I’ve been reading a bit about Zoroastrianism’s inspiration of Satan, spiritual entities, and the concept of an equally dualistic battle between good and evil (some even say the concept of resurrection). I skimmed a couple of past threads on the topic, and it seems that some are comfortable with saying that other cultures may have been used by God to refine the Hebrews’ view of Him. I could see this being criticized by some as weaving around the issue, but I could also see it as being a legitimate conclusion.
Idk if any of you in here have experience in anthropology or human history, but if you do, I’m going to try and condense my ruminations on the subject down to two questions for you:
Just how much of Jewish/Christian thought (supernatural beings, resurrection, evil forces) was influenced by Zoroastrianism? Are we more often low-balling it or overexaggerating it?
I do find it interesting that Jesus is said to have interacted with demons—even Satan himself in the wilderness. This inquiry may open up another can of worms that I’m sure has been addressed somewhere on this website, but I’ll try to keep it on the subject: Could this be interpreted better as the authors misjudging what was happening—Jesus perhaps healing mental illness—or Jesus confirming this influence of Zoroastrian theology?
This is a tough one for me. Any thoughts are appreciated!
The strong dualism in Zoroastrianism does not fit well to the Jewish/Christian teaching of a single God that is above everything else. There is no equal, opposing force that might win God.
The people in the Ancient Near East believed in supernatural beings and in forces that were dangerous for humans (evil or chaotic). You can find these elements from all(?) ancient religions of that region. If also Zoroastrianism has such elements, that does not tell that the Jewish/Christian beliefs came from that direction. If there were some connections, it is possible that Zoroastrianism was influenced by Jewish/Christian thought, more than the opposite.
Zoroastrianism may have had some impact on the surrounding cultures and the cultures may have affected the way how the ordinary Jewish/Christian people understood the cosmos. Yet, the speculated impact on the Jewish culture seems to have happened mainly after the Hebrew Bible (OT) had formed, so it is not very likely that Zoroastrianism would have had a notable impact on the Hebrew Bible.
As regards the issue of exorcism versus mental illness, I personally have no problem with the idea that the NT writers used language and concepts that we would today describe differently.
However I would also encourage you to consider your motives for asking the question. I’ve had conversations with people who raise that idea from a naturalist perspective. They disbelieve evil spiritual realities, therefore there must be an alternative explanation of what happened.
The gospels are saturated in spiritual warfare themes, just as they are saturated in the miraculous. That doesn’t make it automatically true. But it does mean that the real choice is between accepting or rejecting the overall story as it stands.
I tend to low-ball it the impact of Zoroastrianism on Judaism/Christianity, and @gbrooks9 tends to overexaggerate it. He can chime in if he has time.
Zoroastrianism arose in Persia not long after the Hebrew alphabet was invented (~1000-900 BCE). Between then and throughout the Exile, Israel was a vassal state of Assyria and Babylon. The Hebrew scriptures written prior to and during the Exile reflect Babylonian and Sumerian mythological influences, not Persian.
Where things get tricky is after the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon about 500 BCE. Most of the OT had been written by then, and it had been opposed to ANE mythology. It also already included things like angels and spirits of the dead. I see no reason to think Israelite scribes wouldn’t have been opposed to Persian religion and mythology in the same way and for the same reasons that they were opposed to Babylonian religion and mythology.
For example, after Alexander the Great conquered the Persians and then shortly afterward died, the general who inherited the eastern part of his conquests founded the Seleucid Empire about 300 BCE, which included Mesopotamia and Israel. So Persia controlled Israel as a vassal state for just a couple of hundred years. Afterward, the influence was Greek culture and gods, which the Jews rebelled against in the Maccabean Revolt.
All in all, Jewish scribes and prophets protested against other surrounding religions rather than absorbing their ideas. That’s not to say biblical authors weren’t influenced by surrounding culture and ideas. They absolutely were! That happens way more often in the New Testament than the Old, and the church fathers were even more influenced by Greek philosophy than Paul.
As for Satan, that would take a whole book of biblical theology to sort out.
A few things seem to be historically certain to me and this is about point 2 above:
[1] Jesus was an exorcist by his own words and deeds and perceived as such by others. This is well known and widely attested in our tradition. So much so, I am not sure why we would accept almost anything else as being true about Jesus if we dismissed this.
