very descriptive names. Um, and so this, uh, good spirit, this Spirit of Good Purpose, taught Zarathustra, um, about the supreme god of the universe whose name is Ahura Mazda, which means Wise Lord or God of Wisdom. Um, Zarathustra also became aware, um, of a second Primal being, uh, called Angra Mainyu—destructive spirit—and he especially became aware that the whole world is caught up in a, um, cosmic conflict between Angra Mainyu, who employs forces of Druj, that is to say deception, in order to oppose the Asha, the order that Ahura Mazda, uh, sends forth into the world through, um, good spirits like Vohu Manah. In the Avesta, Zarathustra explains, uh, that the conflict between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, uh, you know, has been ongoing, and he also includes the role of humanity in this cosmic fight. Um, Humanity takes sides with one or the other because we, of our inherent goodness or, uh, wickedness. And so he says in the, uh, Avesta: "I will speak unto you, O those desirous for knowing matters of religion, about these two Spirits. Homage unto Ahura Mazda, worship of the good mind, and efficacious holy spell gained through truth. I regard these matters worth learning and profitable on account of this spiritual illumination. The prophet Zarathustra speaks: Hear ye with your ears my best teachings and ponder over them with your bright intellect, for each one for himself there should be a vow of belief of his choice prior to those great events. May you be wakeful for learning. By us these two Spirits, the Spenta Mainyu and the Angra Mainyu, who are twins, talked among themselves. These two Spirits are in this way better and worse in thoughts, in words, and in deeds. Those who are possessed of good understanding chose truth, but those who are possessed of wicked understanding did not do so." So Spenta Mainyu here is the holy spirit created by God, by Ahura Mazda, to contend with the Angra Mainyu, uh, the the wicked spirit. So when these two Spirits, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu, first of all met together, they created life and destruction, and until the world will come to an end, this cycle of creation and destruction will continue. Of these two—I'm sorry—above mentioned twin Spirits, he who is the evil spirit chose the worst deed; the most beneficent Spirit who dwells in the most powerful Heaven chose truth. Moreover, Those Who Please Ahura Mazda by means of virtuous Deeds, having placed implicit faith in the religion, also chose the truth. The followers of the Daevas could not comprehend the difference between these twin Spirits rightly, although when they came up to inquire questions and answers of the matters of religion, we have disappointed them. Even in spite of this, they chose the worst thought and associated with the Daevas, whereby they bring bane mortals into this world.

So, as already as we're kind of, of, um, reading this here, you can see there's sort of a strong dualism, um, there are good and bad spirits, and good and bad people are choosing between the good spirits who are representing order and the bad spirits here—the Daevas—who are spreading the Druj, the deception. Um, and as we get to this word daeva here, this is another interesting thing between, um, um, words as they have evolved out of Proto-Indo-Iranian. So in Proto-Indo-European, the word *daiva* originally would have meant God, and so in Latin that gets to us, uh, through Deus, which is the word, uh, for God. But in the, uh, Zoroastrian Avesta, Daevas are the bad gods or the demons, and so that's where we get our word, uh, uh, anyway, devil, devil. Whereas the, uh, Devas in the Hindu Vedas are actually the benevolent Gods, which is where we get our word Deva. Uh, meanwhile, the name *asu/asura* in Proto-Indo-European is the proper name of a God, and so, for example, the Norse gods, one of the families of gods are called the Æsir, and you can see that as coming from that same Indo-European root. And so then that gives the word *ahu/asura* like Ahura Mazda in the Zoroastrian Avesta, which are the good gods or Angels—the Ahuras. But the Asuras in the Hindu Vedas become the malevolent gods. And so, in any event, we have the same original meanings and the same dichotomies, but who's good and bad gets flipped between, uh, the 300 or so years that separate the Iranians who went one way and the Indo-Aryans who went the other way. Um, this struggle is causing is the cause of suffering in the world, um, which can be mitigated by choosing truth over error. So, uh, as the two different Spirits are contending, people are supposed to choose the good. So when those who are born in good fame are associated in the good abode of Ahura Mazda, of the Vohu Manah, that is to say Good Purpose, and of Asha—truth—then immediately support for the destructive Druj, the deception, become stagnated. "O men, learn this regarding happiness and misery which Ahura Mazda has ordained, namely to bear agonizing pain for the wicked sinful persons and the advantages for the righteous persons, by which happiness is attained by them." So this is this cosmic thing that is going on, and if you, um, follow the, uh, the deception, you're going to have eternal, uh, pain as punishment, whereas you can obtain happiness if you're following the good.

