The God Who Descends and the Savior Who Ends History

Krishna, Jesus, Maitreya, the Saoshyant, and the Ancient Expectation of Divine Intervention

Many are the forms of divine things, and the gods bring to pass many things unexpectedly; what is expected has not been accomplished, but the god has found out a means for doing things unthought of. So too has this event turned out.

Euripides, Bacchae 1388–1392, trans. T. A. Buckley (1850), as revised in the Perseus Digital Library

Two Shapes of One Hope

Over a span of centuries that no one can date with confidence, four religious cultures separated by mountain ranges, scripts and liturgies came to share a conviction that the divine will intervene when the moral order of the world collapses. Krishna, speaking to a hesitant warrior on the field of Kurukṣetra, promises to take birth age after age whenever righteousness declines. Buddhist texts describe a future Buddha named Maitreya who will appear after the teaching of Gautama has faded from human memory. The Zoroastrian priesthood awaited the Saoshyant, a savior born at the close of history who will raise the dead and make the world new. In Roman Galilee a Jewish teacher announced that the kingdom of God had come near, and his followers came to expect his return to finish what his death had interrupted.

The resemblance is real, and a reader notices it first. A second observation takes longer to arrive. Krishna promises to come again and again with no final coming in view, while the Saoshyant arrives once, at the end, after which history has no further chapter for anyone to be rescued from. These are two different pictures of how the divine relates to time, and the four traditions refuse to distribute themselves neatly between them.

My first plan was to sort the four figures into two columns, the god who descends on one side and the savior who ends history on the other. The columns did not hold. Maitreya, who looks at first like an end-time figure, turns out to be one Buddha in a sequence with no beginning and no end; Krishna's own tradition contains Kalki, a rider foretold to close the darkest of the ages; and Christianity claims both shapes for a single person, a god who descended once into flesh and who will come again when history is finished.

A fifth witness, older than the written forms in which the other four reached us, complicates the picture further. Euripides' Bacchae, staged in Athens in 405 BCE, tells of a god who takes human form and walks unrecognized among the people of a city that has refused him. He triumphs. Righteousness, in any sense the Gītā or the Gospels would recognize, has no part in his triumph, and the play ends with an old man asking why a god should be as angry as a mortal.

The argument of this essay grows out of that comparison. A god may enter history without entering it for humanity's sake, as the Bacchae demonstrates at terrible length, and what the Gītā, the Buddhist prophecy of Maitreya, the Zoroastrian apocalypse and the Christian gospel hold in common is the moral purpose attached to the coming rather than the coming itself. Whether that shared purpose arose in four places independently, or traveled along the roads that linked Persia to India and to the eastern Mediterranean, is a separate question, and the evidence on it is thinner than either side of the debate usually admits.

Krishna and the God Who Comes Age After Age

The Bhagavad Gītā occupies eighteen chapters of the sixth book of the Mahābhārata, and it opens on a moment of paralysis. Arjuna, the great archer among the Pāṇḍava brothers, has looked across the field and seen his teachers and kinsmen in the opposing ranks, and he has let his bow slip from his hand. His charioteer is Krishna. Over the chapters that follow, the charioteer discloses himself as the Lord of all beings, and in the fourth chapter, after saying that he once taught this same discipline to the sun god Vivasvat, he faces Arjuna's obvious objection: how could someone born so recently have taught the sun? His answer is that he and Arjuna have both passed through many births, that he himself is unborn and imperishable, and that he enters the world through his own power. Then come the verses that open this whole inquiry:

yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṃ sṛjāmy aham paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṃ vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām dharmasaṃsthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge

Whenever there is a weakening of dharma, O Bhārata, and a rising up of adharma, then I send myself forth. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of those who do evil, for the firm establishing of dharma, I come into being age after age. (Bhagavad Gītā 4.7–8, my translation)

The verbs repay attention. Krishna says sṛjāmi, "I send forth" or "I create," and sambhavāmi, "I come into being," while the noun avatāra, the "crossing down" that later Vaiṣṇava theology made the technical term for his appearances, is absent from the Gītā's text. The familiar lists of descents, ten in the common version and more than twenty in one chapter of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, belong to Purāṇic literature composed centuries afterward. What the Gītā offers is an older and looser promise, governed by the doubled yadā yadā, "whenever, whenever," which ties the divine appearance to a recurring human failure rather than to any appointed date.

