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dubious that the notion that the primal man, Adam, is Christ can be found in Christianity; 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 expresses an antithetical relation but not an identity. In the Gospel of John, it is the logos and the savior who are united for the first time in the incarnation of Jesus. These are Hellenistic Jewish and later Christian notions, explainable and understandable because of the special constraints of Hellenized Judaism and later of Christian conceptualizations of Jesus’ role. The logos of the Gospel of John is best understood as a Greco-Jewish notion Christianized, not a Persian one Judaized.32 On the other hand, many motifs from the Persian notion of resurrection have entered Judaism, to be domesticated in a slightly different way. Furthermore, the cosmic battle and the description of the demonic forces has had an enormous influence on Christian apocalypses, even on The Revelation according to John, as well as on Christian iconography.

The hero of the final battle is Sōshyans, or Saoshyant, sometimes called “the Savior,” with which our English word it is cognate. It is hard not to interpret this name in a Christian context, but in Persia, the kind of “salvation” meant is “benefit” or “profit,” not a remedy to our fallen sinful state. The Saoshyant is the last of Zarathusthra’s posthumous children, arising in the last three millennia to bring about the “rehabilitation,” the “fresh creation,” the frasho kereti. The Saoshyant’s function is to raise human bodies and separate them from the constituent elements into which they have decayed and reunite them with their “souls.” After this they have to endure three days of molten metal to refine them. In historical tradition, there are actually reports that Zoroastrians underwent similar ordeals on earth to demonstrate their religious integrity or their honesty. Zoroastrians have walked between fiery piles of wood or had molten metal poured on them as a way of showing their faith would allow them to triumph.33

In the imaginative eye of Bundahishn, this future ordeal will be safely and easily passed by the righteous. They will feel as though they are in a warm, milk bath. Not so with the sinners, of course, who will undergo excruciating pain. But after the ordeal is over, everyone is purged of sins and malfeasances and everyone enters the newly reconstituted earth. Sōshyans himself brings one last vicarious sacrifice in behalf of humanity and then all enter the newly recreated world, in which eating has no more use and so contains a complete and unthreatened complement of animals. The one exception is that one last bull sacrifice is necessary for preparing the drink haoma,34 the sacred and sacramental drink of the Zoroastrians, which here becomes like drinking from the grail to gain immortality. This haoma will be white, rather than the usual yellow (as it is purified from bulls’ urine), suggesting that it will be higher and purer material. The ritual of taking this psychotropic drug is one of the central features of early Zoroastrianism, though precisely what haoma was has been lost. It seems, however, linguistically related to the Soma of the Vedas.

Orthodoxy in Sasanian Iran and Ascent

SHAUL SHARED suggests some of the religious effects of the establishment of orthodoxy in Sasanian Iran (225 CE until the Muslim conquest).35 The Sasanian period is usually represented as a period of great cultural stability, as it is the period in which Zoroastrianism becomes not just the personal religion of the rulers but the established religion of the whole Sasanian Empire. The Arsacid or Parthian period (ca. 225 BCE-ca. 225 CE) had featured great religious and cultural pluralism, matching a period of great Persian conquest and rule. The empire not only contained a host of indigenous, local cults, it also contained several rival religions to Zoroastrianism-Judaism, Christianity, and Manichaeanism, all offering a significant cosmology and alternative route to salvation. They were all mobile and identifiable by their particular rituals. To make matters worse for Zoroastrians, Christianity