Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 4.djvu/53

Rh doctrine prevailed in a decisive way. After a public controversy with his opponents, he appealed to God's judgment and had molten brass poured on his breast: he went through the ordeal unscathed, and confounded the heretics. During the ordeal he may have repeated the Gâtha lines:—

'O Good Spirit, Ahura Mazda, by thy fire thou decidest between the opponents, according to the greater degree of piety and sanctity ; and many of those who see it believe in thy law' (Yasna XLVII, 6). The king announced that the true religion having manifested itself in a visible way, any false religion (ag-dînîh) could be tolerated no more. That great religious event must have taken place about the year 330; for the persecution of the Christians began in that year. It was about the time when the Fathers at Nicaea organised Christianity into an orthodox state religion.

After Âdarbâd the canon was closed. Whether he added his contribution to the bulk of the sacred texts, like his predecessors under Ardashîr and Shâhpûhr, there is no evidence either to prove or disprove: in any case, the Avesta after him underwent no change of any sort. The Parsi tradition makes him the last of the founders of the religion, and, forgetting the teachers between Zoroaster and Adarbid, makes these two names the Alpha and Omega of the Avesta history.

§ 1. From the preceding it appears that the Sassanian Avesta, as fixed by Âdarbâd Mahraspand in the beginning