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CHRISTIANITY
i. In Pre-Islamic Persia: Literary Sources
In Middle Persian there are three terms used for Christians:
KLSTYDʾN and NʾCLʾY in the inscription on the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt of the
3rd-century Zoroastrian high priest Kartir; and tarsāq, Sogdian
loan-word trsʾq, New Persian tarsā. The first term represents
Syriac kristyānē; the second, Syr. naṣrāya “Nazarene” (cf. Heb. nôtsrî
“Christian”). The third, “(God-)fearer,” evidently is a translation of Syr. daḥlā
(and cf. Psalm 135.20, Heb. yîrei YHWH “fearers of God”). J. de Menasce
(see Bibliography) discusses the latter word in the context of a 9th-century
Zoroastrian polemic against Christianity, and believes it was applied
originally to monks, but S. Pines (see Bibliography) argues that the term was
used independently of monasticism. It has been suggested that the two
different terms for Christians reflect the division between the Greek-speaking
Christian communities, many of whose members were presumably deportees from
western regions conquered by the Sasanians, particularly Šāpūr I, and the
Syriac- and Iranian-speaking, indigenous Church of Persia. In the Pahlavi
translation of the Psalter, unbelievers are called na-tarsāgān, lit.
“unfearing ones.” The term “Messianist” (cf. Ar. masīḥī), used commonly
in the Middle East of Christians, seems not to have been employed in Persia:
for Syr. mešīhā, “Messiah”, the literal translation ʾnwtky (pronounced
*annūdag), “annointed,” is employed.
History. J.
Asmussen (Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, p. 294) observes that the reference to
travelers from Parthia, Media, and Elam (Ḵūzestān) in the description of
Pentacost, Acts 2.9, suggests the presence in the Parthian period of Jews who
were to become the nuclei of future Christian communities in Persia. But the
main body of Eastern converts to the new faith must be assumed to have been in
northern Mesopotamia: Syriac-speaking Adiabene and
Osrhoene. Queen Helena of Adiabene and her son Izates (i.e., Mid. Ir. yazad)
had converted to Judaism in the 1st century b.c.e., and she is supposed to have
donated golden vessels to the Temple at Jerusalem. None of these survive; but
the foot of the Menorah on the Arch of Titus at Rome, “with its pendant leaves,
closely resembles the bases of Persian columns at Susa and Persepolis” (Yarden,
p. 12, with figs. 5, 13, and 14). If the seven-branched candelabrum was not
actually a gift of Helena, it reflects the strong Iranian influence on Jewish
art of the period.
But the earliest Iranian contact with Christianity must be
counted as the visit to the infant Jesus of the three Magi. Many aspects of
this legend reflect Iranian religious belief: The Magi were themselves Parthian
priests, and Herzfeld identified the “Mountain of Victory” from which they were
supposed in Christian apocryphal writings to have come with Kūh-e Ḵᵛāja in Sīstān.
The temple complex rises over Lake Hāmūn, where the Zoroastrian Saošyant,
“Savior,” is to be born. Christ is found in a rock-cave, like the infant
Mithras, rather than a manger; and each Magus entering beholds the Lord at a
different age, as though He were Zurvan. In early Christian art, the Magi are
shown in Iranian priestly garb; and the soldiers of Ḵosrow II at Bethlehem are
reported to have spared a church there when they recognized in a mosaic their
own priests (Herzfeld, pp. 61ff; Messina; Mathews; Russell, 1987b). (For a
comparison of the numerical symbolism of Iranian and Christian eschatology, see
Russell, 1989).
Christian eschatological doctrines, beliefs concerning
heaven and hell, and expressions of a moral and cosmic dualism of forces of good
and evil, may have their origin in the koine of Greek and Iranian
thought which colored intertestamental Judaism—in the Parthian period—but was
in large part excluded from Orthodoxy by the Rabbis. (On possible Iranian
influences, see Boyce, Zoroastrianism III, pp. 440-56; other scholars
whose focus is the Hellenistic world, such as Arthur Darby Nock, place greater
emphasis on the heritage of Plato in the formulation of such Christian
doctrines.) The legends of Apostolic missions to the East in the 1st century
c.e. presuppose that the bearers of the Christian teaching passed through
Parthian territory (see Russell, 1986). More materially, it is during the
poorly documented Parthian period that the church at Dura Europos was built.
