Frashokereti

Zoroastrian time runs toward an end, and that end is frashokereti, literally the "making wonderful", the final renovation in which the battle between good and evil is decided for ever in favour of Ahura Mazda. The later texts fill in the scene. The dead are raised; a universal judgement follows in which a flood of molten metal sweeps over all, searing the wicked yet felt by the righteous as warm milk, and purifying everyone so that none is finally lost. Angra Mainyu and death itself are destroyed, and the whole creation is remade deathless, perfect and unchanging.

A saviour, the Saoshyant, born miraculously from the seed of Zarathustra, is awaited as the one who brings this about. Two things make the doctrine important beyond Zoroastrianism. It gives the tradition a linear rather than cyclical view of history, moving toward a good conclusion. And its features, bodily resurrection, a last judgement, a final purgation and renewal, are widely held to have shaped the eschatologies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Article one names the Saoshyant as the saviour figure of frashokereti, "born miraculously from the seed of Zarathustra," without setting out how that lineage is actually structured in the fuller Zoroastrian texts. The developed tradition does not describe a single such figure but a sequence of three, spaced across a very long span of time, and the detail matters for how the doctrine compares with later messianic expectation elsewhere.

Pahlavi texts describe Zarathustra's seed as preserved miraculously in a lake, Lake Kansaoya, from which three virgin mothers will in turn conceive three sons at intervals of a thousand years: Ushedar, Ushedarmah, and finally the Saoshyant himself, each renewing the world further and the last completing the renovation article one describes. The structure gives Zoroastrian eschatology a staged, escalating shape rather than a single decisive intervention, three successive deliverers rather than one, each preparing for the next.

Article one notes, cautiously, that Zoroastrian eschatology is "widely thought to have influenced" later Jewish, Christian and Islamic expectation; the three-saviour structure is one of the more specific points where that comparison has been pressed, since ideas of a forerunner preceding a final deliverer appear in some Second Temple Jewish and early Christian material as well. The dating of the Pahlavi sources that spell out the three-Saoshyant scheme in this detail is considerably later than the Gathas themselves, which makes the direction and extent of any influence, as opposed to independent development of a similar staged expectation, a question specialists continue to debate rather than one this comparison can settle on its own.