So in part, um, uh, this dualism is a solution to the problem of suffering in the world. So, um, we have an Ahura Mazda, God, who is the universal God, uncreated, the, uh, Lord of Light and wisdom, representing all, all of those great qualities, uh, then why, if that's the case, if Asha is so incredible, why is there so much evil and needless suffering in the world? And so the dualist answer here in Zoroastrianism is because, um, to the extent that Ahura Mazda is all-powerful, Ahura Mazda is constrained in the present world and is now currently locked into a cosmic struggle with a primal Cosmic rival that represents evil—the Angra Mainyu—uh, and that that is going on as long as the world that we now live in continues to exist. So we had a whole, um, lecture on the development of the idea of the devil in Judeo-Christianity, and so by the time, um, we get to the New Testament, um, the Christian writers—New Testament authors—um, pull from the very rare mentions of, um, let's say a devil or the character of the devil in the Old Testament and equate them all together in order to, um, uh, in order to explain the early Christian idea of a cosmic evil figure—the devil. And so New Testament writers, um, in the Book of Revelation, for example, called that old serpent, referring to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the devil, uh, the Satan, the accuser from The Book of Job, who is in the court of Heaven; he's thrown out of the court of Heaven in the Book of Revelation, uh, and thrown down to earth. Um, he's equated with Lucifer, the morning star from the book of Isaiah. Uh, all of these together are understood to be, um, a cosmic devil figure, um, who, for example, in the Gospels tempts Jesus because of his power that exists right now on the Earth and who is raging on the earth in the Book of Revelation, uh, immediately prior to Armageddon and the end and the end times when it'll eventually be, uh, bound. So nevertheless, even though Christians in the first century interpreted all of those characters that way, these are not the same character in the original, in, in the original versions of each of these texts in the Old Testament. So the the story of Eden, the serpent, is not a cosmic devil; he is a a talking snake in essentially a a myth, creation myth that is at its heart has a fable because it has a talking animal in it. Um, likewise, the Satan from The Book of Job, um, is, if anything, operating as, uh, God's loyal opposition; he comes to the court when when, uh, God brings all of the sons of, of God to, uh, show them all, and they tell where they've been; the Satan has been going around as the accuser who has been, uh, making sure, uh, that nobody's too complacent. Uh, finally, the condemnation of Lucifer, the morning star in Isaiah, very, very explicitly is talking about a a king of Babylon, not a cosmic devil figure. So there is no cosmic, uh, force of evil in the Old Testament. So this is not something that was original to First Temple Judaism, but rather it is an idea that is developed in Second Temple Judaism and becomes very important, uh, in a bunch of the different texts in the later writings that we've gone through—some of these, um, apocryphal writings that don't make it into, uh, either the Christian Bible or, uh, into the Hebrew, uh, Bible in Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity, but were very popular at the end of the Second Temple period and influenced, U, you know, Christian ideas as they are writing, uh, their own, um, texts.

Look at Resurrection in the Avesta. So, in addition to having a cosmic devil, Zoroastrian eschatology includes the idea that a savior, the Saoshyant, will one day appear, and there will be a final conflict between truth and deception that will result in this world's destruction. Truth's ultimate victory will come with a restoration of a new, perfected world into which the righteous will be raised from the dead. So we read in the Avesta: "We sacrifice unto the awful kingly Glory made by Mazda that will cleave unto the Victorious Saoshyant, the Savior and his helpers, when he shall restore the the world, which will then forever never grow old and never die, never decaying and never rotting, ever living and ever increasing and master of its wish." So all of those things—that this cycle of destruction and creation will end because we'll no longer have Angra Mainyu causing the destruction at that time when the dead will rise, when life and immortality will come, and the world will be restored.

At its WI, when the creation will grow deathless, and the prosperous creation of spent minu, the Good Spirit, uh, with the prop, it'll go deathless because of that, because the droe, the deception, shall perish, though she may rush on every side to kill the holy beings; she and her H hundredfold brood shall perish, as it is the will of the Lord. So the same way that uh, ultimately, the devil is going to be bound at the end of uh, Revelation. So to uh, we'll see the end of the angru here in the aesta. So this is the second part of the solution of the problem of evil.

