PREFACE

This volume is the result of a workshop, the aim of which was to

explore contacts between the religious communities and traditions
of the Sasanian Empire, and especially between Persian Christianity
and Babylonian Jewry. The workshop sought to promote greater
cooperation between these fields, and further interest in the value
of adopting a comparative approach in the study of these neigh-
bouring ancient communities.
Published here are papers presented at that workshop that
took place on the 17th–18th March, 2010, entitled “Between Contact
and Contrast”: Jews and Christians in the Sasanian Empire. Two addi-
tional papers, by Adam Becker and Richard Kalmin, who were un-
able to attend, are also published here. The workshop was held
under the auspices of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Dynamics in the
History of Religions, at the Center for Religious Studies at Ruhr Uni-
versität in Bochum. I would like to express my gratitude to
Volkhard Krech, the director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg
(KHK) and to Marion Steinicke, its Scientific Coordinator, for en-
thusiastically hosting the workshop. I wish to thank the KHK
team, and particularly Silke Köster and Thomas Jurczyk for dealing
expertly with all of its logistical needs. Peter Wick and Görge Has-
selhoff, both of Ruhr Universität willingly chaired sessions during
the workshop. I also wish to acknowledge Herr Klaus Grigo of
Bochum, for graciously opening up his unique private antiquities
collection for viewing before the participants of the workshop.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to Gorgias
Press: to George Kiraz for willingly accepting this volume; to Rivka
Ulmer, Naomi Koltun-Fromm, and Lieve Teugels, the series edi-

vii
viii JEWS, CHRISTIANS AND ZOROASTRIANS

tors of Judaism in Context, for including the book in their series, and
to acquisitions editor, Melonie Schmierer-Lee, who has cheerfully
and expertly steered it safely to its harbour.
Geoffrey Herman
October, 2013
ABBREVIATIONS

AJS Association of Jewish Studies

BCE Before the Common Era
CE Common Era
CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium
SBL Society for Biblical Literature
SE Seleucid Era

ix
INTRODUCTION

The Sasanian Empire was home to many religious communities. It

was also a place of meeting and transformation. It was where old
religions met more recent arrivals, and where both new and old
were transformed as a result of this contact. While some religious
communities shared more than others, and this for historical or
geographical reasons, some form of contact and exchange with
Zoroastrianism, the religion of the ruling dynasty and of many of
the inhabitants of the empire was undoubtedly the rule for all.
Scholarship on Sasanian religious exchange over the years has
often been hesitant and somewhat uneven, but this has changed
now. A recent conference at Halle highlighted the Zoroastrian in-
terface with Christianity; and another in Los Angeles addresed Jew-
ish Zoroastrian relations.1 The nature of Sasanian Manichaeism has
been an ongoing concern among scholars, the pendulum swinging
between Zoroastrianism and Christianity.2 The situation concern-
ing study of Jewish Christian interaction is slightly more complex.
It is, indeed, not too often that scholars do discuss Jews and
Christians within a Sasanian context.3 More familiar is a firm divi-

1 The proceedings of the Halle conference were published as Musta-

fa, Tubach and Vashalomidze (eds.), Die Inkulturation des Christentums im
Sasanidenreich. For the published proceedings of the Los Angeles confer-
ence see Bakhos and Shayegan, eds. The Talmud in Its Iranian Context.
2 See Ab De Jong’s contribution in this volume.
3 A recent session at the annual conference of The Society of Bibli-

cal Literature on this theme organized by Richard Kalmin was a rare

event. An article by Jean-Maurice Fiey with the promising title, “Juifs et
chrétiens dans l’Orient Syriaque” is almost exclusively concerned with the
image of the Jews in Syriac literature.

1
2 JEWS, CHRISTIANS AND ZOROASTRIANS

sion between the disciplines.4 But in antiquity in many places Jews

and Christians were undoubtedly neighbours, interacting and shar-
ing the common experiences of the times, and often responding in
similar ways.
An earlier era of scholarship on Jewish-Christian interaction in
the East, or in Mesopotamia, typically focused on Christian-Jewish
polemic, primarily as portrayed in the works of Aphrahat, and has,
indeed, enjoyed a revival in recent decades.5 New realms of study
have also emerged. These have included the comparison of the
Eastern Christian school in Nisibis with the Babylonian academies6
and the study practices and gestures of deference, of the two com-
munities;7 and the comparison of hagiographical and martyrological
genres of the two communities.8 The extent of direct narratives
paralleling the New Testament, and in particular, all that relates to
Jesus, found in the Babylonian Talmud has aroused renewed inter-
est of late.9 The magic literature, and in particular that emanating
from the incantation bowl material is proving a veritable treasure of
new understandings of the relationship between the religious
communities inhabiting Mesopotamia. It is in particular the similar-
ities of these bowls that evidence the closeness of the communities

