gards the Old and New Testaments, "the humble, and to a certain extent prior, religion of the Mazda worshipers was useful in giving point and beauty to many loose conceptions among the Jewish religious teachers, and in introducing many ideas which were entirely new, while, as to the doctrines of immortality and resurrection—the most important of all—it positively determined belief."[1]
Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific criticism applied to the sacred literature of southern and eastern Asia. The resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives and ideas in our own sacred books with those of Buddhism were especially suggestive.
Here, too, had been a long preparatory history. The discoveries in Sanskrit philology made in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, by Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, and others, had met at first with some opposition from theologians. The declaration by Dugald Stewart that the discovery of Sanskrit was fraudulent, and its vocabulary and grammar patched together out of Greek and Latin, showed the feeling of the older race of biblical students. But researches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney, Max Müller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth century. More and more evident became the sources from which many ideas and narratives in our own sacred books had been developed. Studies in the sacred books of Brahminism, and in the institutions of Buddhism, the most widespread of all religions, its devotees outnumbering those of all branches of the Christian Church together, proved especially fruitful in facts relating to general sacred literature and early European religious ideas.
- ↑ For the passages in the Vendidad of special importance as regards the Temptation Myth, see Fargard, xix, 18, 20, 26, also 140, 147. Very striking is the account of the Temptation in the Pelhavi version of the Vendidad. The devil is represented as saying to Zaratusht (Zoroaster), "I had the worship of thy ancestors, do thou also worship me." I am indebted to Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for a translation of the original text from Spiegel's edition. For a good account, see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, London, 1884, pp. 252 et seq. See also Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred Books of the East. For Dr. Mills's article referred to, see his Zoroaster and the Bible, in The Nineteenth Century, January, 1894. For the citation from Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple Israel, tome xiv, chap iv; see also, for Persian ideas of heaven, hell, and resurrection, Haug, as above, pp. 310 et seq. For an interesting résumé of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, A Modern Zoroastrian, chap, xiii, London, eighth edition, 1893. For the Buddhist version of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausböll, Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880, vol. i, p. 14, and following. For very full statements regarding the influence of Persian ideas upon the Jews during the captivity, see Kohut, Ueber die jüdische Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihren Abhängigkeit von Parsismus, Leipsic, 1866.