So um, when we're talking about why uh, evil is allowed to function in the world, um, in this case, since there's an idea that okay, after this world ends, there's going to be a resurrection, uh, and then that will allow the righteous to eventually be rewarded, even though they don't seem to be being rewarded all the time in this world, world. So we've looked at this uh, before as well, the uh, we did a whole lecture on the history of the afterlife and the development of afterlife ideas in Abrahamic religions.

So if we go back to um, the earliest uh, proportion portions of the Hebrew Bible, um, there is no idea of afterlife as as central to it. So God doesn't promise Abraham eternal life in heaven with God as part of the Abrahamic Covenant. Instead, God tells Abraham, "I will make you into a great nation; I will bless you; I will make your name great; and you will be a blessing; I will bless those who bless you; I will curse whoever curses you; I will curse; and all peoples on the world will be blessed through you."

So um, so it's a blessing of having God on your side; there's a blessing of long life; and there's a blessing that you will be a great nation. So posterity, posterity in clan is what um, is more important in this early period. Um, Abram is Abraham is then able to live 175 years long, um, but like I say, the promise is not to dwell in eternal life as a spirit in heaven or with a bodily resurrection and a new world to come; rather uh, posterity in this world. God will make Abraham into a great nation; descendants as numerous as the stars.

Um, although it's not well defined in the Hebrew Bible, most Old Testament authors seem to have viewed the underworld as a permanent resting place for the dead, whether you're righteous or unrighteous, and Heaven is really only reserved for God and the angels only. So Sheol is referenced some 66 times in the Old Testament, and there's a a regular um, pattern where uh, people who die are said to go down to Sheol, um, and so in other words, they're resting with their ancestors, sleeping with their ancestors in uh, you know, kind of a Perpetual State like that, with no idea that they're going to wake up again with Resurrection. The um, this is true whether or not you are a a rebel who uh, the Earth opens up and swallows you and you go straight to Sheol, like Korah, or whether you're a beloved figure like Abraham and Samuel. Samuel who's resting in Sheol when the Necromancer, when the witch of Endor uh, wakes, wakes his, disturbs his Spirit in order to talk to Saul.

So with uh, the only exception to this are prophets who don't die, like Elijah who's taken up in a chariot of Fire by a whirlwind into heaven, or Enoch who it's said in the book of, antediluvian ancestor of Moses, I'm sorry, of Noah, who is said that God took him in the Book of Genesis, and then perhaps also Moses who um, wanders into the desert and maybe doesn't die, although maybe he does. And so in other words, there might be exceptions where um, you just don't actually ever taste death, but uh, otherwise, there's not a sense that everybody in Sheol is going to be resurrected.

Uh, the only exception to that in the Hebrew Bible is the Book of Daniel, um, where the author of Daniel does predict that the dead are soon going to rise. So um, this is an apocalyptic book that believes that the world's destruction is very eminent, was going to happen very, very soon; the dead will rise, and some will be rewarded with eternal U life, and others are going to receive Eternal punishment. But one of the reasons why this is the case is that, as we've had a whole lecture on the Book of Daniel, Daniel is actually the newest book to make it into the Hebrew Bible. It pretends that it was uh, set in a time period hundreds of years earlier and written hundreds of years earlier, but it's pseudepigrapha, and thus it is actually sort of anachronistic; it is reflecting ideas that have been uh, developed in Second Temple Judaism that were not part, certainly not in First Temple Judaism or necessarily even in the first uh, first stage of Second Temple Judaism.

So in the Book of Daniel, Ch 12, we read about uh, the resurrection, resurrection of the dead at the apocalypse. So he says, "At that time Michael, the great Prince, the protector of your people, shall rise; Michael the Archangel; there shall be a time of Anguish such as never has occurred before since the Nations first came into existence; but at that time your people shall be delivered; everyone who is found written in the book; many of those sleep who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake." So the dead are going to rise, wake up, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. So um, there going to be a judgment and Punishment and reward. "Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever."