4 This is sometimes even reflected in the way we typically describe

them: “Babylonian Jewry”, but “Mesopotamian” or Persian Christianity.
5 See Neusner, Aphrahat and Judaism and Becker, “Anti-Judaism and

Care for the Poor”; Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Jewish-Christian polemics in

fourth-century Persian Mesopotamia: a reconstructed conversation, PhD dissertation,
Stanford University, 1994; now revised as Jewish-Christian Conversation in
Fourth-Century Persian Mesopotamia, and refer there for earlier studies. Cf.
the recent Lizorkin, Aphrahat’s Demonstrations: A Conversation with the Jews of
Mesopotamia.
6 See Becker, “The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism”” for a re-

view of the scholarship on this topic.

7 Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud. See, especially, chap-

ter III. On a shared culture of gestures of deference see Herman, “‘Like a

Slave before his master’.”
8 See Naeh, “Freedom and Celibacy”; Bar-Asher-Siegal, “A Rabbinic

Monk.”
9 E.g. Kalmin, “Christians and Heretics”; Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud;

Boyarin, Border Lines.

 INTRODUCTION 3

that produced them and their world outlooks. In addition, compar-

ative study of the leadership structures, and interaction with the
Sasanian ruling powers is in evidence.10
The studies in this volume encompass a diverse array of topics
concerning these religious communities inhabiting the Sasanian
Empire. Some include the Roman East in their deliberations. Most,
however, deal with the interaction of one or other religious com-
munity based in the Sasanian Empire with the dominant religion of
the empire, Zoroastrianism.
The first article, by Adam Becker reviews some modern con-
cepts typically employed by scholars when describing religious is-
sues in the Sasanian Empire, such as addressing matters in terms of
a “church-state” dichotomy. He suggests that awareness of the pre-
suppositions behind many notions that have been imported from a
different reality will contribute towards developing a better ap-
proach to explaining the religious situation in the Sasanian Empire.
While a political border separated the Jewish communities of
the Sasanian Empire from their brethren in the Roman Empire, the
Jews of Palestine and Babylonia shared both a common vernacular
in Aramaic and a usage of Hebrew for religious purposes. The de-
velopment of rabbinic culture in Palestine and Babylonia; and the
paucity of evidence for similar rabbinic activity among the Jews of
the Greek (and Latin) speaking Roman Diaspora has been attribut-
ed, in a recent thesis, to the existence of a language barrier between
Jewish communities functioning in Greek and those who under-
stood Aramaic and Hebrew. Isaiah Gafni offers a response to this
thesis. While critiquing some of its assumptions, he suggests that
other factors, apart from a shared language, may explain the devel-
opment of rabbinic culture in Babylonia.
The inculturation of Persian Christians and their familiarity
with Zoroastrian religious terminology, particularly as reflected in
the Syriac martyrology literature, is the topic addressed by Peter
Bruns. In the Syriac literature of the East one encounters traces of
interaction with Zoroastrianism and Bruns reviews this literature.
He relates to compositions belonging to the latter half of the Sasa-

