ALLUSIONS IN SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. 



199 



The explanation raises greater difficulties than does the 

 passage. Omit the name Jesus, and what is there in the 

 passage that should lead any Christian, whether late or early, 

 to connect it with our Lord and to interpolate His Name in ii ? 

 Neither Christian nor Jew look back to an era of negation, and 

 assuredly they do not look forward to such as the end of all 

 things ; the " old silence " is wholly a Magian tenet. It is 

 not now, nor has it ever been, the Christian belief or hope that 

 the Lord Jesus Christ should come to remain four hundred 

 years and that after these years He and all that have the 

 breath of man should die. The Christian faith is now, and 

 always has been, " Christ being raised from the dead, dieth 

 no more, death hath no more dominion over Him." There is 

 no sect, however ignorant or heretical, that has abjured this. 

 Further, no Christians have ever held that our Lord was the 

 son of Uriel, the Angel of Light. 



Had the insertion of the words " Jesus " and " Christ " been 

 a " late gloss," then whoever inserted them was no orthodox 

 Christian, though possibly he may have been a follower of 

 some Gnostic heresy. 



Can w T e trace elsewhere, late or early, a reference to such 

 a final four hundred years in any world-period ? Can we find 

 any reason why the name Jesus should be inserted in connec- 

 tion with it ? 



Apocalypses and Pseudo-Apocalypses were not peculiar 

 to the Jewish and Christian faiths. There is a Magian 

 Apocalypse, the Bahman Yast,* which in beauty of language 



* E. W. West writes as follows in his Introduction to the Bahman 

 Yast :— 



"Whether this text, as now extant, be the original commentary or 

 zand of the Vohuman Yast, admits of clouht, since it appears to quote 

 that commentary (chap, ii, 1) as an authority for its statements ; it is 

 therefore most probably only an epitome of the original commentary. 

 Such an epitome would naturally quote many passages verbatim from 

 the original work, which ought to bear traces of translation from an 

 Avesta text, as its title zand implies a Pahlavi translation from the 

 Avesta. There are in fact many such traces in this epitome ... In 

 speculating therefore upon the contents of the Bahman Yast, it is 

 necessary to remember that we are most probably dealing with a com- 

 posite work, whose statements may be referred to the three different ages 

 of the Avesta original, the Pahlavi translation and commentary, and the 

 Pahlavi epitome of the latter ; and that this last form of the text is the 

 only old version now extant . . . Perhaps the most reasonable 

 hypotheses that can be founded on these facts are, first, that the original 

 zand or commentary of the Bahman Y^ast was written and translated 

 from the Avesta in the latter part of the reign of Khusro Noshirvan 



