Zoroastrianism questions
August 5, 2015 at 9:05 am
(This post was last modified: August 5, 2015 at 9:30 am by RobbyPants.)
I've often brought up Zoroastrianism in the past to show that a lot of "Christian ideas" aren't unique to Christianity, and predate the religion by hundreds of years. Your average Christian has unsurprisingly never heard of Zoroastrianism.
In a recent conversation, on Christian brought up something interesting to me I'd never heard: while Zoroaster himself is much older than Christianity, any surviving claims about his religious beliefs are newer. The Avesta (the primary collections of religious texts for Zoroastrianism) is dated at the third century CE at the earliest.
So, the basic claim is, that while Zoroaster is known to exist well before Christ, the claims of his religious teachings came about after, and likely borrowed from Christianity.
Does anyone know more about this? Are there other sources that predate Christ that talk about the religious teachings of Zoroaster?
In a recent conversation, on Christian brought up something interesting to me I'd never heard: while Zoroaster himself is much older than Christianity, any surviving claims about his religious beliefs are newer. The Avesta (the primary collections of religious texts for Zoroastrianism) is dated at the third century CE at the earliest.
So, the basic claim is, that while Zoroaster is known to exist well before Christ, the claims of his religious teachings came about after, and likely borrowed from Christianity.
Does anyone know more about this? Are there other sources that predate Christ that talk about the religious teachings of Zoroaster?