So the most conservative sect in Second Temple Judaism, the Sadducees, rejected the idea of Resurrection because um, they rightly saw that it was not found in the Torah, which was the part of the scriptures that was most important to them. But there was a great diversity of beliefs that developed in Second Temple Judaism over the course of the whole period. And so other sects, including the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the proto-Christian, by Jesus, um, did believe in Resurrection for the dead. U Many of these also believed in a literal apocalypse. The scenes on the Dead Sea Scrolls were looking forward to that; they were expecting multiple Messiahs, and ultimately, as in the Christian writings, there's in a sense that after Resurrection there will be a judgment with eternal reward and Punishment, like uh, is described in the Book of Daniel and in later Christian writings.

So um, the question then kind of is, so is there any, is there a direct transmission? So for all of these ideas, when we look at um, First Temple Judaism, when we look at the earliest components and understandings in scriptures um, in uh, Abrahamic religion, uh, ideas like this are not present. So we don't have uh, the idea of Resurrection; we don't have the idea that the world is going to come to an end; we don't have the idea of a cosmic devil, uh, and so so forth. But by the end of Second Temple Judaism, these are very, very popular ideas, um, uh, which were also ideas that are found in the religion uh, of the Persian Empire. And so the Persian Empire, you know, had been the greatest power up until this day uh, in the ancient Near East. So maybe some of the Chinese Empires are are comparable, but this was for anywhere uh, West of India; this is the most amazing uh, Cosmopolitan and Powerful Empire uh, up till that time period. And within this, the um, Second Temple Jewish communities are very tiny indeed; they are not hostile. So in fact, compared to the conflict the Second Temple Judaism um, had where where there was often direct conflicts with um, uh, Hellenistic leaders and Hellenismo into uh, Second Temple Judaism, and indeed um, a lot of the conflict over Hellenismo conflict, it's fought between um, uh, Second Temple Jewish people who um, had some had been Hellenized a little bit and others who wanted to be Hellenized a lot more, and so that was kind of where the fighting was happening in that, but there is a a much more fraught relationship uh, where, for example, um, we have the the Seleucid kings of Syria who uh, at a certain point decide that they're going to stamp out um, Judaism and force uh, syncretism on uh, on Jerusalem. That's not something that was happening in terms of the relationship with the Persians. Indeed, the um, uh, the texts of the Hebrew Bible, you you know, are very positive about Cyrus, who is called at one point a Messiah because of uh, being a great king who helped restore uh, the Exiles to Jerusalem, allowing them to rebuild the Temple, uh, and in general there's a relatively positive relationship between um, uh, Jewish people who are acting as courtiers in the Imperial Court. We have um, the stories of of uh, fictional stories that are set like the book of uh, Esther that are set at the court where the Persian emperor in that story is said to um, marry a a good Jewish woman, and she is able to use her position then at the court uh, to prevent a massive persecution and indeed um, genocide of Jewish people throughout the Empire, and instead um, ends up in that story anyway resulting in uh, intolerance. And so in general, that's the relationship; so it's not a hostile relationship, but there is a a vast difference in terms of the power uh, of the Persians and the Persian leadership and their um, not State religion but religion that They are promoting and patronizing um, compared to uh, any time later.

So we don't have um, we don't have lines of direct transmission, so where we can say uh, when we do these things where we're talking about um, literary dependence and we'd say, oh well, this particular text is um, is directly literarily dependent; we take a a poem, let's say from the Avesta, and it actually gets translated and makes it way into the Bible or something like that; nothing like that exists, um, but the but in terms of an idea transmission, this is ideas that are existing right next to each other and on top of each other as opposed to um, much further uh, afield connections that people would like to make, let's say where they would like U uh, Buddhists to be coming and talking to Jesus or the Bab or the Jesus as a child to go visit India or something like that, which did not happen. This is a um, there is a a direct uh, connection, even if we can't show a direct uh, transmission. And so what I would just say is that more attention to this is needed.

Persian cultural influences in the Greek world, the Hellenistic world, were probably really, really important, but their thought is often minimized in part because we have so little survival of uh, any Persian writing and literature and texts and things like that. If we had not lost all of that, um, we might know a lot more about different ways that um, the Persians have influenced Western thought. Um, the Avesta and Zoroastrian theology deserve much more credit, I think, in attention uh, for influencing Abrahamic religion than they normally receive, and any at the very least, um, we need to be probably studying this more. So I'm really glad that um, a lot of you have asked for this, and this is really only just um, scraping the surface because I'd like to do another couple lectures where we um, study Zoroastrianism and its history in a lot more detail.