Though the border town on the Euphrates was under Roman control, many Iranians
passed through it, as the Parthian documents, and graffiti from the synagogue,
attest; and it is likely that the Christian community of Iran acquired its
first strength under the tolerant Arsacids.
By the beginning of the Sasanian period are recorded twenty
Christian bishops, from Bēṯ Zabdē to the north through Karkā
de Bēṯ Selôḵ, and south to Susiana and Mesene (Mešān;
Asmussen, Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, p. 925); and Bardesanes (late 2nd-early 3rd century) refers to
Christians in Parthia, Media, Kāšān, and Pārs. By 250, the religion claimed so
many adherents in Iran that no less than sixty Christian tombs are found on
Ḵarg island in the Persian Gulf. One John of Persis is recorded at the Council
of Nicaea in 325. In 410, a Synod was convened at Ctesiphon: The royal capital
had become also the acknowledged center of Christianity in the Empire. The
proceedings began with a prayer for the king, Yazdegerd I; and the Synod
adopted the creed of Nicaea (Asmussen, Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, pp.
941-42). Six provinces were then listed as Christian jurisdictions, including
Ray and Abaršahr; in the late 6th century, Marv and Herat, whose Christian
communities were already centuries old, are prominently mentioned. Ṯaʿālebī (Ḡorar,
p. 748) reports that in 651, it was the Bishop of Marv who contributed a
sepulcher for the murdered Sasanian fugitive Yazdegerd III.
In Iranian lands outside the Sasanian Empire, there were
large and important Christian communities, notably that of Sogdia, which has
left a relatively large body of translation literature from Syriac. Christian
Sogdian is written in Syriac estrangela script with additional characters for
certain Iranian sounds and a system of vocalic points, but without the
archaisms of orthography or Aramaic ideograms which encumber the Sogdian texts
of other denominations. One such manuscript contains homilies, the Apostolic
Canons, a liturgical commentary, and lives of diverse saints and Persian
martyrs (see Sims-Williams). From the early Muslim period there is mentioned
a Nestorian metropolitan at Samarkand; and two ossuaries found at nearby Afrāsīāb
have Maltese-type crosses. This indicates that some Sogdian Christians
continued the funerary practices of their Zoroastrian neighbors and forebears.
There were other similarities: Sogdian Christians, like their countrymen of
other faiths, were often travelling merchants: crosses with Sogdian
inscriptions are found on a rock at Drangtse, in Ladakh. Christianity was
eradicated at Samarkand only in the mid-15th century, with the massacre or
forced conversion to Islam of the remnants of the faithful (see Grenet, p. 265
and pls. 13, 35; Colless). Farther to the east, in Xinjiang, was found a
fragment of a translation into Pahlavi from Syriac of the Psalms, which Andreas
dated on paleographical grounds to the mid-6th century (Andreas and Barr),
indicating that a number of Christians were amongst the Persians who settled
along the Silk Road.
The conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and the
adoption of the faith as the state religion of the Roman Empire early in the
fourth century, placed Christians in Iran under immediate suspicion as
potential traitors: According to Eusebius, Constantine himself wrote to Šāpūr
II, warning him that Šāpūr I in 260 had been allowed by God to defeat Valerian
because the latter had persecuted the Christians. Ca. 337, Aphrahat wrote, “The
People of God have received prosperity, and success awaits the man who has been
the instrument of that prosperity [i.e., Constantine]; but disaster threatens
the army gathered together by the efforts of a wicked and proud man puffed up by
vanity [Šāpūr] . . . the [Roman] Empire will not be conquered, because the hero
whose name is Jesus is coming with His power, and His armor will uphold the
whole army of the Empire” (Demonstration 5.1.24, cit. by Brock; see also
Wiessner). Christianity was practiced throughout the Empire; but the largest
populations were in sensitive western border regions, and numerous Christians
served in the armed forces. Although the Armenian Eznik Kolbatsʿi (Refutation
of Sects 4.2) was in the 5th century to insist that one could be the
servant of either the Persian king of kings (arkʿayitsʿ arkʿay) or
Caesar, the Great Persecution, which began in 339 and lasted forty years—until
the death of Šāpūr II—engulfed many subjects of the king of kings who were
both Christian and loyal: Goštāzād pleaded that after his execution it be made
known that he had died because of his religion, and not on account of
disloyalty.
Yazdegerd I accorded tolerance and even favor to Christians
and other minorities: His queen, Šōšendoḵt, was the daughter of the Jewish reš
galūṯa “head of the dispersion”; and his policy earned him the enduring
sobriquet “the Sinner” (Pahl. bazaggar as in Markwart, Provincial
Capitals, p. 67) or “the Harsh One” (dabr; cf. Markwart, Ērānšahr,
p. 67) amongst Zoroastrians, and in later Muslim historiography. When the third
Synod was convened at Ctesiphon in 424, and Dādīšōʿ was made Catholicus of the
Orient, the Church of Persia had become largely independent of the old, Western
jurisdictions; and, as if to underscore the separation, the Nestorian teaching
became in the 5th century the established doctrine of the Church of Persia. In
428, Nestor became the Patriarch of Byzantium. He taught that Christ had two
separate natures, divine and human. They remained separate; Mary was not the theotókos,
“Mother of God.” Cyril of Alexandria argued that the two natures of Christ
became inextricably one with His birth. He opposed Nestor; and the latter was
anathematized at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Many Nestorians were forced to
flee Edessa, which was under Byzantine rule. They took refuge in Sasanian held
Nisibis. Christians regarded as heretics by the western Church were obviously
preferable from the Iranian point of view to those who maintained ties with
it, and, thereby, with the Byzantine enemy. It has been suggested that
Nestorian rejection of the divinity of the man Jesus, and certain anti-ascetic
trends in Persian Christianity, reflect Zoroastrian influence (see Asmussen,
1962, p. 10; Geroe); but in general Iranian policy was guided, not by nuances
of akdēnīh “evil religion,” but by political expediency.
In the meantime, Eutyches, an archimandrite at
Constantinople, opposed the idea of two natures of Christ, and held that there
was but one, the divine: the very flesh of Jesus was not of human nature. This
doctrine, the Monophysite (“one nature”), was refuted by the Council of
Chalcedon in 451, which held that Christ had one hypostasis, but two
natures (Gk. ousia). In the sixth century, the Syrian Monophysites at
Edessa, under the leadership of Jacob Bar-Addei, came to be styled as
Jacobites; those who adhered to the Chalcedonian doctrine, which the Byzantine
Empire upheld, were called Melkite, i.e., “royal” (see Young; Pigulevskaya).
At various times, Byzantium attempted to intervene to
protect Christians in Iran. Treaties between the two Empires contained clauses
providing for the reciprocal toleration of Iranian Christians and of
Zoroastrians in Byzantine lands (presumably, Anatolia; see Gray). But in the Acts
of Šīrīn (published by Devos), it is reported that the martyr was
transported from one prison to another, so that a Byzantine embassy never
succeeding in securing a meeting with her. Golendoḵt, a relative of Ḵosrow I,
was converted to Christianity by prisoners of war. She refused to recant and
was sent to the Fortress of Oblivion. There she was visited by a legate of
Maurice on a peace mission: Though he would have been able to have her
released, she settled on martyrdom, and perished in 591. Very much less is
known of the fate of the Zoroastrians who lived in Christendom: principally,
Anatolia and Egypt. In 377 c.e., St. Basil of Caesarea, in Cappadocia,
described in a letter to Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, Cyprus, the magousaion
ethnos, “nation of the Magians” (the Greek derives from Syr. magusāyē,
which is also the source of the Koranic and later Muslim designation of
Zoroastrians, Ar. majūsī). He says they have neither books nor teachers
of doctrine, but pass down their traditions from father to son by word of
mouth, calling fire God and tracing their descent to one Zarnouas; they shun
the society of others, keeping to themselves (i.e., Zurvan; St. Basil of
Caesarea, Letters, IV, Loeb Classical Library, 1934, no. 258, p. 45).
