/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

Orthodox tradition identifies the Magi as Zoroastrians.

Zoroaster is interesting also because his revelations come from angels, not from God Himself, which is a practise which is attested in Scripture, as he was coming out of a river (a crude form of baptism?) and he also preached about the The End of Time and the Judgment.

I don't think it is a coincidence that "Magi" visited the Lord. Knowing they believed in the virgin bith, it would make sense that these would be some of the first to know of the Incarnation, as though the Lord was saying to them "You see, my word has been truly fulfilled".

Christian-Zoroastrian history is really interesting though, especially since Christendom fought its first holy war against them to recover the stolen True Cross.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. You couldn't make a religion or culture or worldview out of nothing but pure lies. It would fall apart. All religions contain some truth. God has likely given private revelation to some people besides the tradition recorded in the Bible, but they don't have the full picture. (Neither do Christians yet, as there are many mysteries.) And many memories of such revelations became corrupted or twisted in the passage of time. No, truth is not relative. No, not all religions are equal. Most of paganism is the work of demons and charlatans and ignorance. Then there's people using their God-given reason and working with what little information they have and doing their honest best and arriving at some modicum of truth. These discoveries are part of God's plan for human history. We can appreciate the good and recognize the bad in all schools of thought by light of divine revelation.

Of course they weren't Christians and therefore not prophets. But that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be able to undestand some face of the Logos. Because the Logos makes as much sense as 1+1=2, it is possible to understand SOME (keyword) of it through human intellect.

Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics did scratch the basis for absolute morality. It just conforms to natural law, which is set by God. And by that, it conforms to God's Will to some extent.

A lot of philosophers could have been saved in the harrowing of hell, but I think that's a stretch we shouldn't rely on.

We must be careful to not mechanize God, very difficult in the current era, and to think since they didn't tick the Christian box, they are 100% wrong in their philosophy.

God is not an autist and neither should you be one.

>>658941

>Of course they weren't Christians and therefore not prophets

Yeah I know that. But there were prophets among the gentiles as well - Job, Baalam, etc.

Zoroastrian scripture wasn't written down until the 3rd century A.D. and the oldest copy of it is from the 14th century, so it's likely a lot of Zoroastrianism had already been influenced by Christianity, or even just the book of Isaiah, by the time the Avestas were written.

>>658966

Don't forget that some Hebrew teachers and even Prophets like Daniel would have had encounters with them, so it's likely that they could have been given special knowledge of Revelation through these contacts.

>>658966

Actually most of Zoroastrian scripture was written down before the Roman Republic even existed. Thing is, Alexander the Great burned down the city of Persepolis, and made sure to destroy every copy of the Avestas he could get his hands on.

The magi were almost certainly Zoroastrians. My theory is that they must have split from the OT Jews and devolved their religion from there.

>>659152

Claiming that an organized religion that used a sacred language to write their works down that in the second oldest Indo-European language in the world only started writing things down almost two thousand years after their organized religion began is revisionism. They had the stuff written down but never compiled it into something like the bible until we did it first.

>>659169

I'm not claiming that they didn't have some of their text written down, but the way the poster phrased it made it seem that they had a completed text that was destroyed.