Justified True Belief

(●) The prophet of ancient Iran, who taught one wise Lord, a free choice between good and evil, and a judgment at the end of the world. + Matthew opens his second chapter with a small party of foreigners arriving in Jerusalem because they had been watching the sky. The word he uses for them is magoi, and English has kept it: magi. It was not a word for astrologers in general. It was the Greek name for the priestly caste of Iran, the men who tended the fires and recited the liturgy of the religion that traced itself back to Zoroaster. Zoroaster is the Greek form of Zarathushtra, and he is among the earliest figures on record to put four things together in one teaching: that there is one Lord who made everything, that he is wholly good, that every person has a real choice for or against him, and that history ends in a judgment and a world made new. Every one of those turns up in Israel’s Scriptures too, which is why he belongs on a Christian shelf. For more than a century it has been argued that Judaism got its angels, its devil and its resurrection from Persia during and after the exile. That argument is worth taking seriously and worth answering, and neither is possible without meeting the man first. Here is the fact about him that is hardest to take in. He left seventeen hymns, called the Gathas, and his people had no writing. Those hymns were memorised, in a language that had stopped being spoken by about 400 BC, and recited by priests for something on the order of a thousand years or more before anyone wrote them down. When the Sasanians, the Persian dynasty that ruled Iran from the third century AD, finally set them down, no script then in use could record the sounds, so an alphabet had to be invented for the purpose.

(●) c. 1000 BC (the date is disputed): He was born into a herding people somewhere in eastern Iran or Central Asia, into a family of priests. + Nobody knows when Zoroaster lived, and the honest range is enormous. The distance between the two serious candidates is not a matter of decades but of centuries, and the reason it stays open is that two lines of evidence pull against each other. - The tradition. Zoroastrian and Islamic writers of the Middle Ages agreed on a figure: he came 258 years before Alexander, which lands his career in the sixth century BC, roughly the generation of Cyrus and the Jewish exile. The number looks like the work of Greek chronographers of the Hellenistic period rather than an independent memory from Iran, though it still has its defenders. - The language. The seventeen hymns are in Old Avestan, a dialect so archaic that it stands to the rest of the Zoroastrian book roughly as the Greek of Homer stands to the Greek of the New Testament, and it is about as old as the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, the oldest collection of hymns in India. On that basis most specialists now put him in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, with something near 1000 BC as the usual peg, and some argue for a date centuries earlier still, Mary Boyce, who wrote the standard modern history of the religion, most insistently of all. The hymns themselves settle no dates, but they do describe a world. There are cattle, pasture, chariots and cattle-raiders. There is no city, no coinage, no king of Persia or of Media, no Babylon, no writing. It is the world of a pastoral people who had not yet moved onto the Iranian plateau in the form history would later find them, which is why the sixth-century date is hard to defend. The c. 1000 BC in his dates is that convention and nothing firmer. The family name is one of the few personal details the hymns give: Zarathushtra Spitama. Later Zoroastrian writings name his father Pourushaspa and his mother Dughdova, and place his birth by a river in Airyanem Vaejah, "the expanse of the Aryans," the half-remembered homeland of the Iranian peoples. Those are traditions written down more than a thousand years after him, and they should be held loosely.

(●) At about thirty, by the later tradition: A trained priest of the old religion said he had met the Wise Lord, and began preaching against the gods he had served. + He was not an outsider throwing stones at the temple. In one hymn he calls himself a zaotar, the fully qualified priest who poured the libation and chanted the liturgy: the man at the front, not the man in the pews. That hymn is Yasna 33.6, and the numbering is worth a word, because it follows him everywhere. His seventeen hymns come down to us lodged inside the Yasna, the Zoroastrian liturgy of sacrifice, so they are cited by its chapter and stanza, much as a psalm is cited by chapter and verse. Everything he says he says in the technical poetic metres of that priesthood, which is part of why the hymns survived at all. Priests keep what priests can chant. What he preached was that the beings his colleagues were sacrificing to were not worth sacrificing to. The old Iranian word for those gods was daeva, the same word that gave Sanskrit its deva and Latin its deus, an ordinary, respectable word for a god. In Zoroaster’s mouth it turned into the word for a demon, and it has stayed that way in Iranian languages ever since. Above them all, and alone, he set Ahura Mazdah: ahura means lord, mazdah means wise, and James Hope Moulton, who put the whole collection into English in 1913, left the name standing in the hymns but glossed it "Wise Lord," which is what a Persian would have heard. Four of his hymns (Yasna 43 to 46) tell the story as an encounter rather than an argument. "As the holy one I recognised thee, Mazdah Ahura, when Good Thought came to me, when first by your words I was instructed," he says in Yasna 43.11, and then, in the next breath and with no pretending: "Shall it bring me sorrow among men, my devotion, in doing that which ye tell me is the best?" The later Zoroastrian lives fill this in with a vision on a riverbank at the age of thirty and ten years of fruitless preaching afterwards. The hymns give no age and no riverbank. What they give is the question, and it was a fair one.