10 McDonough, Power by Negotiation; Herman, A Prince without a King-

dom, passim.
4 JEWS, CHRISTIANS AND ZOROASTRIANS

nian era when many martyrological works reveal a deeper familiari-

ty with Zoroastrian notions and terms than is apparent in the earli-
er Syriac compositions.
Some of the sources dealt with by Bruns are also of relevance
to my own contribution to this volume. I re-examine the evidence
for anti-Christian persecution in early fifth century CE Mesopota-
mia. My paper concerns the Sasanian king, Yazdgird I, whose
treatment of Christians allegedly underwent a reversal in the course
of his reign. Comparing sources from the Greek ecclesiastical his-
toriography with Syriac martyrdom accounts and other sources I
question whether such persecution took place and argue that two
conflicting narratives exist. The Jewish sources about this king
found in the Babylonian Talmud and Geonic sources are also of
value here. The persecution narrative probably stems from the
Roman Empire, but, at any rate, is less credible. The emergence of
such accounts should probably be sought in the Roman Christian
discourse on active anti-pagan aggression rather than in the Sasa-
nian Empire.
Reuven Kiperwasser and Serge Ruzer compare Babylonian
Jewish and Syriac Christian conversion narratives that involve in-
struction in the letters of the alphabet as the first step. The texts
they explore date to the Sasanian era. Of significance is the role
played by the candidate for conversion, common to both Jewish
and Christian narratives: a Persian who questions the efficacy of
literacy and favours orality. This study also includes a digression on
the topos of learning the alphabet in early education in the Syriac
literary tradition.
Ab de Jong considers the impact of Zoroastrian mythology,
and in particular, traditions about the beginnings of Zoroaster, on
the accounts of the early life of Mani. He suggests that the account
of Mani’s early life in the Cologne Mani Codex reflect such an impact.
The topos of the appearance of the prophet before the king is far
more prevalent in Parthian and Sasanian sources than in the West.
Mani’s appearance before the king may, then, be inspired by the
appearance of Zarathushtra at the court of king Vishtaspa.
Sergey Minov, on the other hand, explores Persian and Zoro-
astrian themes in The Cave of Treasures, a Syriac Christian work com-
posed in the late Sasanian Era. In this rich study he considers, on
the one hand, the impact of Iranian cosmological notions on this
Christian work, focusing, in particular, on the mythological notion
 INTRODUCTION 5

of Rapithwin; and, on the other, on the political and ideational im-

plications inherent in its depiction of the Magi in the nativity scene.
Finally, a paper by Richard Kalmin traces the development of
late antique and early medieval traditions on the murder of Zecha-
riah, a priest and prophet, in the Jerusalem Temple. Among its
noteworthy arguments is that Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic
works preserve the core of a non-rabbinic and ultimately Christian
source. This conclusion is arrived at through close attention to the
rabbinic literature’s consistent use of a different language, whether
Hebrew or Aramaic, in distinguishing the core source from later
interpretative accretions.
POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS
DIVERSITY IN THE SASANIAN EMPIRE

ADAM H. BECKER
Sasanian Iran was a religiously diverse empire. Scholars often employ
anachronistic, modern notions borrowed from liberal political philosophy
when they describe the diversity of the Sasanian Empire and the rela-
tions between the different religious communities and the Sasanian re-
gime. By reflecting upon the presuppositions behind such terms as
“Church-State relations” and “tolerance” we may be able to transcend
our own normative thinking about religious diversity and reconceptual-
ize our approach to the Sasanian Empire, the premodern conditions of
which are confused when we employ the secularized categories of “reli-
gion” and “politics.” Recent scholarship in other fields may point the
way forward for Sasanian historiography.
As several of the chapters in this volume attest, scholars have re-
cently begun to better integrate Sasanian history into other fields
such as Late Antiquity, Rabbinics, and Syriac Studies, while the
study of the Sasanian Empire is again becoming a topic in its own
right.1 In this chapter I would like to raise some questions about
how we conceptualize religious diversity in Sasanian Iran. I begin
with an apology: I know and work primarily on Syriac sources and

1 This piece is based on an oral presentation given in the History and

Literature of Early Rabbinic Judaism section at the 2009 annual confer-
ence of The Society of Biblical Literature and later in the Department of
History at UCLA in the Fall 2010. I thank Kyle Smith, Richard Payne, and
especially Michael Pregill for their feedback and editorial comments on
this piece, and Geoffrey Herman for inviting me to contribute to this vol-
ume and for his editorial efforts.

7
8 ADAM H. BECKER

not the Rabbinic, Manichaean, Middle Persian, Armenian, Arabic,

and other sources that shed light on Sasanian history. One of the
reasons why this history has been understudied is precisely because
of the diversity of the sources and the languages in which they are
written or at least extant, as well as the difficulty of reading many
of them. The sources have suffered from a general scholarly ne-
glect and therefore many tools, such as critical editions of texts, are
lacking. Furthermore, because the literary sources are primarily
highly ideological and composed by religious elites they often pro-
vide only a limited perspective on the social worlds that interest
many historians. Although I approach the Sasanian material as an
outsider and this is a contribution to a volume on two of the better
known religious communities of the Sasanian Empire, I nonethe-
less offer here some broader speculations about how we may de-
velop our thinking about Sasanian religious diversity, particularly
within an imperial context. My suggestions will be tentative, often
only pointing to other literature that may push the conversation
forward. As will become clear, I think that the kind of theoretical
conversations occurring elsewhere in the academy, especially in
Religious Studies, have much to offer historians of pre-modernity
who are interested in thinking about religion and politics.