I want to thank um, contributors who uh, have been giving support; I want to thank Charles Reynolds, David Ferguson, Neila Atley, uh, Frank Kich, Scott Heiney, Richard Epler, Reagan Harrington, Rean Harrington, um, John Clinker, Eric Nordquist, the American American Legacy Construction, uh, Jason Bishop, Ron Wagner, Gayen Deosta, Diana Patterson, um, and then there's recent super thanks here too uh, uh, in the super chats. So thanks to VSP, to Susan Smith, uh, Mr. MSA Arodi, John E Elodi Salgado, Hon the Leper, Land Writing to, yeah, Hon the Leper, uh, Demig Glot, Matthew McGil, No Mormon No Cry, and Doug Wolf. Thanks everybody for doing that. Oh, super chats from this live stream: Dave Anderson, JM Darthur, Rama Fire Ever Living. Okay, here's some questions.

Julie Brusi: Can you explain the Zoroastrian concept of hell? Um, from what I've read, it seems more like uh, purgatory and is not Eternal. So um, so I think that I think that you're right, um, so I think that there's an evolution in all of these, and so one of the uh, one of the ideas is that this is also true in, you know, in Christianity, is at a certain point people start to think about the idea of, you know, Eternal punishment, and that seems like incredibly unjust, and so generally speaking, over time, people then as they as they talk about it, they they think, okay, well, you did some very bad things, and there's got to be this uh, purifying uh, edifying way that you're punished for a certain amount of time, but that ultimately um, causes you to um, you've paid your dues, and and and now maybe it won't last forever. And so I think that that's also the case in the descriptions of it that I've read in Zoroastrianism, but it's probably I would I suspect there's probably the idea of it is not not necessarily consistent across time; certainly Christians have different ideas about it within Christianity too.

Jeff C: Do we know about enough about Zoroastrianism back then to know how much it influenced the others? So so because all of the so much of the texts and everything like that are lost, mostly what we have is then um, the Avestas, the the uh, the components that were memorized that are in these archaic languages, which therefore have to be old um, because of because of the uh, they had to have been composed very early, and so then we can look at the ideas existing, but like I'm kind of saying here, Jeff, in the in the of this, we without having any kind of a direct um, you know, like literary dependence or anybody at the time saying, oh, I got this idea from these guys, you know, we we can only say that there's a um, that these are ideas uh, in a what was a very U culturally powerful religion, and these are compelling ideas, and then we can simply say these were AAS that didn't exist in First Temple Judea, but they are um, they do continue to exist or they become important in Second Temple Judaism, you know, right when uh, Persian is side by side with uh, uh, the Jews within both everywhere in in the diaspora in Babylon, but also in um, you know, the Persian Empire that rules over uh, uh, Egypt and Judea, so the whole population, and they're also interacting as a minority at the court and so forth, so they're very connected with it. So we can't we can't know that um, that there's a direct influence, but we can say the ideas; we can see what ideas are in the Avesta, and then we can see ideas that weren't in Second Temple Judaism that or First Temple Judaism that then are in Second Temple Judaism. You know, one of the things that ends up happening in then Rabbinic Judaism because uh, some of these ideas are AR really present in the earliest form because um, the later texts mostly don't make it in um, the uh, the Jewish Canon, the Rabbinic Canon of the Hebrew Bible; a lot of the some of this gets purged and isn't as important anymore in Rabbinic Judaism, whereas because Christian scripture is written down sort of at the height of a lot of these ideas um, the idea of a cosmic devil and so forth, this becomes more important in Christianity, and it is less important going forward in Rabbinic Judaism.

Ry the King: Thanks for your support. Ry the King: Says any idea of the identity of the Haoma from the Avesta and the Vedas respectively, if they're the same plant. And and so I don't know that um, I don't I don't have special idea about that, but um, it's it's interesting; it's inter interesting again that that there are these common um, sources in these common words because the language family has only split apart a few hundred years, it seemingly before the two texts are written, and so both the religions are div dividing but from a same common origin point of uh, Proto-Indo-Iranian um, paganism that would have existed.