(●) The years of rejection: His own people would not have him, and he asked God plainly where he was supposed to go. + Yasna 46 is the most human thing in the collection, and the nearest thing to it anywhere in the ancient world is a psalm of lament. He has been cut off from his kinsmen and his social equals; the local chiefs, who ran the cattle economy and the sacrifices together, are against him; and he knows exactly why he is getting nowhere. He puts it in the currency of his world. Few cattle are mine, he says, and because of that I have few men. In a herding society a man’s cattle were his standing, his dowry, his security and his ability to feed anyone who followed him. A prophet with a small herd was a prophet nobody had to listen to. It is the same arithmetic as a preacher today with no building, no salary and no committee behind him, and Zoroaster does not dress it up. What he asks for is not vindication but instruction: teach me, and give me support as a friend gives to a friend. A few stanzas later he is asking who on earth can protect a man in his position, and answering himself: nothing but your Fire and your Thought. It is a hymn written from the losing end.

(●) The turning point: A chieftain named Kavi Vishtaspa accepted his teaching, and the religion finally had ground under it. + Vishtaspa is named in the hymns themselves (Yasna 51.16, 53.2), which puts him among the very small number of people in this story who are more than tradition. Kavi was a title for a local prince, and elsewhere in the hymns Zoroaster uses the word as an insult, because most of the kavis were on the other side. This one was not. The pattern is worth noticing, because it repeats in every century afterwards. A new teaching gets a hearing when somebody with a household, a herd and a hall decides to protect it. Vishtaspa gave Zoroaster what the hymn of complaint said he lacked: men and cattle, which is to say a community that could feed and defend itself. Two brothers of the Hvogva family, Frashaoshtra and Jamaspa, come into the hymns beside him and were evidently men of standing, and Maidhyoimaongha, who carries Zoroaster’s own clan name of Spitama in the hymns and whom the later tradition makes his cousin, is named as an early follower. Later Zoroastrian writings turn Vishtaspa into a great king of Bactria and add a queen, a court miracle and a holy war. The hymns give a chieftain who chose, and a small society of herdsmen and priests that outlasted him by three thousand years.

(●) Old age and death: He married off a daughter with a hymn, and the tradition says he was cut down at the altar at seventy-seven. + The last of the seventeen hymns (Yasna 53) is a wedding poem for his youngest daughter, Pouruchista, and it is the closest we get to standing in his house. He gives her to Jamaspa; he tells her to take counsel with her own understanding rather than simply doing as she is told; he then turns and addresses all the young couples present, brides and grooms together, and tells each of them to try to outdo the other in doing right. A father, a wedding, and advice that would not be out of place at one now. One stanza mentions a son without naming him, whom the later books call Isat-vastra, and another, on Moulton’s reading of a difficult line, has Frashaoshtra promising Zoroaster a bride. Little else about his household survives, and what the later books add (three sons, three daughters, a wife named Hvovi) comes from writings a thousand years and more downstream. His death is entirely tradition. The Middle Persian and Persian lives say he was killed at seventy-seven, struck down at the fire altar during a raid on Vishtaspa’s city. The hymns say nothing about it, and no contemporary source of any kind mentions his death. What can be said is that the community he founded did not scatter when he died, which is more than most reform movements manage.