This writer has suggested that descendants of such communities in Armenia,
together with the unconverted remnants of the indigenous Armenian Zoroastrians,
were the people called arewordikʿ “Children of the Sun” by medieval
writers (Russell, 1987c, Ch. 16). In the pre-Christian period, Iranians
residing in Syrian and Anatolian Greek cities of the Roman Empire subsidized
Olympic athletes and erected splendid public edifices; and 4th-century Iran
boasted many priestly academies. So the impression given by St. Basil is of a community
socially and culturally impoverished, by contrast equally with its Hellenistic
predecessors and Sasanian contemporaries. The Jews were to be subject to
increasingly onerous restrictions, culminating in the viciously anti-Semitic
edicts of Justinian; the Zoroastrians of the Empire, fewer in number and less
inured to the conditions of a diaspora, cannot have fared better.
Monophysitism endured on the eastern fringes of the
Byzantine Empire notably in Armenia. During the fourth century, the Armenian Arsacids,
and then most of the population, gradually embraced Christianity—an act which
had the political benefit of further separating the country from the Sasanians,
who were detested as usurpers of the legitimate, Parthian crown. Some of the
ancient dynastic families, the nakharars, still held fast to Mazdaism:
The Christian sources vilify them as traitors to the nation. In the 4th
century, the Arian doctrine, which held Christ to be a kind of demigod, had
gained adherents in eastern Anatolia and, as it seems, at the Arsacid court of
Armenia. It was condemned by the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Armenian
Church waged a fierce battle against it (see Garsoian, 1985; idem, 1989). In
the 5th century, there were new conflicts within Armenian Christianity, this
time between Monophysites, Nestorians (who had Sasanian sanction), and
(pro-Byzantine) Chalcedonians (see Sarkissian). Yazdegerd II attempted to force
the Armenians to reconvert to Zoroastrianism, and defeated their commander,
Vardan Mamikonean at the Battle of Avarayr in 451. The campaign was led by the wuzurg
framadār Mehr-Narseh, of the noble Arsacid Spandīād family. The Armenian
historian Łazar Pʿarpetsʿi describes him preaching Zoroastrianism to the
Armenian Varazvalan, and calls him cḥʿarahnar ew dzhnamit, “conceiver of
evil and malign in thought.” From the Sasanian sources, a rather different
picture of this powerful Prime Minister emerges: He founded a village,
Mehr-Narseyān, and endowed its fire temple; and at his own expense he built a
bridge at Fīrūzābād and left a dedicatory inscription in Middle Persian which
is still there. Although some nakharars fought on the Sasanian side, the
Armenian campaign was not successful: after a protracted guerrilla war, Iran
conceded religious liberty to Armenia in the terms of the Treaty of Nuarsak,
484. New persecution, and renewed resistance under Vardan II, flared up in 570.
But in the reign of Ḵosrow II, Armenia had come to be seen as a stable province
of the Empire; so the Sasanians accorded some favor toward the Armenian Church,
and accordingly, toward Monophysitism. The later Sasanian kings presided directly
over the Synod of the Church of Persia at Ctesiphon: Ḵosrow I imposed his own
nominee as Catholicus in 552; and in 609, Ḵosrow II expressed anger when his
nominee was passed over, and forbade the election of any other.