Jesus Tales: Are those ideas verifiable as a part as a part of Zoroastrianism prior to the oldest texts? So so the we don't have anything about Zoroastrianism prior to um, so so you're saying 1000 CE. So so the argument that I've made is, you know, okay, so yes, we have a manuscripts, and the manuscripts are very late, right, um, but just because we let's say only have like a late medieval manuscript of some let's say book that was written by Cicero, that doesn't mean that you know we we we have to say, well, maybe some medieval guy wrote this text of Cicero's, this one text of Cicero, and uh, because we don't have any autographic manuscripts that Cicero wrote, uh, the earliest manuscript, let's say hypothetically, let's say it's from the year 1200, the person in the year 1200, even though um, they may well know medieval Latin because they're a cleric and a church scholar who is educated in that medieval Latin, will have changed remarkably from what um, the language, the Republican Latin that Cicero is writing in; it's really impossible for a medieval person to have been able to forge a document like that in the Middle Ages um, because their language would uh, would give them away; they'll speak the language wrong, and they will introduce all kinds of, here we have late these late manuscripts um, of uh, of the Avesta; we don't have the we don't have any early text of it, and and it's not written down until let's say 500 under the Sasanian's, but because it is when it's written down, it is composed in a language that nobody's spoken for a thousand years, um, you know, in terms of the pop the common population; this is the argument that um, that Scholars make that this is is earlier. And so what we know is uh, we don't know all of the ideas, but we know that um, uh, the Achaemenid Emperors um, are uh, patronizing and supporting uh, this religion, Zoroastrianism, but again we don't have uh, a lot of texts and Persian records that have survived to so that we can know the details of that. So really um, the the argument here is based on the how archaic these uh, these languages are that make it seem pretty compelling that there was a direct memorized oral tradition um, that goes back a long way.

Logos Deen: I'm curious about uh, to know how Roman Mithraism differs from its source in Zoroastrianism, and how Mithraism and uh, the emergent uh, Zurvanite sects differed in their cosmologies. So so Roman Mithraism um, is a um, is a it's frankly a Western religion that had uh, as its guys, I think the an Eastern, you know, Mithas, an Eastern God who made it who gave it s of this um, kind of this flavor of the of the East, but I think it doesn't um, it differs a lot from its it you know, its source uh, in terms of uh, in terms of Mithos uh, the god um, that you know that is has has it place in the in the East. So we need to probably do a whole lecture on Mithraism because it's very interesting, but um, my understanding is that it it actually um, diverges very significantly.

Jop 985: I wonder how the world's religious landscape would look if Constantine had never converted to Christianity; any thoughts on that? Yeah, so it would look very different, um, so so there's so Christianity, although it was a significant minority religion by the time of Constantine, it wasn't it wasn't important; there's no particular reason that Constantine had to convert; um, he could have uh, he could have done something different. So so so ultimately, um, there was uh, there had been crises of Faith where um, where the old style of paganism had um, had ceased to provide the kind of meaning um, that had um, had fueled it earlier, and so and so the Greco-Roman um, uh, philosophies like Stoicism, Platonism, and so forth, those were um, reforms of that where they're trying to where um, religious reformers essentially the philosophers are trying to add um, ideas and meaning to um, to practices that seemed U Hollow over time, and so there was a kind of a crisis of spirituality as a result of that, um, eventually, you know, as there are these um, competing, you know, World Religions, so there's other religions like Manichaeism that were going on at the same time; we just talked about Mithraism; um, there were new new formulations um, if other world religion, let's say, had had really um, taken off, like let's say, you know, Zoroastrianism is one of these, it had would have had a lot of strength against um, just the basic unorganized inherited paganism that the uh, that the Romans were uh, still having in the 4th century, and so probably under the pressure of a um, let's say of a stronger world religion, uh, in the same way that Hinduism under the pressure from the different world religions organized and changed and evolved into something that is more resembling a world religion, um, it's possible that Greco-Roman paganism would have evolved into something that resembled Christianity anyway because it was on that kind of path, but that would have maintained um, you know, the all of the Gods, some of the ancient practices, all of the mythology and so forth. So that's one of the options; another option is some other world religion um, you know, could have taken over.