[2] The early Church is absolutely steeped in belief in spiritual warfare. That language is all over the place.
Dismissing these out of hand because some of those in the ivory towers of academic institutions “don’t believe in demonic forces” is regrettable to me. Many scholars have already reconstructed Jesus in our own modern mage and failed miserably.
In my mind, if one chops enough material from the gospels and Bible in general as being made up or misunderstood, at some point I am going to stop seeing those beliefs as being Christian. I am not meaning to question anyone’s relationship with God or salvation status but I am not interested in inventing my own religion nor in following anyone else’s modern invented Christianity. I am also not at liberty to correct my Lord and savior on significant portions of his ministry. I think a lot of us modern Christians have lost our backbone and caved to modernity. I know I did this for a while in some areas.
Jesus healed people of physical and spiritual ailments–including demons. He believed, his apostles believed it, and those who call him God and Lord today should probably just follow His lead over the naturalism and whateverr spirit of modernity they are possessed by. It would probably be more reasonable to be a cessationist with respect to demon possession after the apostolic era than it would be to call Jesus lord and tell him he had no idea what he was doing when miraculously healing people --some he clearly thought were possessed. That the gospel authors made this all up brings enormous troubles of its own in addition to being historically problematic.
I did some study in this area while writing an article about the Magi and the Star of Bethlehem. “Magi” was originally a term for a Zoroastrian priest. Most of what we know about it comes from later time periods so we can’t know much about the originator, if he was even a real person, or what they believed. It is interesting, however, that it emerged when the Israelites were in Persian exile.
My personal suspicion is that the direction of causality went the other way; that early zoroastrianism was influenced by the Hebrews. But I don’t know of any evidence to support that, or even if it would be possible, given the paucity of historical information from that time period.
Here’s my Star of Bethelehem post. It has a few links that address what I’m talking about.
I spent a few minutes stress-testing that hypothesis with ChatGPT, and this is informative:
”The only Zoroastrian beliefs we can confidently date before the exile are ethical dualism and a supreme god—the more striking parallels with Judaism (resurrection, Satan, final judgment) are only securely attested centuries later.”
I encountered an atheist psychiatrist who was head of a mental facility who had come to believe demons were real. He refused to believe in a God who would allow such entities to exist.
I think the reason it’s so easy to do that is because we have found so many natural explanations for spiritual things—schizophrenia being an example. It seems that the idea of demonic possession and exorcism even makes things worse for them, and that they really need medication and therapy! I’ve heard that some homosexuals have been traumatized by exorcism attempts as well. We could argue that we need to discern what is a spiritual vs mental condition, but there’s no guide on how to tell. Maybe I come from a position of never having interacted with potentially possessed individuals that makes it hard to believe, but I’m trying to be open to the possibility… it’s just difficult given modern psychology.
Ah, so it’s possible that the jews may have acted more in protest? I think people usually assume that, given the jarring experience and the domination of the ruling culture, their religion would have cracked and been affected. We could look at the Greeks/Romans and assume the same thing, but while culture did leave impressions, the religion still remained distinct. I see that the same may have been possible in the exile, too.
So I suppose that influence from other cultures doesn’t have to be as threatening as one may believe at first. Maybe it’s a good thing that we can consider ideas from other people and let those be constructive, but not replacements.
It may be a matter of “peer pressure” to believe the current claims about spiritual presences (being, there are none), but by looking at our chunk of the world, one will find that that the claim can be observed. We (at least, in the West) live in a society with widespread support and use of mental/behavioral health treatments, and most reports of spiritual influence come from A. a misunderstanding from well-meaning believers about a mental condition, or B. other countries where medical help isn’t available or understood.
I’m open to the idea that I could be wrong, especially since Jesus interacted with people in a way that implies possession, but I’m trying to make sense of it given the modern perspective we’re steeped in. Or maybe I’m trying to find a way to see how both can be true at the same time without calling one or the other wrong—perhaps that’s where my lack of backbone becomes most obvious
I have a hard time trusting ChatGPT since it seems to pick up on our behaviors and thoughts. But I did look this up, and there seems to be inadequate information about how much Jewish religion took from the Persians… even Bart Ehrman says that the idea of Zoroastrians imparting the belief of resurrection to the Jews doesn’t have a lot of evidence to back it up. So it seems that ChatGPT may be on the right track
That is true, similarity doesn’t mean the two are connected directly. I’m not as familiar with the timeline of that period of history well. Maybe I ought to learn!
