influence is strongly marked, though not so strongly as Vdélter, in his latest volume (pp. 29 f., 63 f., 86 f., 116 f.), would make out. This, like that of Babylonia, reaches back not simply to the indirect channel of the post-exilic Judaism, but apparently to an almost direct relationship. In Zoroastrian angelology and eschatology alone, for example, does anything adequate correspond to the sort of con- ceptions which in their present shape are peculiar, or almost peculiar, to the Apocalypse: vz. (i.) the binding or noosing of the fiend (xx. 1f.,cf.S. B. E., v. 19), (ii.) the blasting of the third part of the earth (viii. 7 f., cf. S. B. E., v. 164, where the climax of the evil spirit’s work is that “he took as much as one-third of the base of the sky in a downward direction, into a confined and captive state’), (iii.) the seven spirits of God (i. 4, cf. Encycl. Religion and Ethics, i. 384-385, and S. B. E., iv. pp. Ixxi. f.), (iv.) the guardian fravashis of the churches (see note on i. 20—quite an Avestan touch), (v.) the recrudescence of evil genii before the consummation (xx. 7 f., cf. Stave, pp. 227 f.), (vi.) the emphasis on the millennium-period,! and (vii.) the renewal of the universe. See, further, notes on i. 13, ii. 5, iv. 3, vii. 17, xi. 5 f., xiv. 17 f., xvi. 13, 20. Upon the other hand, no distinct references to Mithraism (as, ε.σ., against Barns in Expos., iii. 220 f.; Titan, the number of the Beast = Mithra as sun-god) can be detected, while the Buddhistic or Indian parallels are scanty and as a rule remote. Nothing is more deceptive than such coincidences between primi- tive religions. Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem, They may simply be due in certain cases to analogous but independent movements of the religious feeling in different quarters. Here as elsewhere infer- ences have to be drawn with extreme caution, yet there is good reason to believe that a number of the special traditions and para- phernalia used in the Apocalypse owed part of their form, if not of their content, to ideas which were current in Jewish and pagan circles during the first century in Asia Minor. The coincidences with Oriental religious conceptions (cf, e.g., J. Brandis in Hermes, 1867, pp. 259-284) are too numerous and too striking to be dismissed in every case as accidental. Even when the cord is Christian, it may be spun out of several variegated threads, though it is often diffi-
1 Plutarch (De Iside, 46 f.), in describing the Zoroastrian doctrines of the Magi as these were known to Romans and Greeks of the first century Α.Ρ., closes by sketching the final doom of Ahriman, when the earth lies smooth under a single ruler and a single language, and ‘‘at the end Hades shall fail and men be happy” (Apoc. xx. 6-14). Similarly, the fierce doom of Apoc. xix. 17-18, where birds are summoned to eat the flesh of messiah’s victims, is probably a reflex of the supreme penalty inflicted on the carcases of those who resist Mazdeism, viz., that they be devoured by birds of prey (S. B. E., iv. 27, 131).