Josh Bedford: Any thoughts on Nietzsche's creative use of their Thra or his ethical project of uh, developing Beyond Good and Evil? So yeah, so it is it's interesting, so um, it's not particularly related to the actual Zarathustra or Zoroastrianism um, in the same exact way we were talking a second ago about how um, uh, Roman Mithraism uh, has this flavor of the East, so is Nietzsche uh, here in in taking this idea of Zoroaster, Zoroaster, and and sort of WR in a creative philosophical fiction about it, um, you know, it's not it's not based on Zarathustra, but it's but it's his own idea, and he's using that as sort of uh, historical fiction jumping off point, and that in a turn um, inspired the uh, um, the music right that became uh, that we now associate with um, with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Robert Fulz: Hanukkah came about during the Second Temple Judaism; surely I'm not the first person to wonder if it was related to the so-called fire worshipping or Zoroastrian under Cyrus the Great, who uh, is a Messiah. So that's interesting; I have not heard that before. So um, so yeah, Hanukkah is a miracle that um, uh, where they were able to keep the the the fires lit despite running for a whole long time, despite having enough oil, not having enough oil, uh, and so again there's flame being kept uh, alive; it's also um, again a it's the only Festival that doesn't isn't therefore represented in the um, in the scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, because it's talked about in the in the book of Maccabees, that doesn't, it's in Catholic and Orthodox Bible but not in the Jewish Bible. I have not heard that before um, in I don't know; I wouldn't I don't want to I guess I could say, you know, fire is is common to lots of religious worship, um, although this is it's interesting in that in that this is about keeping a lamp burning as opposed to um, fire being used for for animal sacrifice, which is how it would have been used in the um, the First Temple especially.

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Stories by Steve: What translation is John using for uh, the Avesta? And um, I I I was able to download a couple PDFs from uh, a website, and I don't know what the translation is, who the translator is offhand, and so I apologize for that; we'll look it up and add that.

K Tempest Bradford: Did uh, the Zoroastrians believe in bodily Resurrection or a spirit-Soul one, and did Second Temple Jews which did they believe in, how did that jive with the funeral practices? So so they do believe in um, so they do both believe in a in a bodily Resurrection, um, and so I I presume that the way that this works is that um, the important thing to keep, as far as anyway what seems to be the important thing to keep in the Zoroastrian practice, is is the bones, so um, the flesh as it decays.

Um, uh, would it would be making the ground or fire impure? So, um, when you have the the the uh Temple of Silence or the where the where the uh bodies are laid out, eventually the bones are are cleaned and are dry, and then you take the bones and you put them into uies. And so we had a picture of a uary where you just put all the bones together; you don't have a a big casket, um, like you would have in uh Judaism or Christianity. And so, um, and so I think that the idea then would be new flesh would grow on the bones, but the important thing to maintain is the bones. Um, and in terms of um second temple Judaism and Christianity, there's burial of the body, um, and there's a sense that the body needs to be intact for for the resurrection, um, for some some conceptions of it.

Fire ever living. Um, do you think Christianity's association of Fire with hell might be an attack on Zoroastrianism? Um, I don't know. I don't think so. I think that um I think that U I think the association is probably with uh, you know, the these earlier conceptions of Underworld. So, um, you know, this is the so Heaven gets associated with the sky and then clouds and things like that, and uh hell gets associated with underworld. And so because the underworld, we know especially that there's a lot of molten lava down there, but anyway, you people knew that enough because of volcanoes, um, that I think that that's probably that I would assume is what the association is uh with fire as opposed to um, you know, like Vulcan's Forge. In other words, the ancient pagans also have um fire in their underworlds as opposed to um as opposed to saying that you people with your fire temples are are making hell on Earth or something. I don't think it's it's I've never heard any of that before.

Anyway, uh, wing of shoe, uh, how much of Zoroastrian history or belief is lost to time? So a huge proportion, almost all of the history is lost. Um, in terms of belief, we have the, you know, again these earliest texts, and we can reconstruct from that. We have um little bits of information in the in the unfortunately scant records that we have of both um both Persian Empires, the Achaemenid Empire and the Sasanian Empire. Relatively, we have the interactions that the Greeks and the Romans and the Arabs are having with um uh Zoroastrian, but um but in general, we we've lost huge proportions of it. So, um, and then unfortunately in modern times, uh the Zoroastrian community has been very tiny, and so it um it's in the opposite situation that um where that that was occurred under the Persian Empire where we're talking about how um uh Zoroastrianism might have been influencing the very tiny and unimportant religion of second temple Judaism, the Proto-Abrahamic religion. Um, in the modern times, because the Zoroastrian community is so tiny, um Christians have had exerted a lot of influence on it in the last few hundred years, um, and so and so it it's subject to to that kind of thing at this point too.

