[klaucke]

A while back, while reading and studying and (trying to) intepret Herman Melville's Moby Dick, I ran into some Zoroastrian allusions, perhaps refering to Christ. My goal here isn't to analyze Moby Dick though, its about what I found when I just pricked the surface of Zoroastrianism.

Zoroaster lived somewhere between 6000-600 years before Christ. Apparently, many Jewish prophets and Christ himself reiterated many truths first attributed to Zoroaster. Today Zoroastrians are known as Parsis, meaning "Persian," originating from the fact that their ancestors flead from the area to escape Muslim persecution.

Now, some scholars will argue that there are many similarities between Christianity and Zoroastrianism, such as their single deity who can be broken up into multiple Godheads (such as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost for Christianity), among other things.

Most startling, though, is what (little) I found about Zoroastrian quotes. From the book I looked at:

"Long centuries before the Galilean [Christ] began his ministry, Zoroaster was already proclaiming a golden rule that said that a man is good only when he is willing not to do to another whatever is not good for himself.

"Before Jesus' teachings concerning the goodness of the Father, Zoroaster described God as "the Giver of all good and perfect things.

"Zoroaster spoke about the "resurrection from the dead," the "immortality of the soul" and even went so far as to say that people who believed in him [Zoroaster] "would not perish, but be given everlasting life.""

All the quotes above have been somehow attributed to Christ, if not directly said.

Even the wise men from the East who brought gifts to Bethlehem are supposedly Zoroastrians.



Now, what I find truly enlightening about this information is that it immediately detracts from the divinity of Christ. He basically stole some of his words from Zoroaster. Christ could then appear to be simply another prophet or philosopher. Maybe he wasn't the son of God, after all, why would the son of God need to plagiarize quotes from some earlier religion?

What about other quotes Christ may have stolen, such as "He who has ears, let him hear" which has been attributed to Buddha? Maybe Christ is really a Buddhist as well as a Zoroastrian. Or at the very least, a philosopher and not a divine being. Enlightened, yes, but divine? Apparently not.

EDIT: Quotes from "Major Religions of the World" by Marcus Bach.