‘CHURCH-STATE’ RELATIONS IN PRE-ISLAMIC IRAN

On examining the historiography of Sasanian Iran, especially the
larger synthetic works, it becomes apparent that the scholarship
often has certain implicit and explicit notions of religious diversity
and how a religiously diverse society can or at least tends to func-
tion. I would like to address this issue by focusing on one recent
book, Touraj Daryaee’s Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire
(2009). I preface the following statements with an important quali-
fication. I am not suggesting that Daryaee is not aware of the prob-
lems I will address. Sasanian scholarship is still in its youth, if not
infancy, and, to be frank, it is unfair or even unpleasant, as some-
one outside the field, to criticize a leading scholar of things Sasa-
nian when I am unable to read most of the sources except in trans-
lation. In fact, I introduce Daryaee’s work specifically because of its
significance in the field.
In Daryaee’s recent book I find an ongoing tension between
his learned discussion of the details of Sasanian social, religious,
political, and economic culture on the one hand, and the terms and
 POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY 9

implicit framework he uses in his discussion on the other. The lat-

ter, a paradigm implicit in much scholarship in general on pre-
modern religious diversity, entails the norms of political liberalism.
What do I mean by this? In Daryaee’s survey we find the terms
“tolerance,” “toleration,” “officially tolerated,” “secular power” as
opposed to “religious power,” “secular ruler,” “church” to refer to
a Zoroastrian religious establishment (albeit in quotation marks),
“church and state,” “balance of power” between religion and poli-
tics, “citizens of the Empire,” “minorities,” “recognized religion,”
“official religion,” and “state church.” These terms are all potential
anachronisms and when combined suggest an approach to political
life that belongs to our own world rather than what is appropriate
for understanding pre-modern institutions. Among other things,
‘church’ is a problematic term because it implies a physical struc-
ture as well as a formally organized community, often subject to
the larger organization of ‘the Church.’ We typically understand
membership within a ‘church’ to be based upon a faith commit-
ment, with members being considered equal, aside from the re-
maining hierarchy of clergy and laity. Zoroastrianism in antiquity,
however, seems rather more to resemble the collection of practices
and beliefs that have come only over the past two hundred years to
be referred to as ‘Hinduism.’ ‘Persecution’ is the term regularly
used in Daryaee’s book for policies and practices that entailed vio-
lence against non-Zoroastrian religious communities. However,
‘persecution’ is an awkward heuristic term because it is difficult to
define and only nihilistically evil people would ever admit to doing
it.2
The point I am making about Daryaee’s book can be made
about others. For example, in Arthur Christensen’s classic 1944
L’Iran sous les Sassanides, we find statements like “The church gave
to mundane power its sacred character and intervened at the same
time in the life of each citizen in all important circumstances.”3
Mary Boyce in 1968 referred to Zoroastrianism in the seventh to