The phrase yuge yuge sets that promise inside Indian cosmic time, and Indian cosmic time turns. The classical scheme divides each great cycle into four ages of shrinking length and virtue, called Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali, and the law book attributed to Manu pictures dharma in the first age standing on all four feet and losing a quarter of itself with each age that follows (Manusmṛti 1.81–82). By this reckoning we live in the Kali age, with dharma hobbling on a single leg. A god who promises to come age after age is a god suited to a universe where the decline will happen again, however many times he halts it.

The tradition does hold an end-time figure. In the third book of the Mahābhārata the sage Mārkaṇḍeya describes the last days of the Kali age, when duty is abandoned and violence fills the earth, and he foretells the birth of a brahmin called Kalki Viṣṇuyaśas in the village of Śambhala, who will destroy the wicked and bring back the first age (Mahābhārata 3.188–189). At first glance Kalki looks like India's answer to the Saoshyant. The age he restores, however, is a new Kṛta, the opening of another cycle, and the wheel will carry that age down into another Kali in due course.

The village of Śambhala had a strange later career, incidentally. In the Buddhist Kālacakra Tantra, composed in the early eleventh century, Śambhala became a hidden kingdom ruled by a line of kings bearing the title kalkin, the last of whom is to lead a final war against the enemies of the dharma, so that a Hindu savior's birthplace became a Buddhist savior's realm, which serves as a small warning against assuming that religious ideas in South Asia moved in only one direction.

The date of the Gītā is uncertain, and the uncertainty matters for any comparison. Scholarly estimates commonly place its composition between the second century BCE and the second century CE, which would make its earliest possible form roughly contemporary with the Book of Daniel and its latest with the Gospels. I know of no evidence that its authors had heard of Jewish or Iranian expectations, nor of anything in the text that would exclude the possibility.

Dionysus at Thebes

Dionysus opens the Bacchae by telling the audience who he is and what he has done to himself:

ἥκω Διὸς παῖς τήνδε Θηβαίων χθόνα Διόνυσος, ὃν τίκτει ποθ᾽ ἡ Κάδμου κόρη Σεμέλη λοχευθεῖσ᾽ ἀστραπηφόρῳ πυρί· μορφὴν δ᾽ ἀμείψας ἐκ θεοῦ βροτησίαν πάρειμι Δίρκης νάματ᾽ Ἰσμηνοῦ θ᾽ ὕδωρ.

I have come, the son of Zeus, to this land of the Thebans, I, Dionysus, whom Semele the daughter of Cadmus once bore, brought to birth by the lightning-bearing fire; and having exchanged a god's form for a mortal one, I am here at the streams of Dirce and the water of Ismenus. (Bacchae 1–5, my translation)

A few lines later he repeats the point, as if the audience might miss it: ὧν οὕνεκ᾽ εἶδος θνητὸν ἀλλάξας ἔχω / μορφήν τ᾽ ἐμὴν μετέβαλον εἰς ἀνδρὸς φύσιν, "for this reason I have taken on a mortal appearance and changed my form into the nature of a man" (53–54).

The play was produced at Athens in 405 BCE, after Euripides had died in Macedonia, and it took first prize. Its premise would not have startled anyone in the theater, since Greek gods had been putting on human shapes since Homer, where Athena takes the likeness of Mentor to guide Telemachus. The Bacchae differs in the length and seriousness of the disguise. Dionysus spends the entire play in human form; he is arrested by Pentheus, the young king of Thebes, as a foreign charlatan, then bound, questioned about his rites, mocked for his long hair and soft looks, and imprisoned. He is the son of a god and a mortal woman, the giver of wine, and a stranger rejected by the city where his mother lived and died.

Readers of the Gospels will recognize the outline, and Dennis R. MacDonald has argued at length that the Fourth Gospel was composed partly in imitation of Euripides (The Dionysian Gospel, 2017). I am less persuaded than he is that the evangelist wrote with the Bacchae open before him, but one verbal echo deserves notice. When Paul, or the hymn he quotes, says that Christ, "being in the form of God ... took the form of a slave" (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων ... μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, Philippians 2:6–7), the noun doing the work is the same μορφή that Dionysus uses when he announces that he has traded a god's form for a mortal one. The word is ordinary Greek, and the coincidence proves no borrowing, though it does show that the language possessed a vocabulary for a god in human shape four centuries before Christians needed one.

