Tradition, Exegesis, Innovation: Patterns of Zoroastrian Reasoning

The fact that various works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle would have been translated into Middle Persian, by the Sasanian period, is attested by various sources. Yet, no such translated fragment was preserved.

Iranian scholarship has included so far a few attempts at comparing the Zoroastrian exegetical literature with various parts of Aristotle’s works, or the Middle Persian vocabulary with general Greek concepts.

The historical fact that, in the wake of the closure of the Athens school (529) by the Byzantine emperor Justiian, various Neo-platonic philosophers found exile in Sasanian Iran encourages the research on the intermediate reception of Aristotle’s philosophy via these Late Antiquity filters.

With the attempt at bringing a new perspective to the former research, the present paper proposes a survey of the structures of reasoning one finds in two major exegetical works written down after the Arab conquest of Iran : Dēnkard 3 and the polemical treatise Škand Gumānīg Wizār. These patterns were used for both apologetical and polemical purposes. Part of them could have been set up already by the late Sasanian period, but they were fully developped after the Arab conquest. Regardless of their precise source of inspiration, they were adapted to the traditional way of thinking of the Zoroastrian priests, who provided thus original patterns of argumentation.