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The Dualism, and Who Borrowed from Whom

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The Dualism, and Who Borrowed from Whom

Zoroastrianism is regularly credited with supplying Judaism, Christianity and Islam with a cluster of ideas, a cosmic opponent of God, angels and demons in ranks, a final judgement, resurrection of the body, heaven and hell, a saviour to come at the end. The claim is old, it is not baseless, and it is asserted far more confidently than the evidence supports.

The difficulty is dating on both sides. The distinctively Zoroastrian eschatology is fully documented only in Middle Persian texts of the ninth century CE and later, written after the Islamic conquest, by which time contact and mutual influence had been running for a very long time. The Avestan material is earlier but much of it is liturgical rather than systematic, and the great compendia are lost. Meanwhile the Jewish material develops in the Persian period and after, which is when the two communities were in contact under the Achaemenids, so the chronology is compatible with influence, and compatible with the reverse, and compatible with parallel development.

Angra Mainyu in the Gathas is not the mirror of Ahura Mazda. He is opposed to Spenta Mainyu, the beneficent spirit, and the two are presented as twin mentalities choosing between truth and the lie. The strict two-power cosmology of later Zoroastrianism is a development, and Zurvanism is a further variant that the tradition later repudiated.

The defensible statement is that the parallels are real and the direction of borrowing is not established for any specific doctrine. Specific claims should be attributed to whoever is making them.

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