(●) After him: His hymns were carried west into an empire, written down at last under the Sasanians, and are still recited by about a hundred and twenty thousand people. + By the time Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, the worship of Ahura Mazdah had reached the Persian court, a long way west of the pastures where the hymns were made. Darius I covered a cliff face at Behistun with an inscription that credits Ahuramazda with his kingship line after line, and his successors did the same. Whether the Achaemenid kings, the dynasty of Cyrus and Darius, were Zoroastrians in the full sense is genuinely disputed, and one detail should keep anyone from settling it too fast: no Achaemenid royal inscription anywhere names Zoroaster. Under the Sasanians (AD 224 to 651) Zoroastrianism became the state religion of Iran, and the whole liturgy was at last committed to writing in a purpose-built alphabet. It was written down, as it turned out, only just in time. The Arab conquest ended the empire, and over the following centuries the great Sasanian collection was mostly lost; roughly a quarter of it survives. A group of believers sailed for the west coast of India and became the Parsis, the "Persians," who are there still. The arithmetic today is sobering. Something like 120,000 Zoroastrians remain worldwide, the largest communities in India and Iran, and the Indian census of 2011 counted 57,264 Parsis. The religion that once ran from the Aegean to the Indus is now smaller than a mid-sized town. Its founder’s hymns, however, have never stopped being sung.

What He Taught

(T1) One wise Lord made everything there is, and he is the only one worth worshipping. + Think of a child working through the questions children actually ask. Who holds the ground up? Who put the moon where it goes? Who invented sleep? Zoroaster asks precisely those questions, one after another, for nineteen stanzas of a single hymn, and every one of them opens the same way: this I ask thee, tell me truly, Ahura. It is a catechism written as a cross-examination of God, and the answer he expects is always one name. That name is Ahura Mazdah, the Wise Lord. Around him the hymns cluster six qualities, which later Zoroastrianism turned into six archangels called the Amesha Spentas, the "Bounteous Immortals," but which in the hymns still read as attributes of the Lord himself and gifts he gives: Good Thought, Right, Dominion, Piety, Welfare and Immortality. Moulton translated them as plain English nouns for exactly that reason, and a reader who keeps them as nouns rather than as names is closer to the original. What Zoroaster does not do is build a temple or carve an image, and the Greeks noticed: Herodotus reports that the Persians thought it foolish to give the gods human shape. Christian readers will recognise a great deal here, and should. One Lord, maker of the light and the moon and the winds, wise, good, and not to be pictured, is a very long way from the pantheon of Homer or Egypt. What is missing is not obvious until you look for it. This Lord has no covenant, no chosen people, no history with anyone. He is reasoned toward and worshipped; he does not turn up in a particular place at a particular time and start talking to a particular man about his descendants, the way the God of Israel turns up at Abraham’s tent.

(Q) "This I ask thee, tell me truly, Ahura. Who is by generation the Father of Right, at the first? Who determined the path of sun and stars? Who is it by whom the moon waxes and wanes again? This, O Mazdah, and yet more, I am fain to know." + Source: Zoroaster, Gathas, Yasna 44.3 (Moulton translation, 1913). The hymn runs on in the same form. The next two stanzas ask who upheld the earth and the sky from falling, who made the waters and the plants, who yoked swiftness to the winds and clouds, what artist made light and darkness, what artist made sleep and waking, and who made morning, noon and night "that call the understanding man to his duty."

(T2) Two spirits stood at the beginning, and everything since follows from a choice they made. + This is the teaching Zoroaster is famous for and the one most often got wrong, so it is worth slowing down. Dualism, in the study of religion, means holding that reality runs on two ultimate principles rather than one: a good power and an evil power, neither reducible to the other, like two players facing each other across a board that belongs to neither of them. Later Zoroastrianism does come close to that, with Ohrmazd (the Wise Lord under his later Persian name) and Ahriman (the Hostile Spirit) set against each other as opposites, and the Greeks who described the religion from the outside understood it that way. The hymns are not so tidy, and the difference matters. In Yasna 30 the two spirits are twins, and what makes them what they are is not their nature but their choosing: one chose Right and one chose the Lie, and only after that are they the Better and the Bad. Evil, on this account, is not a substance God manufactured and not a rival God failed to prevent. It is what happens when somebody with a will uses it the wrong way. Augustine would reason his way to something similar fourteen centuries later and call evil a privation, a falling away from good rather than a thing in its own right. And the choice is not confined to the twins. The whole point of the hymn is that a human being stands where they stood. Yasna 31.11 says God made "actions and teachings, whereby one may exercise choice at one’s free will," and Yasna 30.2 tells the hearer to weigh the two beliefs "each man for himself." Zoroaster is preaching a decision, and he expects an answer in the room.