The chorus, midway through the play, sings what sounds at first like a Greek version of Krishna's promise:

ὁρμᾶται μόλις, ἀλλ᾽ ὅμως πιστόν τι τὸ θεῖον σθένος· ἀπευθύνει δὲ βροτῶν τούς τ᾽ ἀγνωμοσύναν τιμῶντας καὶ μὴ τὰ θεῶν αὔξοντας σὺν μαινομένᾳ δόξᾳ.

The power of the divine moves slowly, but it can be trusted. It corrects those mortals who honor senselessness and, in their raving judgment, do not exalt the things of the gods. (Bacchae 882–887, my translation)

The resemblance to the Gītā holds only until one asks what the divine power is correcting. Krishna comes to protect the good and restore dharma; the Theban chorus celebrates a god who punishes too little reverence toward himself. Pentheus, lured into dressing as a maenad so that he can spy on the women's rites, is torn apart on Mount Cithaeron by the women of Thebes, and his own mother Agave leads them, believing that the head she carries back to the city belongs to a mountain lion. The god's victory amounts to a mother killing her son.

When Dionysus finally appears in his own form to pronounce exile on the house of Cadmus, the old king makes the protest the whole play has been building toward. ὀργὰς πρέπει θεοὺς οὐχ ὁμοιοῦσθαι βροτοῖς, he says, "gods ought not to resemble mortals in their anger" (1348). Dionysus answers with an appeal to decree, πάλαι τάδε Ζεὺς οὑμὸς ἐπένευσεν πατήρ, "long ago Zeus my father ordained these things" (1349), and the exchange goes no further. Cadmus has raised the question that every later savior tradition in this study tries in some fashion to answer, while the god of the Bacchae treats it as beneath reply.

The closing lines of the play, which supply this essay's epigraph, also end four other plays of Euripides with little or no change, the Alcestis, Andromache, Helen and Medea, the last with a different opening line. Buckley himself flagged the repetition in a note to his 1850 translation. Many scholars treat the lines as a conventional exit chant, possibly attached by actors, and nothing in what follows depends on their authenticity; they serve as an epigraph because a chorus that has just watched a god destroy a family tells us, on its way out of the theater, that the divine appears in many forms, and that observation is where any comparative study of divine intervention has to begin.

Maitreya and the Turning of the Ages

The oldest canonical account of Maitreya, called Metteyya in Pāli, appears in a discourse of the Dīgha Nikāya known as the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta (DN 26), and it is a story of moral collapse told with the flat patience of a chronicle. Kings stop giving to the poor; poverty breeds theft; theft breeds violence and lying; and with each generation human lifespans shrink, until people live only ten years and marry at five. At the bottom of the decline comes a seven-day "sword interval" in which people see one another as wild animals and kill one another. A few survivors hide in thickets and caves, emerge when the killing is over, embrace, and resolve to abstain from taking life. Their small act of restraint reverses the decline. Lifespans lengthen generation by generation until they reach eighty thousand years, the city of Benares becomes a capital called Ketumatī under a righteous wheel-turning king named Saṅkha, and in that age the Buddha Metteyya arises, leading a community of many thousands of monks just as Gotama now leads many hundreds.

Two features of this prophecy separate Maitreya from Krishna and from the Saoshyant alike. Maitreya is a human being who attains awakening, as Gautama did, and he is in no sense a god descending; later tradition places him, while he waits, as a bodhisattva in the Tuṣita heaven, which makes him a celestial being but leaves him well short of the high divinity of theistic religion. And his coming follows human moral recovery rather than causing it, since the survivors of the sword interval turn back toward virtue before he appears, so that he arrives into a world already healing.

A third feature complicates any tidy scheme. Maitreya belongs to a series. The Buddhavaṃsa lists the Buddhas who preceded Gautama across immense stretches of time, and Maitreya is simply the next in line, with others to follow in later world-ages. Gautama's teaching is expected to disappear, and commentarial literature associated with Buddhaghosa describes its fading in five stages, beginning with the loss of attainment, then of practice, then of learning, then of the outward signs of the monastic life, and finally of the relics themselves, which gather at the site of the awakening and are consumed in flame. That disappearance prepares the way for Maitreya, yet Maitreya's own teaching will one day fade in its turn. In the shape of its time, then, the Maitreya prophecy stands nearer to Krishna's yuge yuge than to the single last day of the Iranian and Christian apocalypses, even though popular devotion has often treated him as a figure of the end.