2See, e.g., comments by Castelli at “Praying for the Persecuted

Church,” 328.
3 Christensen, L’Iran sous les Sassanides, 111.
10 ADAM H. BECKER

ninth centuries CE as “a church on the defensive,”4 whereas Par-

vaneh Pourshariati’s 2008 Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire uses
the language of church-state relations without any qualification.5
The language I have identified in Daryaee’s book is common to
other works in the field.
All the terms I have listed, such as ‘church’ and ‘persecution’,
when set together, fit into a framework of liberalism. In order to be
precise about the paradigm apparent in much of the historiography,
and in this case, in Daryaee’s book, I should specify that I use ‘lib-
eralism’ in the broad sense of the term. By it I refer to the political,
philosophical, and ethical formation that consists in a focus on
moral autonomy, political agency, epistemological independence
from tradition, and a tendency to preserve the rights of property, as
well as a clear distinction between persons and things. The concern
for the ‘modern’ typical of much liberal thought has implied a cer-
tain ‘moral narrative’ whereby it behooves all humans inasmuch as
they are human to free themselves from tyranny, ignorance, and
enthrallment to the fetish. 6 By ‘fetish’ I refer to the notion that
human beings ignorantly attribute agency to a trifle, often of a reli-
gious nature, such as an idol, and subject themselves to it. In con-
trast to this imagined other, liberalism prioritizes human agency
and reason. Although not necessarily anti-religious, liberal thought
is associated with a concomitant disenchantment of the world and
a rejection of ecclesial forms of authority.
Liberalism, if for example simplistically typified by John
Locke’s Letter on Toleration, advocates the removal of religion from
the public space, a removal which in fact constitutes religion as a
distinct and private sphere. The ideology of secularism, which pre-
scribes such a privatization, and the secularization thesis, a histori-
cal model that describes a progressive decline in religion, both treat
religion as an epiphenomenal part of human social life, a secondary
effect that obscures and misdirects human action in the ‘real’ world
of political and economic life. The liberal model of politics takes
for granted a distinction between religion and politics, sometimes

4 Boyce, “Middle Persian Literature,” 39.

5 Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire, e.g., 324–5.
6 Keane, Christian Moderns, 47–55.
 POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY 11

even a (utopian) separation of church and state, purportedly in or-

der that all citizens may enjoy equal rights under the law.7 Some-
times, as in most European countries, liberal politics includes an
official or state religion, but the possibility of inequitable treatment
of citizens is reduced by the tolerance and even special privileges
granted to minorities.8 Furthermore, it is noteworthy that liberal
politics developed in part in reaction to Catholicism and the specter
of ‘Oriental despotism.’ The perceived hegemony of the Pope and
the supposed ‘fanaticism’ of the Turk created anxieties that helped
promote liberal politics (as similar concerns today motivate our
politics).
The paradigm of politics that I have just described, which of
course has a specific discursive history, seems to be implicit in
much of the scholarship on the Sasanian Empire (and other ancient
empires). Such scholarship tends to re-inscribe Enlightenment cat-
egories that are fundamentally modern and Protestant. However, a
scholar as learned as Daryaee is aware of how fundamentally differ-
ent the Sasanians were from us. In fact he shows this throughout
his book. For example, we learn that judges and numerous officials
in the Sasanian Empire were from the priestly class. Priests held
important offices at various levels and the “bureaucratic apparatus”
was “under the control of the priests.”9 The second estate of Sasa-

7 For a thorough history of the phrase “separation of church and

state,” describing how it evolved in American parlance until it was read
into the American constitution, see Hamburger, Separation of Church and
State.
8 Brown, Regulating Aversion, offers a critique of the current discourse

of tolerance. For the colonial particularity of the process of minoritiza-

tion, see the discussion in Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, which, among
other things, attempts “to delineate central categories and narratives of
liberal culture and thought concerning the question of minority existence
— assimilation, emancipation separatism conversion, the language of state
protection and minority rights, uprooting, exile, and homelessness — and
the dialectic within which they are produced” (2–3).
9 Daryaee, Sasanian Persia, 26. Cf. “But even in the Sasanian period

the separation between a priestly specialization and public, judicial or ad-

12 ADAM H. BECKER

nian Society, the warrior class, “had a designated fire-temple,” sec-

ond only to one other regional fire-temple. The King and members
of this warrior class worshipped there. 10 The family of Ardashir,
the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, “had a priestly function with
the Zoroastrian cult of Anahid and its fire-temple at the city of
Istakhr.”11 These examples suggest that the notion of church-state
relations does not apply here. Religion and politics were not simply
intermingled, but imbricated and impossible to separate.
To be sure, there was conflict between the priestly class and
the Shahanshah or between the priestly class and the nobles, but
these were frictions within a fundamentally political and religious
system of social networks that made up the Sasanian state and elite
society. The Letter of Tansar attests to these deeply linked yet semi-
distinct spheres, although Boyce’s standard translation of this text,
which was mediated through Middle Persian, Arabic, and then
New Persian, points to the very problems I aim to demonstrate in
this piece. The Letter states, in her translation, “for church and state
were born of the one womb, joined together and never to be sun-
dered”.12 Or, as one sixth-century Syriac text puts it, the piety of
the Magi depended on the authority of the king.13
Garth Fowden has pointed to links between Sasanian univer-
salism and the violence suffered by some non-Zoroastrians, thus
showing a connection between ‘persecution’ and political theology,
but he suggests that ultimately this universalism was limited by the
fact that Zarathustra “remained a national rather than a universal
prophet.”14 This is another reason why the language of ‘church and