(Q) "Now the two primal Spirits, who revealed themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad in thought and word and action. And between these two the wise once chose aright, the foolish not so." + Source: Zoroaster, Gathas, Yasna 30.3 (Moulton translation, 1913). The stanza that follows says that when the two spirits came together in the beginning "they established Life and Not-Life," and that the worst existence falls at the last to the followers of the Lie and the best thought to whoever follows Right. Moulton notes that the word he renders "in vision" is the ordinary Avestan word for sleep or dream (T2).

(T3) Religion is Truth against the Lie, and it is settled in what a person thinks, says and does. + Two Avestan words carry almost the whole ethical weight of the hymns, and both are worth learning because neither has a clean English equivalent. - Asha, which Moulton renders "Right." It means truth in the sense of the way things actually ought to run: the pasture watered, the herd fed, the promise kept, the sun on its path. It is a single word for what is true and what is right, and the fact that Iranians had one word for both is itself an argument. - Druj, "the Lie." Not merely saying a false thing, but living crosswise to the way things ought to run. A man who follows the Druj is called, in the hymns, simply a Liar. Zoroaster’s world made this concrete in a way ours does not. The Lie was the raiding party that came over the ridge at dawn, drove off a family’s cattle, and killed what it could not drive. Yasna 29 opens with the soul of the ox crying out to God about exactly that, asking who has been appointed to protect it, and Yasna 44.20 asks bluntly whether the old gods ever governed well, given that their priests handed the cattle over to violence. When Zoroaster tells a man to choose Right rather than the Lie, the first thing he means is: be a herdsman, not a raider. Settle down, water the ground, keep your word. Out of "thought and word and action" in Yasna 30.3 the later religion made its best-known summary, humata, hukhta, hvarshta: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. That exact formula belongs to the younger books, but the substance is his, and so is the reason for it. He is not offering a ritual that works regardless of the man performing it. He is saying that what a person chooses is what a person is, and that the Wise Lord will treat it that way.

(Q) "Hear with your ears the best things; look upon them with clear-seeing thought, for decision between the two Beliefs, each man for himself before the Great Consummation, bethinking you that it be accomplished to our pleasure." + Source: Zoroaster, Gathas, Yasna 30.2 (Moulton translation, 1913). The opening of the hymn of the two spirits, addressed to a gathering. "The Great Consummation" is Moulton’s rendering of the end of the present age (T4), and the stanza puts the decision in front of every individual hearer before it arrives.

(T4) Every soul is met at a bridge, and at the end the world is not abandoned but put right. + Picture a river crossing on the road out of a settlement, the kind of narrow plank bridge everyone in a herding community used and nobody thought about. Zoroaster took that and made it the last thing a person meets. The Avestan is Chinvato peretu, which Moulton translates the Bridge of the Separater and which is usually Englished as the Bridge of the Separator: the crossing where the sorting happens. Yasna 46 puts both halves of it in two consecutive stanzas. Those who did what the Wise Lord knows to be best cross it with him. Those who taught men to act wickedly are met there by their own soul and their own self, which torment them, and they become "to all time dwellers in the House of the Lie." Notice who does the tormenting in that line. It is not a demon with a pitchfork. It is the man’s own self, arriving at the bridge and meeting him. Then there is the end of everything, and here Zoroaster is genuinely unusual among ancient teachers. He expects a judgment by fire and molten metal poured out over the world, which destroys what is evil and leaves the righteous unharmed (Yasna 30.7, 51.9). He expects the dead to be given back "continued life of their bodies and indestructibility." And he expects the result to be a repaired world rather than an escape from it: the Avestan phrase behind Moulton’s "So may we be those that make this world advance" is the ancestor of the later Zoroastrian word frashokereti, the Making Wonderful, the renovation of creation at the end of time. Set that beside Plato, who has the soul escaping the body and the visible world for a better one, and the difference is stark. Zoroaster wants this world mended, with bodies in it. That is a good deal closer to the prophets of Israel than anything Athens produced, and it is the single point at which he most surprises a reader who came expecting a mystic.