Popular devotion did a good deal more than that. Jan Nattier, in a study of Maitreya legends across Asia, sorted them according to whether the devotee expects to meet Maitreya here on earth or in a heaven, and now or in a distant future, and the "here and now" variety proved politically combustible ("The Meanings of the Maitreya Myth," 1988). Chinese rebels from the early medieval period onward proclaimed that Maitreya had arrived or was about to, and several imperial dynasties treated Maitreya cults as seditious. The cheerful pot-bellied monk Budai, whose statue greets customers on shop and restaurant counters from Manila to San Francisco, is venerated in Chinese Buddhism as an incarnation of Maitreya, which means that a future Buddha once invoked by insurgents now presides over a great many cash drawers.

Whether the expectation of a future Buddha is as old as the Buddha's own teaching is uncertain. The Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta is canonical, but a number of scholars regard its Maitreya passage as a later addition, since Metteyya is rarely named anywhere else in the Pāli discourses, and the relative dating of the canon's layers is itself contested.

The Saoshyant and the End of Time

The word begins modestly. Avestan saošiiaṇt is a future participle of a verb meaning "to benefit" or "to strengthen," so that the term means something like "one who will bring benefit," and in the Gāthās, the hymns attributed to Zarathustra himself, it refers to the prophet and to those who carry his work forward. One Gāthic stanza speaks of saošiiaṇtō daxiiunąm, "the benefactors of the lands" (Yasna 48.12), in the plural, as a company of human helpers rather than a single figure of the end.

By the time of the Zamyād Yašt, a hymn of the later Avesta, the word has narrowed and grown at once. The hymn foretells a savior called Astvat.ərəta, "he who embodies truth," who will come forth from the waters of Lake Kąsaoiia and bring about frašō.kərəti, the "making wonderful" of existence, when the dead rise, the living cease to age or decay, and the Lie is driven from the world (Yašt 19.89–96). The lake is usually identified with the Hāmūn in Sistan, on the present border between Iran and Afghanistan, a marshy basin that floods and shrinks with the seasons. I have never seen it, and in photographs it looks less like the cradle of a world savior than like a place where cattle go to drink.

The Pahlavi books, compiled in the ninth century CE, give the full scheme. World history runs for twelve thousand years, and in its final three millennia three saviors are born at thousand-year intervals, Ušēdar, Ušēdarmāh and Sōšāns, each conceived when a maiden bathes in the lake where the seed of Zarathustra has been miraculously preserved. Sōšāns, the last, raises the dead. Then comes the final ordeal, in which the metal of the mountains melts and flows over the earth as a river through which every person must pass; to the righteous it feels like warm milk, and to the wicked like what it is (Bundahišn 34). Evil is destroyed, and the world returns to the perfection in which it was first created.

The Saoshyant is the purest case of linear expectation in this comparison. History has a beginning, a fixed length and an end, and the savior's task is to close it rather than to repair it for another round. The figure is also wholly human, a descendant of the prophet born of a virgin mother, and in no sense a god descending into flesh. Even here the scheme contains a small echo of repetition, since three saviors arrive in sequence before the last one completes the work, but the sequence runs in one direction and stops.

The difficulty for comparison lies in the dates. The Gāthās are old, possibly from the late second millennium BCE, though estimates range across many centuries; the Zamyād Yašt is younger and hard to date; and the Pahlavi books that supply the vivid details were compiled under Islamic rule, some eight centuries after the Gospels. Mary Boyce argued that the essentials of Zoroastrian eschatology were ancient and that the Pahlavi books preserve them faithfully (A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1, 1975). Her critics answer that a ninth-century compilation cannot by itself establish what Persians believed in the sixth century BCE, and that some details may even reflect contact with Jews, Christians and Muslims. Neither side can settle the matter from the texts that survive.

Jesus, Who Descends and Returns

I owe the reader a correction before going further. In early notes for this essay I treated "liberation of the oppressed" as a modern gloss on Jesus, imported from twentieth-century liberation theology, and that judgment was too quick. Luke places the idea in Jesus' own mouth at the synagogue in Nazareth, where he reads from the scroll of Isaiah that he has been sent κηρύξαι αἰχμαλώτοις ἄφεσιν ... ἀποστεῖλαι τεθραυσμένους ἐν ἀφέσει, "to proclaim release to captives ... to send the crushed away in release" (Luke 4:18, joining Isaiah 61:1 and 58:6). The language of release is Isaianic, drawn from the jubilee laws of the Jewish scriptures Jesus read aloud, which gives it a far older pedigree than the one I had assumed.

