Richard, there was nothing polytheistic at all about Mazdaism.
You do not have to be worshipper of some version of Jehovah to be monotheistic.
Zoroastrians were as monotheistic as we are when Jahweh one of the tribal gids telling his own people not to worship any of the others.
Richard, you are still trying to shoehorn the world into the Old Testament.
First you say Zoroastrianism was not the problem in All-Important Judea at the time. Absolutely no one knows what Zoroastrianism meant in the place at that time. All reference has been censored, aka, “interpreted” out. You folks never mentioned it after Iran fell to the Moslems.
For many years, there was a desperate denial that Gilgamesh was written so long ago, because the Jews OWNED the Flood, you know. So naturally the titanic Persian Empire was totally unknown to a people who were closer to it than to Rome and the ancient people the Gilgamesh beloned to were just scratching their itches until Moses came along.
It’s not a theological expression, but:
Yea. Right.
Who were the enemies of the Hellenes, right back before the Battle of Marathon?
Well, gee, whiz, it was them nonexistent Persians! They were Zoroastrian then.
I’ll tell you something you can’t dig out of the OT: the Persians destroyed temples, not just because they were the enemy, but because they were PAGAN.
Sound familiar? It was a habit Christianity INVENTED centuries after the Persians did it.
In fact just shortly before Iran was conquered by the Moslems the Persians and the Jews, AGAIN, engaged in a joint attack on Byzantine Christians, aka, Hellenics. The “real” Jews, like the Philistines, found their allies against the Hellenics in Persia over and over and over.
And, yes, they did know that Persia existed.
On the Persian/Parsee/Farsi/Pharisee connection: The plan of the temple in Hieru-salem (I’ll fling that out there) is exactly that of a typical Zoroastrian fire-temple and built, according to legend, by King Cyrus of Persia.
When one perceives that the Persians predicted the coming of the Savior (Saoshyant), that the Zoroastrian priest-kings (Magi) knew where to find him, and were the first to worship him, it all begins to come together.
It also makes perfect Mazdaist sense that the Lord would choose the darkest corner of the world from which to RISE.
This means that the “Christ” hailed in the oldest Greek version of the OT was not the national hero of a kingdom of this world, but was of the kingdom of Heaven — just as in Zoroastrian scriptures. And unlike Mithras who appeared cosmically in eternity past, this Savior of the kingdom of Heaven appeared in HISTORY, and so the Magi were there following his star from the east.
A secondary consequence of this knowledge that the groundwork of Christianity (and so too of our civilization) was laid in polytheistic Mazdaism may be that respect of Woden’s lore might not be in competition with Christian revelation.
Comment by Peter — 11/12/2005 @ 5:15 pm | Edit This
Bob, The Pharisees were the “super” Jews. Zoroastrianism was not the problem in Judea at the time. Hellenism was and the Pharisees hated Hellenism with a pure hate. The Saducees were the heretics who had bought into a lot of the paganistic belief swimming about the middle east at the time.
#1 by Peter on 11/15/2005 - 9:40 pm
Zoroastrianism is not identical with Mazdaism. Zoroastrianism is Mazdaist but not all Mazdaism is Zoroastrian.
To historians Zoroastrianism is the first monotheist and revealed religion. Mazdaism means worship of the supreme God and implies monotheism. However, the pre-Zoroastrian religion was polytheist although Zorastrians regard it as (corrupt) Mazdaist. One of the reasons for Zoroaster’s reforms was that the Persians had begun to worship all sorts of spirits in addition to the family of the supreme god. Zoroaster also did away with the drug-orgies. The reform of the religion from a pantheon (with millions of spirits added to it) to a monotheon brought order, discipline, and simplicity.
There is a debate on which group, the Pharisees or the Sadducees, were the real Jews. In many ways, the Sadducees resemble the modern Jews the most in that they did not believe in an afterlife, believed the soul died when the body died, believed this world was all that was, and so were pure materialists like all good Communists and Capitalists from Marx to Kuhn and Loeb. Josephus claimed that the Sadducees were the majority.
When the Decalogue reads “Thou shalt have no other gods BEFORE me,” it suggests that the law-giving god on the mount was a god above gods. This position had always been occupied by the Lord, the son of God, but Jehovah (Yaw/YHWH) was challenging that.
The Septuagint’s version of Deut. 32:8-9 confirms that the god of Jacob was separate from and lower than God the Most High; the oldest version of this verse, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls confirms the Septuagint and names this lower god YHWH. This clearly explains what having no gods “before me” means: one god was to be revered before the others. Unfortunately, the name of the god who gave the laws to Moses is left out. We are told only that he said “I am… ” and there it ends.
So Jews claim that “I am” was the whole sentence, that the god never identified himself. And through twists and turns and unconvincing rhetoric Jews claim that “I am” is just an unclear way to say YHWH. He wanted Moses to know who he was but didn’t want Moses to be clear. Of course, Jews also left out from the Masoretic text (the newest text of the OT) the part of Deuteronomy where their god is lower than the Most High.
The Jews and the Judaizers were the first menace that Christianity faced. When their attacks failed, a new heresy came about on the other extreme from Judaism. Where Judaism is materialist, Gnostic was pure spiritualist. Gnosticism preached that the material world was created by Yaw, and that people should focus only on things spiritual and never enjoy the physical. And so the pendulum swings.
#2 by Elizabeth on 11/18/2005 - 3:01 pm
There is some recent work out about polytheism in the Jewish kingdoms. One author states
that Judaism as we know it first arose when the Jews, having been in contact with
Cyrus’ Persians, returned to Jerusalem from Babylon.
In the Avesta, not only is there a Flood, the plans of the Ark are described _in
detail_. (The Avesta is one of Zoroastrianism’s holy books.)
#3 by Richard L. Hardison on 11/19/2005 - 10:05 am
Before the exodus the “Jews,” actually hebrews, were polytheistic. That’s why Moses asks God “who should I say sent me?” That is the point at which montheism begins. The rest of the world at that time were polytheistic or animist.