Many Christians, wearied by the incessant wars of the 7th
century and exhausted by punitive taxation, welcomed with palm fronds the Arab
conquerors of Ctesiphon. Christianity, along with other minority faiths such as
Manicheism, enjoyed a brief period of expansion in the early centuries of
Islam, only to suffer diminution later on through conversion and attrition in
times of strife, particularly in the 15th century, after which the faith
survived only precariously in Iranian lands (see Morony, pp. 384-430).
Polemics. The
Syriac martyrologies record abundant exchanges between captive Christians and
their Mazdean persecutors. A pattern such as this is often encountered: A
Christian, frequently a high-born Iranian proselyte, might approach a sacred
fire, sweep it from its altar, and trample it underfoot; or break the barsom bundle;
or, if a woman, deliberately defile the fire temple precincts by entering them
in menses. The examining magistrate, usually a high-ranking Magus, then demanded
monetary restitution, or return to the Good Religion, which the apostate
eloquently rejected, desiring rather to receive the crown of martyrdom. During
the Great Persecution in 339-79, when perhaps 35,000 died, many Christians
certainly did not provoke the persecution that befell them, and for many
martyrs the imitatio Christi, and not abuse of an alien or ancestral
religion, was their motive to the end; yet it is worthy of note that the
practice of the Christian faith was never actually forbidden in the Empire.
Details of grisly tortures are recorded (as of binding sagdēs “in the
manner of a dog”—the Pahlavi names of these procedures are rendered in Syriac
script); during these, the martyr refuted diverse Zoroastrian doctrines. In one
debate at Ctesiphon in 612 c.e., George of Izla, a Persian whose former name
was Mihramgošnasp, declared that the Zoroastrians were worshipers of fire, not
of God. The Magus replied that one worshiped God through fire. George then
produced an Avestan passage in which fire is called a god. The priest explained
that this is because fire is of the same nature as Ohrmazd (Morony, p. 287,
citing Hoffmann, pp. 109-10; the latter is the largest compilation of sources
translated from Syriac on Christian martyrs in Iran; see also Zaehner, esp. pp.
419-46).
In Armenia, the principal refutations of Zoroastrianism
belong to Eznik, 5th century, and to Ełiše, who probably lived about a century
later and reproduces the former’s arguments, in the dramatic setting of the war
of Vardan against Yazdegerd II. On the plane of theory, Eznik focuses primarily
on the logical inconsistencies of the Zurvanite cosmological myth, relying in
large part upon Syriac sources—mainly, it is supposed, on a Syriac translation
of the Peri tēs en Persidi magikēs of Theodore of Mopsuestia (see
Zaehner, p. 420)—though he produces also a number of abstract arguments against
dualism. The battle of the Armenian Christians against Sasanian proselytism and
persecution is justified, as one might expect, in more emotional, biblical
terms: Pʿawstos compares Šāpūr II to Nebuchadnezzar, invoking the paradigm of
the Book of Daniel; and Ełiše compares the Armenian champions to the Maccabees.
The Armenians were outraged by the Zoroastrian practice of consanguineous
marriage (Av. xvāetvadātha-) and called the Persians kinemol “woman-crazy.”
In the text of Ełiše, the Iranians are made to retort that Christian monks by
their celibate way of life depopulate the world and thereby further the
destructive aims of Ahriman. The later arguments of the Škand-gumānīg wizār
follow the same line: How, asks Mardānfarroḵ, could a good God have created the
noxious serpent of Eden? And, paralleling talmudic critiques of Christianity,
the same text ridicules the idea that God could have been born of an earthly
woman. The Jews and Christians in the Sasanian Empire devoted more attention to
refuting each other than to attacking Mazdaism. The theologian and Persian
convert Aphrahat, writing in the mid-4th century, remarks in one polemic that
God did not rest after Creation because He was weary. This cannot be a response
to any Jewish doctrine, though; but is more likely an implicit answer to a
Zoroastrian charge, not cited by Aphrahat but independently attested later in Škandgumānīg
wizār, that the God of the Bible was too weak and insufficient to create
the world (see Neusner, p. 125).
Intercultural contacts.
