Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [115]
In the Zoroastrian tradition, as humanity progresses, it loses interest in food and other earthly things. The gradual abandonment of eating becomes symbolic of the ascending path to immortality. Eating was paired with dying among the Zoroastrians, since everything that lives and dies needs to eat and digest. As humanity progressively gives up food, it gives up digestion and corruption, becoming perfected. This in turn deprives Az (concupiscence), a bad goddess or demon, of her normal sustenance so she threatens to devour the other demons. In the Zātspram, she threatens to to eat up Ahriman but this version may have been influenced by a Zoroastrian monistic heresy known as “Zurvanism.” At any rate, in the Bundahishn, Ahriman survives long enough to see Āz’s weapons smashed, whereupon they both go hurtling into the deep darkness.
The Resurrection
ZOROASTRIANS begin with the bones when speaking of the resurrection. Since they practice exposure of the corpse, only the bones are left after the disposition of the dead. The same would be true had the body been buried and the flesh decayed in a sarcophagus, so we may expect that this imagery can be borrowed or reinvented in Judaism and Christianity in Hellenistic times when they both practice this form of burial.
The great day of general resurrection is called in “Pahlavi,” Ristaxez (“raising of the dead”), just as it is in Judaism and Christianity. Notice that the Zoroastrian text says that resurrection is not nearly so difficult for God as creation itself, which is accomplished ex nihilo, from nothing. In chapters 6 and 9, we shall run into the same argument in 2 Maccabees, where it is argued in the converse way: The mother exhorts her children to keep the faith in resurrection in the face of their martyrdom because God, who made heaven and earth from nothing, can surely resurrect the martyrs. This is a most important parallel between Persian and Jewish notions of resurrection and suggests that the Jews could have been influenced by their Persian overlords, though we have no direct evidence of borrowing and no hint at what could have been the channel of transmission. On the other hand, Zoroastrian and Muslim heaven is bodily, as sexual congress is one of the joys that continues into the next world. Christian heaven is not sexual (though eventually sex comes back during Renaissance),31 and Jewish notions are equivocal.
The resurrection body for Zoroastrians, however, is not exactly the body of this life, but a body which has entered a more perfected, spiritual state, called “the future body” (tan i pasen). It is somewhat like the spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians Ch. 10, as we shall see. Gayomart, the primal man in Zoroastrianism, will be the first to be resurrected, followed by the primal couple, Mashye and Mashyane (the Zoroastrian Adam and Eve), then everyone else, every righteous person and every sinner having already been punished sufficiently in the interim. Zoroastrians are not unitarians, but they are universalists: Everyone will be saved.
Rudolph Bultmann and his students expressed the idea that a Persian myth of a “redeemed redeemer” is the background for Christianity, especially in the Gospel of John. For Bultmann, Jesus was fit into the story of an original man who becomes the final savior. Here, that notion can be shown to be quite mistaken. Gayomart and the Sayoshyant are two different characters and so there is no single myth of a “redeemed redeemer” in Iranian thought at all. It is even