Gathas

The Gathas are the oldest and most sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, seventeen hymns traditionally ascribed to the prophet Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) and widely accepted by scholars as very likely his own composition, which would make them among the oldest religious poetry of any living faith. They are written in Old Avestan, a language markedly more archaic than the rest of the Avesta and closely akin to the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda, and their great age makes them famously difficult to translate. They are not narrative but intense, personal, often questioning hymns addressed to Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord," setting out the core of Zoroastrian thought: the supremacy of the one wise God, the cosmic opposition of truth and order (asha) to falsehood and disorder (druj), the moral responsibility and free choice of each person, and a coming judgement. Preserved by being embedded within the Yasna liturgy and transmitted orally by priests for many centuries before being written down, the Gathas are the theological bedrock on which the whole later tradition rests.

Because the Gathas are written in an archaic form of Avestan close to nothing else that survives, and because they are compressed, allusive religious poetry rather than plain narrative, translating them has remained one of the most contested tasks in the study of any scripture; specialists working from the same seventeen hymns have produced renderings that differ not only on details but on the basic sense of entire verses, disagreeing over whether a given line is a statement, a question or an exhortation, and over who is speaking within it.

Some of the disagreement is grammatical, since Old Avestan case endings are frequently ambiguous or damaged in the surviving manuscript tradition, and some is interpretive, since translators working from within the Zoroastrian community and translators working as outside philologists have not always agreed on how much later doctrine should be read back into Zarathushtra's own words.

What is not contested is the Gathas' place in living practice: Zoroastrian priests continue to recite them within the Yasna liturgy much as they have for centuries, and lines from them are taught to children at their initiation into the faith, so that a text scholars still cannot agree on the plain meaning of remains, for practicing Zoroastrians, closer to memorized prayer than to a puzzle awaiting solution.