Mani, though a native speaker of Aramaic and not a Zoroastrian, grew and taught
in a largely Iranian milieu, and his doctrines were very widely disseminated
through Iranian lands. He describes himself as a physician, as Jesus did; and
in his Persian-language Šābuhragān, Jesus is represented through
citations from the New Testament. Manicheans, in the manner of Christians,
organized monasteries, and encouraged asceticism and celibacy. Even though the
Manicheans adhered to a Docetist viewpoint, disbelieving that the Lord Himself
might have been susceptible to crucifixion, but only seemed to suffer and die,
many Iranians must have learnt of some Christian beliefs through Manicheism
(see Waldschmidt and Lentz). Manicheism imitated the legends of the Christian
apostolic missions in the literature describing its own propagation: For
example, the Sogdian text which describes the mission of Mar Gabryab to ryβʾn
(probably Arbanos, mistaken for Revan, i.e., Erevan, whose Iranian form had
more familiar, Zoroastrian associations) in Armenia and his conversion of the
princess and royal court, with their subsequent backsliding from Manicheism to
Christianity (!), is historically improbable. More likely it is a conflation
of two legends of the missions of Sts. Thaddeus and Bartholomew (the Armenian
sources present these together) with the names of the faiths involved suitably
altered (for the text, see Sundermann, pp. 45-49).
Aspects of Christian iconography reflect interaction with
Zoroastrian culture. The Persian word for the cross, čalīpā, Chr. Sogd. clybʾ;
derives from Aramaic ultimately, but appears to have undergone internal
development in Iranian. Nestorian crosses on monuments in China are often shown
above an open lotus, taking the place, as it were, of the Buddha. In
pre-Christian Armenia, sacred monuments (Arm. arzdan) were often made in
the form of a stepped pyramid with an eagle or spear at the top. St. Gregory
the Illuminator, a scion of the noble Parthian house of Suren, who established
Christianity in Armenia, erected arzdans surmounted by the cross. The
Armenians carved vast numbers of khacḥʿkʿars, “cross stones,” which
became objects of cult. At Dvin, the capital of the Sasanian marzbāns of
Armenia, the cross is framed by a pair of wings spreading upward from its base:
This is, evidently, a Christian appropriation of a Sasanian iconographic
convention. Another Sasanian convention to indicate divine glory and protection
was to enclose a picture or device in a ribbon, usually creased and with the
ends fluttering up to either side. Such a ribbon encloses the cross in a
6th-century Georgian relief from Akvaneba—it is recalled that Georgia was a Sasanian
province (see Rice; Foster, on the Chinese Nestorian examples; and Beridze, pl.
19). It is to be noted that Mithra at Ṭāq-e Bostān stands upon a lotus: This
would indicate the influence of Buddhist iconography in Iran itself. If the
image of Christ enclosed in a radiant mandorla, found early in Armenia and
later on farther to the west, derives from similar Indian representations of
the Buddha, then such an image came through Sasanian Iran. That there was an
intriguing, if sparsely documented, Buddhist-Iranian syncretism, is borne out
by Stavisky’s discovery of a Buddha image in the vihāra at Qara Tepe
(Old Termeḏ, in Bactria) with a Bactrian graffito “Buddha-Mazda” scratched
above it.
Another area of interaction was in the official use of seals
and titulature. The former have been studied by Judith Lerner: The cross is the
predominant symbol, in some compositions evidently replacing the Zoroastrian
fire (as on Georgian Christian coins modeled after Sasanian issues). As to
titles, N. G. Garsoian has shown that the Zoroastrian ecclesiastical title, driyōšān
ǰādagōw, “intercessor on behalf of the poor [i.e., the faithful],” was
adopted by the Armenian Christian clergy (1989, p. 534 s.v. jatagow,
citing Pʿawstos 4.3, with references).
