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  • A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity by Richard E. Payne
  • Philip Wood
A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity
Richard E. Payne
Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xv + 301. ISBN 978-0-520-28619-1

Our vision of the Iranian world before the coming of Islam is handicapped by a reliance on two sets of sources: observers within the Roman world and Syriac-speaking Christians within the Iranian world. Payne’s overwhelming contribution here is to give the Zoroastrian sources their due. He writes with a wide knowledge of the Middle Persian religious and legal texts that allows him to evoke a variegated and nuanced image of fifth- and sixth-century Zoroastrianism on its own terms, not merely as an opponent of Christianity. At the heart of his book is a deep understanding of the “good religion” in its Sasanian context, of its conception of the Iranian empire as “a cosmological project to organize beneficent humankind to restore the world” (7), especially through systems of inheritance, agricultural improvement, and the management of deviant ideas.

The “mixture” of the title evokes the uncertain role for Christians within this cosmological project. Payne emphasizes that Christians in the Sasanian world are widely attested archaeologically and enjoyed increasing social mobility. He links this to the expanding military and fiscal requirements of the state. He cautions us against accepting hagiographic evidence for widespread persecution or conversion. But he is also wary of seeing Christians as a discrete group sealed off from the culture of their co-subjects. Payne reads Christian hagiographies and legal texts against the grain to examine how middle-ranking Christian lay elites participated in the kind of claims to land and lineage that were used by the great noble houses of Mihran and Karen.

Chapter 1 examines “the myth of Zoroastrian intolerance.” The key text here is the famous third-century inscription of the mobad Kerdir, which has often been used to claim Zoroastrian persecution of religious others. Payne argues that scholars have ignored a hierarchy of non-Zoroastrian beliefs, extending from the worship of demons and deviant forms of Zoroastrianism to the different agdēn, “those of bad religion,” including Jews and Christians. Payne contends that this hierarchy explains the negative treatment of Buddhists and Manichees, while Christians and Jews are only to be “struck,” a term that he interprets as suppression, rather than elimination (24). Moreover, Kerdir’s example needs to be tempered by the writings of Zoroastrian jurists who considered whether anēr, non-Iranians, could participate in the struggle against evil, such as warfare against the Turks. Payne argues that the image of Zoroastrian persecution that we often receive from Christian hagiography is an exaggeration: the punishment of recalcitrant Christians such as Mar Abda is ultimately generated by a refusal to compromise and by the Christian conceptualization of a single true religion opposed by many false ones. [End Page 547]

Chapter 2 identifies the sacred connection to the land as a key theme of Zoroastrian thought that was internalized and accommodated by Iranian Christians. Here Payne draws on the Syriac Lives of Anahid and Pethion (composed ca. 500) to examine how mount Bisotun, a site with longstanding links to the Iranian kings of the past, was re-imagined as a place of Christian martyrdom. He stresses that the text was probably not written to inspire conversion from Zoroastrianism, though the martyrs it describes were converts, but to underscore the legitimate presence of Christians in a land replete with other, older forms of place-making. Payne suggests a social context in which Christians participated in links of foster-age with Zoroastrian elites and sent their children to be educated in Zoroastrian schools (hērbedestān). It is in protest against these kinds of connections that the Lives of Anahid and Pethion distort Zoroastrian myths to present Ohrmazd as the powerless equal of Ahreman and unworthy of worship.

Chapter 3 discusses the various sixth-century legal innovations of the catholicos Mar Aba as a means of examining the social worlds that Sasanian Christians inhabited. The History of Mar Aba describes the patriarch’s...

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