Greg2003

I am a newbie to the board, so I apologize if this subject has been discussed before. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has investigated the possible connections between Zoroastrianism and Judaism and Christianity.

A compelling theory has come to my attention, and I would like to explore it in more detail, hear the arguments in favor and against.

According to this theory when Cyrus, who Isaiah calls the Messiah, sent Ezra and Nehemiah to Jeruselem, they introduced the Mosaic law. The people hearing it didn't recognize it. In fact, it wasn't even written in their language and Ezra had to have a group of interpreters from all around the Persian empire join him to translate and explain the law of Moses to them. Ezra then had the people celebrate the "feast of booths." The theory goes that Cyrus was Zoroastrian. As emporer he followed a strategy of assimilating the various native religions but syncretising them to make them compatible with his own so that the people would not have reason to resist their persian rulers. The foriegn language of the law of moses, the detailed purity rituals, the feast of booths, the unfamiliarity of the people with the laws are all seen as evidence that Zoroastrianism has been grafted onto the mosaic tradition. The feast of booths apparently corresponds to a Zoroastrian feast, and the purity rituals correspond to the Zoroastrian sacred texts. Isaiah celebrates Cyrus as the jewish messiah, while recognizing that he doesn't worship the same god. Isaiah also distinguishes the jewish god from the Zoroastrian god by specifically stating that the jewish god makes both good and evil.

The idea of interpreters being needed is also suggested as the source for the pharisees. The sadducees had a simpler version of Judaism and did not believe in the resurrection and did not believe in a hell of damnation or even an evil satanic figure, apparently. The pharisees, by contrast believed all of these things which are compatible with similar Zoroastrian beliefs. While pharisee can be translated "seperated ones", it can also be translated "interpreters" which seems to correspond to the Ezra account. According to this theory after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans circa 70CE, the sadducees disappeared but the pharisee version of judaism remained with its detailed laws, monotheism with a satan figure seperating a good god from a bad satan (very similar to Zoroastrian dualism).

Mithraism was a cult that sprang out of Zoroastrianism. Mithras was supposedly the son of the one and only God Ahura Mazda. One version of Mithraism has him born springing fully formed out of a rock, thus creating a cave, which is where Mithraists are supposed to worship him. But another version has him born of a virgin impregnated by god. He is wise from childhood on and becomes a powerful prince, but is ultimately killed and hung on a tree, and then rises again.

Paul is said to be a pharisee living in a cosmopolitan center where both or either the Roman version of Mithraism was practiced or the eastern version was practiced. Some christians will claim that Roman Mithraism only emerged after the time of Christ. I am not sure about that claim. But in any event the persian version should have been present to some extent in Tarsus in the area of Syria/Turkey.

According to this theory the movement that Paul represents simply syncretizes the psuedo-jewish rabbi figure jesus that emerged out of all of the "new covenant" work done by the Essenes and Gnostics with the Persian and Greek god-man ideal. But Paul's movement (if we may call it that) is particularly inclined to identify the new covenant with a god-man because there is so much persian influence in his thinking already due to his pharisee-rabbinic education.

The angel-demon spiritual warfare stuff that Paul talks about also closely corresponds to the popular, though corrupted, version of Zoroastrianism popular by the 1st century BCE.

Thus, Judaism and Christianity are essentially expressions of Zoroastrianism. Comments please!!

Marduk

"The angel-demon spiritual warfare stuff that Paul talks about also closely corresponds to the popular, though corrupted, version of Zoroastrianism popular by the 1st century BCE."


Seems reasonable, The Book of Enoch was to have been written around this time, full of angel-demon lore.

RyanS2

I write a little bit about that:

<a href="http://www.satan4u.8m.com/history/666.html" target="_blank">http://www.satan4u.8m.com/history/666.html</a>

Zoroastrian influence comes into the late portions of Judaism, particularly the apocryphal documents. Some researches point out because of the large amounts of reconstruction under Persian rule, (authors of the "Priestly" or (P) class), trying to figure out which parts were original Judaism w/o the Zoroastrian influence is hard. Even harder, Zoroastrianism was influenced by Babylonian religions, which influenced Judaism, so we're left with a melting pot of whom had what?

The largest internet proponent of the idea that Zoroastrianism heavily influenced Judaism is Dr. Michael Magee. He has a large collection of online books that he's written at his website:

<a href="http://www.askwhy.co.uk" target="_blank">http://www.askwhy.co.uk</a>

For his full dissertation on Judaism, (though there are scattered references throughout the page), go to:

<a href="http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/index.html</a>

Greg2003

Fantastic sites RyanS2!!!!!! Thanks sooo much. That was just what I was looking for. I hope his scholarship holds up. I'll be chewing on this for a while. Can't thank you enough!!

RyanS2

"Some christians will claim that Roman Mithraism only emerged after the time of Christ."

Impossible, Mithrainism is attested to at least one century before Christ, typically thought to have been introduced around the late 3rd century BCE from foreign wars and travel. The usual claim is that Mithrainism was a small cult, and that its initation and rituals were completely secret, and thus, it is impossible for Paul to have known about it. (Mithrainism only allowed male Roman soldiers into it, which would mean that Paul would have to have been a Roman soldier). Calling Mithrainism a small cult is a stretch, it extended into all of Rome, with sites of Mithraic caves found all over, and still more being discovered. The better claim is how secret it was, we really know next to nothing about mystery schools, only their public rituals were publically known, and even they esoteric, their secret rituals and meaning are complete guesswork to us. Thus whether Mithra's act of slaying the bull is him sacrificing himself to himself, slaying the winter, slaying the Zodiac sign and representing a new equinox procession, etc., etc., can go on infinitely.

