This is an excerpt from my interview with Dr. Winfried Corduan in which we discuss the Christmas-famous Magi. Hear the whole thing here. -P
Penjammin: You hear people talking about the Magi all the time. It's like, “oh, well, they they had some contact with material in Numbers or they had contact with material in Genesis or [especially] Daniel.” They'll say that Daniel was their leader once upon a time, and so he left his Magi in his place (when he was in Babylon). And those guys would have known the scriptures, and they could have done math and figured out prophecies that [implied]: here comes the king-of-the-Jews time. Now, that you hear all the time, but this is different . . .
Win Corduan: Well, here's the thing that I have become increasingly convinced of. About three years ago, I may have said something along the line of why, precisely, they went to Judea and Jerusalem and then on to Bethlehem. That remains a mystery. Well, I have been more and more convinced that the theory that Zoroaster had had contact with the Israelites in exile, that theory has a lot of merit to it. Now I realize that most scholarship over the last hundred years has gone in the other direction, that some of the Jews learned about their religion from the Persians, but there really isn't enough overlap there to make that plausible at all. But it is plausible that (okay, I'm saying Israelites, not Jews, but) the so-called ten lost tribes who were deported into what at the time was then the Assyrian Empire with their belief in one God (assuming that they repented from all their idolatry). It was very likely that Zoroaster came in contact with some of them and that he picked up the idea of one God, possibly. And I'm saying, with greater probability than I used to think, [that] he picked it up from the Israelites and then incorporated it as he carried out the very much needed reformation of the original Persian polytheism.
For more, find Win's compilation of relevant blog posts here and hear the whole interview here.
Penjammin was raised in a labyrinthine cavern. Then he ran with the wolves, and life in the scent of his game was sweet, until the pirates landed and… (see “About” above).
Get his eletters at penjams.com/subscribe.