In the Armenian and Iranian translations of Christian works,
Zoroastrian terms are used, sometimes, it would seem, deliberately. In
Armenian, for example, the word “righteous” is translated ardar, cognate
with but not derived from Iranian; in Christian Sogdian the word is ʾrtʾw,
from the Zoroastrian usage ardāw; and in the Pahlavi Psalter Syriac zadîqâ,
“righteous,” again is rendered as ʾrtʾdy/*ardāy/ (see Russell,
1987a; idem, 1987c, Ch. 15). The Armenian translation of the Bible utilizes
some Zoroastrian terms which would have been familiar to 5th-century hearers:
e.g., “Dionysiac” is rendered spandarametakan in Maccabees. To Armenian šnorh-kʿ
“grace,” from Pahlavi šnōhr, Avestan xšnaoθra-, corresponds
Pahlavi /burd-šnōhr/, “grateful,” in the Psalter. Christian Pahlavi pʾdlky,
corresponding to Syriac qurbānā, “offering, sacrifice,” is paralleled by
the Armenian loanword for the Divine Liturgy, patarag. Pahlavi uzdēs,
the term used for the religious images of the yazatas which Sasanian
iconoclasts destroyed, is found in the Psalter as the word for an idol (Ps.
134.15).
The Christian communities also served as a conduit for Greek
science and literature (in Syriac translation) to enter Sasanian Iran, and,
ultimately, Islamic culture. The Christian Boḵtīšūʿ family, for example, provided
prominent physicians to the royal court, and presided over the Nestorian
medical academy at Gondešāpūr (see Rosenthal, pp. 6-7). The Pahlavi Dēnkard
contains large philosophical sections derived from Aristotle; and Paul the
Persian dedicated a Syriac book on Aristotelian logic to Ḵosrow I, who was
responsible for the final redaction of the great Sasanian Avesta of twenty-one nasks
that incorporated much knowledge which Zoroastrian apologists claimed had been
“lost” to Greece and India and subsequently recovered (see Bailey, Zoroastrian
Problems, p. 80, citing Baumstark, 1922, passim).
Iranians confronted by the innovations of Christian culture
changed their archaic ways of learning. There died in 620 a Persian convert to
Christianity, ʿIšōsabrān. His Life was written by the Nestorian patriarch
ʿIšōyahb: In his native village of Kur on Mt. Hedayab, ʿIšōsabrān had requested
of the priest who converted him, ʿIšōrahmeh, that the latter’s young son
ʿIšōzekh teach him to read Scripture. The boy explained to the proselyte that
one learnt first letters, then syllables, then the Psalms, then the rest of the
Bible. “It is useless to teach me letters, teach me ten Psalms,” said
ʿIšōsabrān. The youth tried to explain that it was in vain to “mumble like the
Magi”; but ʿIšōsabrān memorized whole words, pronouncing each forcefully and
repeating it “nodding his neck, like the Magi.” ʿIšōzekh taught him to read
quietly, moving only his lips; and eventually ʿIšōsabrān learned to read whole
books (see Chabot).
Although the zamzama (“muttering,” a pejorative usage
of the Muslim period, translating Pahl. drānǰišn “recitation”) of the
Avesta endured, the Zoroastrians were forced in various ways to counter the
challenge Christian literacy posed to their traditions of oral learning. It
was, possibly, in response to Christian credos and prayer books that the
4th-century high priest Ādūrbād ī Amahraspandān, patriarch of the subsequent
generations of high priests, still revered by many Parsis as the rāyēnīdār ī
zamān “regulator of the age,” composed the Pahlavi credo Nām stāyišn “Praise
is meet to the Name of Ohrmazd,” and compiled the Ḵorda Avesta “Little
Avesta”—the prayer book containing it, which is still used in daily devotions
(see Russell, in press). The Manichean and Armenian scripts, especially the
latter, the first true Oriental alphabet, may have stimulated the invention of
the Avestan alphabet in the 5th century.
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(James R. Russell)
Originally Published: December 15, 1991
Last Updated: January 4, 2012
This article is available in print.
Vol. V, Fasc. 5, pp. 523-528
