Page:Syrian Churches (Etheridge).djvu/25

Rh the first evangelists to, their own land. "That they came from Chaldea," says Yeates, "agrees with the best accounts; and if we may conjecture from the names of three of them recorded in the Ethiopic church-books, one at least was a Chaldean, whose name, they say, was Chesad." It is true that Chesadim, or Chesdim, is the Old-Testament name for the nation of the Chaldeans; but the circumstance thus pointed out, it must be confessed, furnishes but a dubious evidence in settlement of this question. The Nestorians have a legend, that the Magi went from Ooroomiah, or Urmiah, a city of Media, instructed by a prophecy of Zoroaster, who, at the time of the captivity, had been a disciple of the prophet Jeremiah. Zoroaster, or Zerdushta, was the great reformer of the old fire-worship, which prevailed so extensively in those countries. He was a worshipper of the one true God, or, as Sir William Jones says, "a pure theist, who strongly disclaimed any adoration of the fire or other elements, and denied the favourite doctrine of two coeval independent principles, supremely good and supremely bad." The long sojourn of the Jews in the state of their captivity; their steadfastness, in general, in the true worship; the teachings of their prophets; and the remarkable interpositions of the divine power in their favour; tended to prepare the way for such a reform in the popular religion, as is affirmed was effected by the instrumentality of Zoroaster. Now it is highly probable that these Magi (whether Chaldeans, Persians, Medes, or Arabians, as some conjecture, from the interchange of the words Arabi and Magi by Ptolemy and Pliny, and the nature of the oblations presented by them,—gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the productions of Arabia,) were Sophoi, "Wise Men," or students of the True and the Good, who retained the principles of the reformed Magian theology, with some measures of divine truth,