24 Bundehesh, ch. xxxi.
Avesta was written. We know that the Christians of the first two centuries believed a great many things of which there is no statement in the New Testament. Spiegel holds that the doctrine in debate is not in the Avesta, the text of which in its present form he thinks was written after the time of Alexander.25 But he confesses that the resurrection theory was in existence long before that time.26 Now, if the Avesta, committed to writing three hundred years before Christ, at a time when the doctrine of the resurrection is known to have been believed, contains no reference to it, the same relation of facts may just as well have existed if we date the record seven centuries earlier. We possess only a small and broken portion of the original Zoroastrian Scriptures; as Roth says, "songs, invocations, prayers, snatches of traditions, parts of a code, the shattered fragments of a once stately building." If we could recover the complete documents in their earliest condition, it might appear that the now lost parts contained the doctrine of the general resurrection fully formed. We have many explicit references to many ancient Zoroastrian books no longer in existence. For example, the Parsees have a very early account that the Avesta at first consisted of twenty one Nosks. Of these but one has been preserved complete, and small parts of three or four others. The rest are utterly wanting. The fifth Nosk, whereof not any portion remains to us, was called the Do az ah Hamast. It contained thirty two chapters, treating, among other things, "of the upper and nether world, of the resurrection, of the bridge Chinevad, and of the fate after death." 27 If this evidence be true, and we know of no reason for not crediting it, it is perfectly decisive. But, at all events, the absence from the extant parts of the Zend Avesta of the doctrine under examination would be no proof that that doctrine was not received when those documents were penned.
Secondly, we have the unequivocal assertion of Theopompus, in the fourth century before Christ, that the Magi taught the doctrine of a general resurrection.28 "At the appointed epoch Ahriman shall be subdued," and "men shall live again and shall be immortal." And Diogenes adds, "Eudemus of Rhodes affirms the same things." Aristotle calls Ormuzd Zeus, and Ahriman Haides, the Greek names respectively of the lord of the starry Olympians above, and the monarch of the Stygian ghosts beneath. Another form also in which the early Greek authors betray their acquaintance with the Persian conception of a conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman is in the idea expressed by Xenophon in his Cyropadia, in the dialogue between Araspes and Cyrus of two souls in man, one a brilliant efflux of good, the other a dusky emanation of evil, each bearing the likeness of its parent.29 Since we know from Theopompus that certain conceptions, illustrated in the Bundehesh and not contained in the fragmentary Avestan books which have reached us, were actually received Zoroastrian
25 Studien uber das Zend Avesta, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 1855, band ix. s. 192.
26 Spiegel, Avesta, band i. s. 16.
27 Dabistan, vol. i. pp. 272-274.
28 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Introduction, sect. vi. Plutarch, concerning Isis and Osiris.
29 Lib. vi. cap. i. sect. 41.
tenets four centuries before Christ, we are strongly supported in giving credence to the doctrinal statements of that book as affording, in spite of its lateness, a correct epitome of the old Persian theology.
Thirdly, we are still further warranted in admitting the antiquity of the Zoroastrian system as including the resurrection theory, when we consider the internal harmony and organic connection of parts in it; how the doctrines all fit together, and imply each other, and could scarcely have existed apart. Men were the creatures of Ormuzd. They should have lived immortally under his favor and in his realm. But Ahriman, by treachery, obtained possession of a large portion of them. Now, when, at the end of the fourth period into which the world course was divided by the Magian theory, as Theopompus testifies, Ormuzd overcomes this arch adversary, will he not rescue his own unfortunate creatures from the realm of darkness in which they have been imprisoned? When a king storms an enemy's castle, he delivers from the dungeons his own soldiers who were taken captives in a former defeat. The expectation of a great prophet, Sosiosch, to come and vanquish Ahriman and his swarms, unquestionably appears in the Avesta itself.30 With this notion, in inseparable union, the Parsee tradition, running continuously back, as is claimed, to a very remote time, joins the doctrine of a general resurrection; a doctrine literally stated in the Vendidad,31 and in many other places in the Avesta,32 where it has not yet been shown to be an interpolation, but only supposed so by very questionable constructive inferences. The consent of intrinsic adjustment and of historic evidence would, therefore, lead to the conclusion that this was an old Zoroastrian dogma. In disproof of this conclusion we believe there is no direct positive evidence whatever, and no inferential argument cogent enough to produce conviction.