Zoroastrian tradition names Adurbad Mahraspandan, the celebrated high priest of Shapur II's reign in the fourth century CE, as the compiler of the little Avesta, the figure to whom the tradition also credits an ordeal by molten metal undergone to vindicate the faith and a body of surviving wisdom sayings. Scholarship treats the attribution as traditional rather than documented, and the book itself as a genre more than a fixed text: a devotional selection whose exact contents have always varied by community, era and printer, stabilised only locally by influential editions.
The Avestan texts it carries are transmitted with the same manuscript fidelity as the priestly corpus, but around them each edition arranges instructions, introductions and supplementary prayers in the vernaculars of the community, Middle Persian in the old manuscripts, later Persian, Gujarati in the Parsi editions of India, and English in the diaspora, together with the Pazand prayers composed in later ages.
Printed Khordeh Avestas multiplied from nineteenth-century Bombay onward, the editions with Gujarati transliteration and translation by scholar-priests such as Kavasji Kanga becoming household standards among Parsis, and community presses in Iran, India and the diaspora keep versions in circulation today. Its daily use continues wherever Zoroastrians live: the kusti retied, the sun saluted, the fire greeted, a canon of small recurring acts that has carried the world's oldest continuously practised revealed religion through profound dispersal.