The earliest summary of his message, in Mark, is shorter and stranger: πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, "the appointed time has been fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near" (Mark 1:15). The sentence belongs to the world of Jewish apocalyptic, in which history runs toward a decisive moment when God takes back the rule of the world from the powers that have usurped it. Mark's Jesus goes on to speak of the Son of Man "coming in clouds with great power and glory" (Mark 13:26), language drawn from Daniel's vision of one like a son of man who comes with the clouds of heaven to receive an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13–14). On this side of the tradition Jesus resembles the Saoshyant far more than he resembles Krishna, as a figure tied to the end of history, the judgment of the nations and the raising of the dead.

The other side came from a different direction. Within a generation of the crucifixion, Paul was quoting a hymn about a figure who existed "in the form of God" and emptied himself to take "the form of a slave" (Philippians 2:6–7), and by the end of the first century the Fourth Gospel could open with the claim that ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14). Here we have a descent from above, a divine being entering human life, and its company is Dionysus at the springs of Dirce and Krishna in the chariot, a long way from the Saoshyant coming up out of his lake.

The Letter to the Hebrews holds the two shapes together in a single passage. Christ, it says, has appeared νυνὶ δὲ ἅπαξ ἐπὶ συντελείᾳ τῶν αἰώνων, "now, once, at the culmination of the ages," to put away sin, and he will appear ἐκ δευτέρου, "a second time," to bring salvation to those who wait for him (Hebrews 9:26–28). The adverb ἅπαξ, "once," carries the weight. Krishna comes whenever dharma declines, whereas the Christ of Hebrews came a single time, at the hinge of the ages, and will come one further time to close them. Christianity thus took the descent of a god into history, which in India recurs with every age, and made it unrepeatable; and it took the Iranian and Jewish expectation of a final savior and attached it to the same person.

Which brings up an uncomfortable question. A tradition that fuses two shapes of salvation in one figure may be preserving one man's complex understanding of himself, or it may be preserving the seams where distinct traditions were joined. In my work on Christian origins I have argued that several foundational figures of the New Testament are composites assembled from distinct historical individuals. The comparative evidence gathered here does not prove that thesis, though it does show how readily the two savior types could be fitted onto a single name. The rabbi who announced that the kingdom had drawn near belongs comfortably within first-century Jewish expectation, while the preexistent being who took the form of a slave and the cosmic judge returning on the clouds come from idioms with long histories of their own, and the gospel tradition carries all three under one name without ever explaining how they came to share it.

Borrowed or Born Separately

The strongest case for transmission concerns Iran and Judaism. When Cyrus of Persia took Babylon in 539 BCE and allowed the exiled Judeans to return home, the prophet whose oracles fill the second half of Isaiah called him God's anointed, məšîḥô, "his messiah" (Isaiah 45:1), the only foreign king in the Hebrew Bible to receive that title. For two centuries afterward Judea was a province of an empire whose kings honored Ahura Mazda, and in the Jewish writings of the following centuries ideas appear that the older scriptures had barely entertained: an organized hierarchy of angels and demons, a cosmic adversary, a resurrection of the dead and a final judgment. The resurrection surfaces unmistakably in Daniel 12:2, written around 164 BCE, where many of those sleeping in the land of dust will wake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting abhorrence.

Norman Cohn argued in Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come (1993) that the Zoroastrian vision of a world moving toward final renovation supplied the basic shape of Jewish and then Christian apocalyptic, and Boyce made the same case from the Iranian side. The argument is strong in outline and weak in its documents, because the Iranian texts that would prove the borrowing are either too terse, as with the Gāthās, or too late, as with the Pahlavi books, to establish priority by themselves. Nobody has produced a text in which a Jewish author can be seen reading a Zoroastrian one. What can be shown is two centuries of proximity, a fairly sudden appearance of matching ideas, and the lack of a better explanation, which together make a reasonable inference that stops short of proof.

