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Geographically, they would congregate westward from where Buddha emerged, over to the
shores of the Mediterranean area, in Israel. Several of the best-known individuals who
established or updated major belief systems claimed to be no more than special teachers, even if
noble, honorable, and illustrious ones. In such cases, it would be offensive and even
blasphemous to call or refer to these prophets as God or deity in any sense.
The chief prophet of the Persian religion named after him, Zoroaster is usually dated to
the Sixth Century BC. But he never claimed to be deity. A key concern is that the reports
indicate a span of potential dates for Zoroaster’s birth that varies as widely as about 1000 years,
from 1500 to 500 BC! 19
But the major problem is that, of all the Zoroastrian writings, none date
between 250 BC and 225 AD. So this automatically removes the most important material to at
least 700 years after Zoroaster lived and perhaps as much as 1700 years later, given his range of
possible birth dates. 20
The only items that could have been written by Zoroaster himself are a small portion of a
set of non-theological prayers and hymns, contained within the Avesta, composed over about a
thousand years. Worst of all, the earliest manuscript copies of the Avestas are “highly dubious”
and date to the Thirteenth Century AD, or some 1800 years after the earliest of Zoroaster’s birth
dates. 21
Much of the religion’s theology (especially its important eschatology) comes from the
19 Nigosian, World Religions, 216; Irving Hexham, Understanding World Religions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
2011), 235. However, Hexham himself choses the traditional Sixth-Century BC date, in his volume Concise
Dictionary of Religion, 239.
20 This is according to a Persian ancient historian of religion, Edwin Yamauchi. See his Persia and the Bible
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1990), 458-466 and Yamauchi’s lengthy essay, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife in the
Ancient Near East,” in Richard N. Longenecker, Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message in the New
Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 21-50, especially 47-49.
21 Winfried Corduan, A Tapestry of Faiths: The Common Threads Between Christianity and World Religions
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), especially 63-64; cf. Nigosian, World Religions, 222.
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