a moment to suppose them to have been an
independent product spontaneously developed in the two nations;
though even in that case the doctrines in question have no
sanction of authority, not being Mosaic nor Prophetic, but only
Rabbinical. One must have received from the other. Which was the
bestower and which the recipient is quite plain.42 There is not a
whit of evidence to show, but, on the contrary, ample presumption
to disprove, that a certain cycle of notions were known among the
Jews previous to a period of most intimate and constant
intercourse between them and the Persians. But before that period
those notions were an integral part of the Persian theology. Even
Prideaux admits that the first Zoroaster lived and Magianism
flourished at least a thousand years before Christ. And the dogmas
we refer to are fundamental features of the religion. These dogmas
of the Persians, not derived from the Old Testament nor known
among the Jews before the captivity, soon after that time began to
show themselves in their literature, and before the opening of the
New Testament were prominent elements of the Pharisaic belief. The
inference is unavoidable that the confluence of Persian thought
and feeling with Hebrew thought and feeling, joined with the
materials and flowing in the channels of the subsequent experience
of the Jews, formed a mingled deposit about the age of Christ,
which deposit was Pharisaism. Again: the doctrines common to
Zoroastrianism and Pharisaism in the former seem to be prime
sources, in the latter to be late products. In the former, they
compose an organic, complete, inseparable system; in the latter,
they are disconnected, mixed piecemeal, and, to a considerable
extent, historically traceable to an origin beyond the native,
national mind. It is a significant fact that the abnormal symbolic
beasts described by several of the Jewish prophets, and in the
Apocalypse, were borrowed from Persian art. Sculptures
representing these have been brought to light by the recent
researches at Persepolis. Finally, all early ecclesiastical
history incontestably shows that Persian dogmas exerted on the
Christianity of the first centuries an enormous influence, a
pervasive and perverting power unspent yet, and which it is one of
the highest tasks of honest and laborious Christian students in
the present day to explain, define, and separate. What was that
Manichaanism which nearly filled Christendom for a hundred years,
wh