The Saoshyant.
A future saviour born of a virgin who bathes in the lake where Zarathustra's seed is miraculously preserved, who will raise the dead and preside over the renovation. Whether Jewish and Christian messianism drew on this during the Persian period is argued about; the chronology makes it hard to rule out.
The Saoshyant scheme in its developed form has three future saviours, born at thousand-year intervals from the miraculously preserved seed of Zarathustra, each to a virgin who bathes in Lake Kansaoya; the last, Astvat-ereta, presides over the resurrection of the dead and the final renovation. Whether this influenced Jewish messianism and hence Christianity is one of the long-running arguments in the study of religion. The circumstantial case is substantial: the Judaeans were under Persian rule for two centuries after Cyrus, Cyrus is called God's anointed in Isaiah, and a cluster of ideas — a final judgment, bodily resurrection, an eschatological saviour, angels and demons in ordered ranks, a cosmic conflict — appears in Jewish texts of the Persian and Hellenistic periods with far less precedent in earlier Israelite material. The difficulty is dating the Zoroastrian sources, most of which survive in Middle Persian compilations written after the Islamic conquest, which makes proving direction of influence hard.
The same ground, other faiths
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