More likely, in Paul's own words, he was "All things to all men". Meaning he knew about Greek religions, at least as much as we do if not much more, and Jewish religions. He reconciled the two into a harmonious package, and went about preaching it. Keeping the Jewish morals, without the over-restrictions of the Orphic cult, and having that unmoveable mover of a God, while still connecting to us in an ecstatic way, Paul basically managed to reconcile two Worlds together. If you stand back, you have to admire what he did. Most of us wouldn't have been so inventive.

I'll quote myself on the contention that Paul had no knowledge of Hellenism, <a href="http://www.satan4u.8m.com/history/dionysos.html:" target="_blank">http://www.satan4u.8m.com/history/dionysos.html:</a>

"Paul understood that in their extensive pantheon, the Greeks had an unknown god, who covered any god that may have been neglected; Paul will now reveal to them the identity of the Unknown God. A Christian commentator writes of it as thus:

Athens was filled with statues to "the unknown god." Six hundred years before Paul, a terrible plague had come upon the city and a man name Epimenides had an idea. He let loose a flock of sheep through the town and wherever they lay down, they would sacrifice that sheep to god which had the nearest shrine or temple. If a sheep lay down near no shrine or temple, they would sacrifice the sheep "to the unknown god."

In pointing out Paul, Mr. Miller is apparently forgetting that everyone identified one God with another, outside of Judaism, there were no exclusive Gods. The pantheon was now the pantheism, every God was a God incarnate. Perhaps more striking is the mention that Paul detested anything made with hands as an object of veneration, but the Christian Church adopted this. Syncretism hadn't taken effect six hundred years before Paul, but by the time Paul was around, it had. The "unknown God" was really the same God, it had fallen out of its old ideology, and it was an idol representing EVERY GOD IN THE PANTHEON!"

It would be absurd to label Paul, a proselytizing Christian, as not having any knowledge of foreign religions. Even in modern times, most of our earliest works on foreign religions come from Christians, who are seeking to gain converts. (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) Without understanding someone else's religion, it's hard to convert them to yours, and it's no doubt the same case that Paul found out as well.

Boshko

"Mithraism was a cult that sprang out of Zoroastrianism."
That there's much to this connection besides the name is disputed. This article seems to make sense but I don't know enough of the history to say for sure:
<a href="http://www.well.com/user/davidu/mithras.html" target="_blank">http://www.well.com/user/davidu/mithras.html</a>

Also Judeo-Christian teleology (ie "endism") and the concept of a savior/messiah being more than just the reinstation of the old davidic dynasty are also heavily flavored with Zoroastrianism and the image of a cosmic war that will finally end with a victory with good when the savior (saoshayt) comes.

Greg2003

The article you cite states the earliest evidence for Mithraism in the Greek world as the 1st century BCE. But I believe the eastern version of Mithraism was in evidence before that by mabey a century or more. But I don't know about this for sure. If anyone has any knowledge of this I would appreciate it.

RyanS2

Christian George W. Gilmore, an associate editor of the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, states that:

It was probably at this period, 250-100 B.C., that the Mithraic system of ritual and doctrine took the form which it afterward retained. Here it came into contact with the mysteries, of which there were many varieties, among which the most notable were those of Cybele.

godfry n. glad

Greetings, Greg-

Thanks for the leads. I don't know whether you've stumbled across it yet, but _Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith_, by Norman Cohn, is an excellent source to connect a lot of the Jewish parousia beliefs (and thus Christian ones) to Persian sources. Hell, Satan, bodily resurrection and the like seemingly have their origins in Zoroastrian mythos....at least according to Dr. Cohn.

Remember, too, that Crassus got his ass whipped by the Parthians (the inheritors of the Persian empire and Zoroastrians/Mithraians) in Syria at Carrhae and the Parthians controlled Jerusalem for a couple of years thereafter (around 53 BCE). In geopolitical terms, Cyrus' inheritors still were one of the most menacing sources of possible destabilization for Roman control in the Levant...clear into the 2nd century CE.

I find it peculiar that the Farsi/Persian/Parthian influence in the Levant during the "Axial Age" is minimized to the point of near non-existance by historians of ancient Rome and both Jewish and Christian religions.

Best,

godfry n. glad

CX

If I'm not mistaken I believe that the Roman cult was not strictly Mithraic per se. Rather the Roman Legions in outlying areas practiced a syncretistic blend of the cult of Sol Invicti and mithraism. That cult which was quite popular and wide spread in the Roman world around the same time as Xianity emerged is not precisely the same as the mithraic mystery cults of the Perso-Iranians. I have often felt that too much is made of the connection between the Judeo-Xian mythos and the Mithraic/Sol Invicti cult.
That there is a connection between Judaism and Zoroastrianism resulting from the interaction between cultures during the Bablylonian captivity seems undeniable, but I'm not sure how much to make of it. Any non-web references on the subject would be appreciated.