Like I said in response to Jay, it’s probably best that we don’t assume the Hebrews sprung up with a complete and thorough theology. Maybe God used that process to teach gradually?
It’s less a matter of trusting ChatGPT (or any other platform) than knowing its limitations and being a savvy user. Given their propensity toward sycophancy (all platforms), I ask it to come up with the strongest argument against my position. Anything really important or ambiguous, I always pursue external confirmation. Keep your BS detector sharp!
FYI, I’m giving a 1-hour session on using AI at the CMDA annual convention this Saturday.
That’s good to hear! Sometimes the tension around AI causes me and others my age to bristle, but it is a useful tool when utilized right. Seems like you’re very conscious, and I appreciate that!
Ngl, that sounds very interesting. I’d go if I could!
CMDA? Is that Christian Medical & Dental Associations?
Just a historical quibble: The Israelites were in exile in Babylon. The Persians allowed the return of the exiles to Judea. Not all of them returned, of course. A sizeable Jewish population remained in Babylon, and because of Christian persecution most rabbis in Israel moved there and produced the Babylonian Talmud in the 3rd-6th centuries CE.
Cultural influences definitely can flow both ways, but I doubt Judaism influenced Zoroastrianism. Persia was the rich empire; Israel was a tiny backwater ruled by Persia for a few hundred years. It’s similar to Puerto Rico and small Caribbean nations next to the United States’ empire. They live next to a gorilla whose every move affects them. Has Puerto Rican or Jamaican culture influenced ours? In some small ways (although Rastafarianism unfortunately never caught on here), but the influence mainly goes their direction.
Genesis 1-11 is a polemic against Babylonian/Sumerian mythology. Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the prophets consistently protest against Baal and the false gods of surrounding cultures. Throughout their history, the Jews protested against and resisted the empire. That theme continues all the way into Revelation, which was a blatant condemnation of the Roman empire.
The peer pressure is modernity and secularism tellings us the spiritual realm is make believe and only mindless atoms and meaningless forces are real. No one is saying all mental illnesses, all physical disabilities or genetic deformities must be caused by sin or demons. But that doesn’t mean they cannot be, some of the time. Nor does it mean that demons cannot operate through nature. Jesus also speaks of a man born blind from birth so that God’s works may be made manifest in him.
We live in a time where secularism is increasing, where we know more and more about efficient and material causes, but mental health is severely declining. Maybe some of us have been duped about how the world actually works.
I trust Jesus more than modern materialism.
From the Catholic Answers Encyclopedia:
But whatever view Rationalists may ultimately adopt, for a sincere believer in the Scriptures there can be no doubt that there is such a thing as possession possible. And if he is optimistic enough to hold that in the present order of things God would not allow the evil spirits to exercise the powers they naturally possess, he might open his eyes to the presence of sin and sorrow in the world, and recognize that God causes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust and uses the powers of evil to promote His own wise and mysterious purposes (cf. Job, passim; Mark v, 19).
That mistakes were often made in the diagnosis of cases, and results attributed to diabolical agency that were really due to natural causes, we need have no hesitation in admitting. But it would be illogical to conclude that the whole theory of possession rests on imposture or ignorance. The abuse of a system gives us no warrant to denounce the system itself. Strange phenomena of nature have been wrongly regarded as miraculous, but the detection of the error has left our belief in real miracles intact. Men have been wrongly convicted of murder, but that does not prove that our reliance on evidence is essentially unreasonable or that no murder has ever been committed. A Catholic is not asked to accept all the cases of diabolical possession recorded in the history of the Church, nor even to form any definite opinion on the historical evidence in favor of any particular case.
Neither you nor any modern materialists are in any position to denounce the possibility of spiritual forces causing physical and mental health issues for people. No one has anything to offer against this possibility outside the bias or spirit or presumption of secular modernity.
I read a book some years back that discussed multiple-personality cases. One thing that struck me was that the author put several cases into a distinct category defined by the fact that those personalities showed impossible attributes, usually the ability to converse in a language the individual had never even been exposed to, and once mathematical abilities, including the proper terminology, that the individual had never so much as read about. The author admitted that apart from the idea of some secondary intelligence that wasn’t actually a part of the psyche in question there was no possible explanation.