ministrative office is by no means clear-cut,” Shaked, Dualism in Transfor-

mation, 88.
10 Ibid. 47
11 Ibid. 69
12 Boyce, The Letter of Tansar, 8 (33–34). Cf. ibid. 11–13 (37–39). See

also Boyce, Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, 109. Daryaee refers
to “religion” and “nation” (in quotation marks) in addressing this passage
(Daryaee, Sasanian Persia, 71).
13 Bedjan, ed., Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha, 402.14 (the sixth-century Mar-

tyrdom of Yazdpaneh).
14 Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 33. See also 24–36.
 POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY 13

state’ is misleading in discussions of the Sasanian Empire: ‘church’

and, in particular, the political problem it raises implies a universal-
ism typical of Christianity. In fact, Christian universalism may be
one of the reasons for the violence Christians occasionally suffered:
their universalism as well as the fact that their piety was shared with
the Christian Roman Empire rendered them an apparent threat to
Sasanian rule. In turn, the closed nature of Zoroastrianism may also
explain why Christian martyrs in the later Sasanian period were
primarily elite converts. ‘Church’ — or even ‘religion’ — and ‘state’
elide this historical particularity.15
Daryaee mentions several times the shift from the identifica-
tion of the Shahanshah with the seed of the Gods in the earlier
Sasanian period to the links that were later drawn between the rul-
ing dynasty and the Kayanids, mythological figures of the past. 16
This could perhaps reflect the institutional divisions that developed
between the priestly class and the Shahanshah, but it is too hasty to
treat this differentiation as a secularization of political authority, as
Daryaee does.17 The descent of kings from mythological primordial
ones continues to look enchanted, and this Sasanian genealogy re-
sembles the descent Medieval French kings traced for themselves
back to the Holy Family.18 Furthermore, the xwarrah or aura of the
kings remains a dominant theme throughout this period.19 The mis-
take here is to assume that tensions between, for example, the Sha-
hanshah and the priestly class suggest a bifurcation between reli-
gion and politics.
Gignoux has argued that the symbiosis of religion and king-
ship scholars have seen in the Sasanian Empire is in fact a projec-
tion back from later sources and that the two were often in con-
flict, the former often striving for dominance and the latter main-
taining its independence. However, this is not an instance of
‘church-state relations’ in some simple sense, despite the title of

15 In general, see Payne, Christianity and Iranian Society in Late Antiqui-

ty.
16 Daryaee, Sasanian Persia, 24.
17 Ibid. 20.
18 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 333.
19 Soudavar, The Aura of the Kings.
14 ADAM H. BECKER

Gignoux’s article: He cites Widengren, for example, who states

“the Sasanian kingship has a religious character of its own and is
least marked by Zoroastrianism,”20 which fits with what we know
about sacral kingship among the Sasanians.21
Despite the common acknowledgement of sacral kingship, the
tendency which I have identified in Daryaee’s work to anachronis-
tically treat religion in the Sasanian Empire from a secular modern
perspective is common in much of the literature. This leads to con-
fusion. The religious character of kingship is often noted by schol-
ars, but then in the same passage they will designate the Sha-
hanshah’s interests as non-religious. For example, after referring to
the Shahanshah’s support of the religious establishment and his
self-identification as a mazdēsn (worshipper of Ahura Mazda),
Gherardo Gnoli states “[p]olitical interest always, or almost always,
prevailed in the Sasanian monarchy’s concern about, and attitude
towards, the different religious faiths.”22 Or Shaul Shaked, after a
nuanced discussion of the Shahanshah’s relationship to the various
religious communities, writes: “Royal interference in religious mat-
ters is an expression not so much of interest in religion as of inter-
est in holding the populace in tight control. The king’s involvement
in the affairs of the Zoroastrian church is not much deeper than in
those of the other religious communities of the kingdom.” 23 This is