Thumper, is syncretism more the norm than the exception? I would say perhaps so. I think that there's um people um are in their in their time frame, you're exposed to ideas, and you think about those ideas, and so um and so some things are maintained, you know, and so if you're sitting around with a um, you know, like a holy book, then you're maintaining that and how and as you're interested in that that um uh that continues to ground you in the past because it ceases to be um, you know, it's not updated if you're maintaining it either through memorization or through a text. Nevertheless, um, your ideas can all start to change, and you reinterpret them and add add things to them as we even have seen the the earliest parts of the Bible don't have these ideas, and yet their these ideas have become Central to um the sect that becomes Christianity, uh, and so and so how are they adding that despite holding on to um a religious book? They're exposed to new ideas; they're living their own time, um, and and that's influencing who they are. We now have 200 likes, thank you. Uh, Troy Coralus says, um, if few records exist from the Persian period about Zoroastrian cultural influence, might there be any other sources from neighboring cultures such as India that uh could provide clues to Zoroastrian influence? So like I say, there is, you know, there are references in other texts that are around um we know what uh but they're but they're scant as well, you know. So so unfortunately, um, you know, yeah, we have to try to reconstruct things based on what neighbors are saying, um, but we that gives us a very imperfect picture.

Uh, Julie Bazooki, is Zoroastrianism like Samaritanism, a religion that only allows marriage within its faith? It definitely has been, and so this is one of the reasons why um it's has so many fewer people. So in a lot of cases, um, you know, when a religion is a minority within a society that has a um has a different religion that is somewhat hostile, like the Samaritans have had to deal with um over time, one of the deals you make with the surrounding culture is, you know, just going to be separate and keep our own, and we'll marry amongst ourselves, and people can marry out of the faith. Uh, and that certainly was a was uh the policy in Iran. If you um if you marry out of the faith into Islam, you can't go back, um, but uh you can't marry anybody who's Muslim, can't go into Zoroastrianism. So it it what one of the reasons why it's shrunk down to so such a small group. I'm not sure if you know that would continue to be true, let's say here in Canada. I don't know that you have to I mean I would have to I'd have to ask them if how they're doing it here if um um if you can marry somebody who then can convert and become Zoroastrian. I would think that they might be more open to that now, but we'd have to ask.

Jacob, when did the idea of hell go from something like an underworld to a place where bad people go when they die, and where does this come from? Well, so there's an evolution of an underworld as a place where your shade goes to rest, which is um true in uh like Sheol in the in the Old Testament times, uh, but it's also true for um, let's say Greco-Roman paganism. The idea is your people's Shades go into the underworld, um, and so that's a fairly common idea. Uh, but then again, when the when when when we right out of that and and start to develop these um, you know, getting away from polytheism where we have all these little Gods who are gods of everything, and instead we now start to have um Universal Gods including Cosmic Devils, that's when we start to get um this idea of places of infinite punishment or or or being one with the the infinite good Creator. And so it's the same transition time, and this is also the time when other world religions are are contemplating things like, you know, reincarnation is how things work or um uh or a in a personal soul that can go on, you know, and or a resurrection where you have bodily Resurrection. These are people are start to be worried about um individually what will happen to me after I die, and these are some of the ideas that people come up with.

Zorok says, can you speak to the role and place of women in Zoroastrianism, either historic or in contemporary times? I'm interested in how they stack up against their neighbors. So, um, according to um the Zoroastrian I met here in Toronto, there's nothing that forbids women ordination in the sacred text, but that this is something that has been introduced uh, you know, throughout the Middle Ages and into the present where they'd have male-only ordination um as a custom but not as a um not as a precept from the scriptures. And so uh the goal here anyway in North America is to um to get past that uh tradition and to allow uh for full ordination for women and men. And so in the present, because they they cannot do the the full ordinations until they have a um a fire temple that has all of the different levels of fire, uh instead they have to have ordination to priesthood at the temples in India. Um, right now they have elaborate um lay Ministry where more or less lay people do all the things that you would need a priest for normally except for just the one top priest or something. But when they are able to have a fully functional, you know, top-level, you know, Fire temple here, then they'll be able to do uh ordinations here, and that could include ordinations of women.

All right, guys, uh, thank you so much. This has been really wonderful. Um, remember we're going to do a lecture on Pho and the logos next week, then female Apostles in the early church the following week, and finally the Trinity the week after that. Thanks so much, uh, see you then.