For India the case is weaker still. The name Maitreya derives from maitrī, "friendliness" or "loving-kindness," and some scholars have proposed a link with the Indo-Iranian god Mitra, Avestan Mithra, whose name shares the same root, while others reply that the Buddhist etymology needs no Iranian help. The likely setting for any exchange would be the northwest of the subcontinent, where Gandhāra under the Kushan kings of the first to third centuries CE mixed Iranian, Indian and Greek traditions, and where Maitreya became a favorite subject of Buddhist sculpture. Whether proximity there produced borrowing, and in which direction, cannot be decided from the surviving evidence, and the Kālacakra case noted earlier shows Hindu and Buddhist savior traditions trading material as late as the eleventh century.

The Greek evidence opens a third possibility, and an odd one. Dionysus shows that the idea of a god entering human life in disguise was at home in Greece by the fifth century BCE without any Iranian or Indian source, and Alexander's campaigns later carried Greeks into the same northwestern borderlands. Arrian reports that near the Kabul River the Macedonians came upon a city called Nysa whose people claimed Dionysus as their founder (Anabasis 5.1–2), which means that the Greeks arrived in Gandhāra already convinced that their own wandering god had been there before them. A few of the resemblances among these traditions may be inherited and others borrowed, while some may reflect nothing more than the limited number of ways in which human beings can imagine the divine answering a world gone wrong. I doubt that every parallel will ever be sorted into its proper bin.

The God Who Comes for Our Sake

The question with which this study began, whether Krishna, Jesus, Maitreya and the Saoshyant express one human expectation, receives an easy affirmative at a distance and dissolves into qualifications on close inspection, which is why it makes a poor guide. The four figures differ in their relation to time, since two belong to turning worlds and two to worlds that end. They differ in nature as well, ranging from the Lord of all beings to a human Buddha to a prophet's descendant born of a virgin to a crucified teacher whom his followers came to call the Word made flesh. And they differ in what they come to accomplish.

The Bacchae supplies a better question. Euripides shows a god entering history in human form, suffering rejection, standing before a king's tribunal and prevailing, and the story carries no promise for anyone except those who worship him. Divine descent taken by itself is morally indifferent; a god may come down to rescue the world, or he may come down to avenge an insult to his mother. Cadmus objects that gods should be better than mortals in their anger, and the god answers with his father's decree.

Each of the four later traditions answers Cadmus in its own idiom. Krishna comes "for the protection of the good" and the firm establishing of dharma. Maitreya arrives in a world whose survivors have chosen to stop killing, and he teaches them a way out of suffering. The Saoshyant raises the dead and ends the reign of the Lie, and for the righteous the river of molten metal runs like warm milk. Jesus, in Luke's telling, reads Isaiah's promise of release to captives in a village synagogue, and in Paul's hymn he empties himself and takes the form of a slave. The pictures of time, of the savior's nature and of salvation itself diverge at every turn, yet each tradition insists that the divine comes down, or comes forward, for the sake of a suffering humanity, and that insistence, more than any shared image of a descending or returning figure, is the thread running through all four.

Whether the insistence arose separately in India, Iran and Judea, or passed among them along the roads of the Persian and Hellenistic worlds, remains an open question, and I have tried to mark the places where the evidence gives out. Something can still be said with confidence. In Athens in 405 BCE an audience watched a god in human form destroy a royal house to vindicate his own honor, and the play offered them no other kind of divine visitor. The traditions gathered here, some older than Euripides and some younger, each imagined the other kind, a god or a savior whose coming is measured by what it does for those who receive it. The Theban chorus sang that the god finds a way for the unexpected, and in the traditions that followed, the unexpected thing the divine found a way to do was to come for the sake of people who had no claim on it.

Works Cited

Boyce, Mary. A History of Zoroastrianism. Vol. 1, The Early Period. Leiden: Brill, 1975.

Buckley, Theodore Alois, trans. The Tragedies of Euripides. Vol. 1. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850. Revised text consulted in the Perseus Digital Library; original 1850 wording and Buckley's note on the repeated ending at Elpenor.

Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

MacDonald, Dennis R. The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.

Nattier, Jan. "The Meanings of the Maitreya Myth: A Typological Analysis." In Maitreya, the Future Buddha, edited by Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Primary texts (the Bhagavad Gītā, Mahābhārata, Manusmṛti, Dīgha Nikāya, Avesta, Bundahišn, Euripides, Arrian, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) are cited by standard book, chapter and verse or line numbers. Translations from the Sanskrit, Greek and Hebrew are my own unless otherwise noted.