20 Gignoux, “Church-State Relations in the Sasanian Period,” 80.

21 Wiesehöfer, “King and Kingship in the Sasanian Empire”;
Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth; Panaino, “Astral Characters of Kingship
in the Sasanian and Byzantine Worlds”; Choksy, “Sacral Kingship in Sasa-
nian Iran.”
22 Gnoli, The Idea of Iran: An Essay on its Origin, 166. This instrumental

view of religion is common in the secondary literature. Daryaee writes, for

example, “…Shabuhr I understood that in order to have a universal em-
pire, a universal religion which could cement loyalty to the king and state
was much desired” (Daryaee, Sasanian Persia, 14). Or, note the instrumen-
tal view of sacral kingship when Josef Wiesehöfer states, “Specific means
and institutions were meant to strengthen the idea that the ruler and his
Iranian subjects shared the same destiny” in “King and Kingship in the
Sasanian Empire,” 144.
23 Shaked, Dualism in Transformation, 112.
 POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY 15

a fundamentally secular perspective in that it presupposes that true

religion is something that essentially does not have to do with
“holding the populace in tight control” (i.e. politics) and that it
generally remains limited, at least in its essence, to the “church.”
One cause of the confusion in much of the literature is the failure
to differentiate between priestly institutions and the various cosmi-
cizing ideas that scholars vaguely identify with religion.
The point I am making has been made in nuce in the past, but
scholars’ calls for a better model have not been heeded. For exam-
ple, Josef Wiesehöfer wrote almost twenty years ago:
Moreover, the differentiated religious-administrative hierarchy,
which Perso-Arabic sources already attribute to the third and
fourth centuries, was created in a lengthy process, as we have
seen, and based on the model of monarchic power. This being
the case, the concept of ‘state religion’ and ‘state Church’ used
by earlier scholars has to be discarded, and that not only for
semantic reasons — the concept of ‘Church’ suggesting false
analogies with Western evolution — but also on historical
grounds.24
As Hal Drake reminds us in an article on the issue of religious in-
tolerance in antiquity, it is better for us “not to read religious con-
flicts in the ancient world through clearly defined categories of
‘Church’ and ‘State,’ because in the ancient world these spheres
were deeply intertwined: the ancient ‘state’ was also a religious in-
stitution, a ‘church.’ It is not at all clear that the conceptual catego-
ries needed to distinguish between ‘Church’ and ‘State’ even exist-
ed.”25 Drake’s claim for the Roman world applies all the more so
for Sasanian Iran, a region less imbricated in the genealogy of the

24 Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, 211. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth,
shows an awareness of this problem and steps back from “religion” (and
the implicit “secular”) by simply talking about ritual (see, e.g., 230 note 2).
However, this is a term with its own baggage, cf. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual
Practice.
25 Drake, “Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacy

in Late Antiquity,” 214.

16 ADAM H. BECKER

West than Rome and therefore more likely to be misconstrued by

Western categories.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY
I would suggest that we employ the term ‘political theology’ to
think about the Sasanian material. The empire was a political entity
and a religious one. The question for us is how to conceptualize this
without, on the one hand, using all the recognizable terms and cat-
egories of our own society and, on the other, saying simply that
everything just had fuzzy and blurred boundaries. What I mean by
‘political theology’ must be defined because it is a term theologians
use in a variety of ways, and it is also most well-known of late
among certain scholars because of the revival of interest in the
work of the political theorist Carl Schmitt.26 Schmitt uses ‘political
theology’ as a term to address the theoretical and juridical basis of
the state and sovereignty. Schmitt famously defined the sovereign
as the one who was permitted the exception — that is, possessing
the authority to step outside the law, just as God is outside of crea-
tion. In fact, he suggests that this legal concept is a secularized the-
ological notion. For theologians, ‘political theology’ tends to refer
to theological engagement in the political, whereas for Schmitt it
concerns a foundational politics, as if politics were theology. But he
does not simply suggest an analogy between the two. He also draws
a homologous relationship between them. He states, “The meta-
physical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the
same structure as what the world immediately understands to be
appropriate as a form of its political organization.”27 Thus the
structure of politics and theology can correspond at any given time.
Ultimately, however, Schmitt’s notion of political theology is mis-
leading for historians of pre-modernity because of the implicit sec-
ularist framework of his project. Schmitt is critical of the legal pro-
ceduralism associated with liberal democracy and he understands it

26 Scott and Cavanaugh, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology,

provides a broad survey. For Jewish thinkers on the term, see Lazier, “On
the Origins of ‘Political Theology’.”
27 Schmitt, Political Theology, 46.