(Q) "And those whom I impel to your adoration, with all these will I cross the Bridge of the Separater." + Source: Zoroaster, Gathas, Yasna 46.10 (Moulton translation, 1913). The stanza begins by saying that whoever does what the Wise Lord knows as best in life, "man or woman," is to be given the Dominion through Good Thought. Zoroaster then puts himself at the head of them going over. The next stanza gives the other side: the priests and princes who accustomed mankind to evil actions are tormented at the same bridge by their own soul and their own self (T4).

(Q) "And thus Zarathushtra himself, O Ahura, chooses that spirit of thine that is holiest, Mazdah. May Right be embodied, full of life and strength! May Piety abide in the Dominion where the sun shines! May Good Thought give destiny to men according to their works!" + Source: Zoroaster, Gathas, Yasna 43.16 (Moulton translation, 1913). The close of the hymn in which he tells how he came to recognise the Wise Lord. Having spent the whole poem telling other men to choose, he ends by naming himself and choosing, in front of them. It is the last word of the collection’s most personal hymn, and it is the note the religion carried out of Iran and into the world Israel would meet in exile.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Israel met his religion at the moment of the return from exile, and Isaiah answered its central claim in a single sentence. + In 539 BC Cyrus of Persia took Babylon, and within a year the exiles were free to go home and rebuild the temple. Isaiah had named him: "who says of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose" (Isaiah 44:28), and then, astonishingly, called a pagan king God’s anointed (Isaiah 45:1). For the next two centuries the Jews lived under kings who invoked Ahura Mazdah by name. Darius I had it carved into a cliff at Behistun, over and over: by the favour of Ahuramazda I am king. Read on a few verses in Isaiah 45 and something happens that is hard to miss. God tells Cyrus who he is dealing with: "I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5), and then, in the next breath, "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). Light and darkness. Well-being and calamity. Those are precisely the pairs an Iranian would have assigned to two different spirits, and here they are claimed by one. Many readers have taken the verse as a deliberate refusal of the Persian scheme, spoken to the Persian king’s face. The text does not name a target, so the reading cannot be proved, and it is fair to say only this much: whatever Isaiah had in mind, the sentence rules out in advance any account of the world in which good and evil are two powers standing at the beginning, and it was published in the one century when Israel was living inside the empire of the people who taught that.

(†) The magi who came to Bethlehem belonged to his priesthood. + "Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem" (Matthew 2:1). The Greek word behind "wise men" is magoi. Herodotus, writing five centuries earlier, uses it for a specific Median priestly group who performed the sacrifices and read the sky, and by the first century it covered the Iranian priesthood generally and the astrology practised in that world. Be careful about what Matthew does and does not say. He does not say how many there were; the number three comes from the three gifts. He does not call them kings; the crowns are a later tradition. He does not say they were Zoroastrian priests, and he shows no interest in their theology. What he does is open his second chapter with a word his readers would have heard as Persian, and set these men down in front of a Judean king who was terrified of them. Still, the picture the church has drawn from this since antiquity is worth having, because it is doing something real. Zoroaster had taught his people to expect a deliverer. In the hymns the word saoshyant means one who will bring help, and it turns up in the plural as often as the singular, the deliverers still to come, with Zoroaster seemingly counting himself among them; the later religion narrowed it to one figure at the end of history. Matthew’s point is not about Iran, but about the reach of the star. The first outsiders through the door came from the far side of the empires, from a religion that had been watching and waiting, and they got as far as a house in Bethlehem, "and they fell down and worshiped him" (Matthew 2:11).

(†) The charge that Judaism borrowed its angels, its devil and its resurrection from Persia deserves a straight answer. + Here is the case, put as strongly as it can be put, because a weak version is not worth answering. Israel spent two centuries under Persian rule. In the books written during and after that period, and in the Jewish literature of the following centuries, four things appear with a clarity the older books do not have: a ranked hierarchy of angels with names; a personal adversary who tempts and accuses; a general resurrection of the dead; and a final judgment dividing mankind in two. Zoroastrianism had all four, and on the linguistic dating its founding hymns are centuries older than the exile. Mary Boyce, the leading historian of the religion in the twentieth century, argued for direct and substantial influence. The parallels are not vague, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Now the answer, in four parts. - The dating cuts both ways. The Gathas are genuinely ancient, but the fully developed Zoroastrian eschatology, with its named archangels, its individual judgment and its detailed renovation of the world, is set out in books written down under the Sasanians and after, a thousand years and more after the exile. Establishing that Persia held a doctrine first is much harder than asserting it, and much of what gets compared with Daniel is attested later than Daniel. - The Hebrew hope grew from Hebrew soil. Job wanted to see God in his own flesh after his skin was destroyed (Job 19:25–27). Isaiah said "Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise" (Isaiah 26:19). Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones re-knit into an army (Ezekiel 37). The resurrection of Daniel 12:2 is the flowering of a conviction Israel already had, that the God who made bodies is faithful to them and keeps covenant past the grave. It does not need an import to explain it. - The differences are as large as the parallels. Israel’s satan is a creature under God’s authority who has to ask permission (Job 1), not a spirit standing at the origin as God’s opposite number. Israel’s resurrection is God’s own act on the last day, not the outcome of a cosmic ordeal. A borrowing account has to explain the alterations as well as the resemblances, and the alterations run in one direction: everything is subordinated to one sovereign God. - Even a real influence would not be fatal. Scripture is not embarrassed by the nations. It has Israel learning law codes in a world that had them, taking wisdom sayings that circulated in Egypt, and hearing God call a Persian king his anointed. If some of the vocabulary for angels and judgment reached Jerusalem along the imperial road, that would say something about the route and nothing about the truth. The question a reader has to answer is whether these things are so, not whether the idea had a passport.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a rival at the beginning, and a scale where the cross should be. + He got a great deal right, and the disagreements are the sharper for it. - Two spirits at the beginning. Even in the milder form the hymns give it, a Hostile Spirit is already there when the world starts, and the hymns nowhere make his existence the Wise Lord’s doing. Scripture will not allow it. God creates, and there is nothing beside him to create with or against: "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity" (Isaiah 45:7), and "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Evil in Scripture has a later beginning than the world and starts inside a creature who was made good. That is a harder doctrine, because it leaves the problem of evil sitting in God’s lap rather than parcelling it out to a second power, and Scripture takes the harder road on purpose. - The scale. Yasna 33.1 already knows the man "whose false things and good things balance," and the later religion weighs a life at the bridge. It is the most natural religion in the world, and every human being reaches for it, usually in the form of a private ledger kept somewhere at the back of the mind with the good on one side and the bad on the other. The gospel takes it away: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:23–24), and "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works" (Ephesians 2:8–9). - A Lord who never comes down. Zoroaster’s Wise Lord is asked, praised, obeyed and reasoned toward. He does not take a body, does not suffer, and does not die for anybody. The Christian claim is not that a wise Lord exists but that he came into his own world and was killed in it, and everything the gospel says about grace depends on that having happened. - A deliverer still ahead. The hymns look forward to deliverers who have not come and a world not yet made new. Christian hope looks back to a man with a name and a date under a named Roman governor, and forward only to his return. Two religions can both be waiting; they cannot both be right about whether the decisive thing has already happened. None of that cancels what he saw. Long before Athens and with no Scripture in front of him, Zoroaster reasoned to one Lord who made the light and the moon and the winds, refused to picture him, insisted that evil is chosen rather than manufactured, told ordinary herdsmen that their thoughts and words and deeds would be weighed, and expected an end in which the world is repaired rather than discarded. Paul says the invisible attributes of God "have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20). Zoroaster is what that looks like when the man doing the perceiving is a first-rate one.