1
Flawless Morality
A perfect religion should be grounded in flawless moral values, like supporting animal rights, gender equality and same-sex-marriage and clearly condemning slavery, racism and sexual abuse.
Torturing someone for all eternity who has never heard about your faith isn't morally acceptable, there's actually nothing that would ever justify doing so much harm.
2
Encourage Critical Thinking
Many religions make you choose to 'believe' and reject critical thinking, logic and reasoning, but these are the things we use for working out what's right and what's not. How else would you determine that you're correct, if not by questioning your viewpoint?
3
Explain The World We See
Many religions claim there's one omnipotent and inherently good god, but the world we see is not what we'd expect from such a deity. A perfect religion would have to explain why all this death, harm and chaos exist in our world.
4
Contain Relvant Information
A holy book should contain relevant information, rather than just a bunch of horrendous stories about people that may or may not be part of a raiding tribe.
How about containing clearly structured information regarding how to become a better person and how to build a peaceful society?
5
Exist Since Ancient Times
Shure, we could simply make up a modern religion fitting these criteria, but then we would know it's made up. Why would a deity wait to reveal himself or herself until now?
6
Originate In Multiple Places
We wouldn't expect a perfect religion to be known to only one tribe for thousands of years but rather be present all around the world, even very long ago.
A good god doesn't simply choose a tribe at random and tell them they're superior to all the others. That's exactly the sort of thing that a tribe would make up to justify feeling superior.
7
Persist Throughout The Ages
We would expect the perfect religion to have always been one of the dominant ideologies. If a religion is right it surely must be popular and it also shouldn't change throughout history.
8
Prove It Wasn't Simply Made Up
Let's say the holy book would tell you about something so scientifically advanced that it couldn't have emerged from the ancient people who wrote it down.
Even if a new religion suddenly emerged with consistently Flawless Morality that Encouraged Critical Thinking, Contained Relevant Information and could Prove It Wasn't Made Up, it would still be a new religion and couldn't have existed for ages whilst being reasonably popular throughout history.
Otherwise you would already know about it, would you?
Origin Of The Ahura Yasna
The first holy book (which we call the the "Ahura Yasna") is known to the Zoroastirainis as the "Gathas". They claim that it originates in Persia where Darius I. popularized it, but there's a few reasons to conclude it's a lot older than that.
Accoding to Ammianus Marcellinus, Hystaspes, the Father of Darius, learnt about this faith from the Brahmans after traveling to upper India.
Those people may have belonged to the Ajivika faith since both them and Darius are constantly depicted with lotus flowers, one of the faiths that passed on this holy book alongside the Jains and Bhuddists (+ tisya = Tishtrya).
Indian Emperor Ashoka promoted the ideas of this book and we can see a strong connection between him and Darius in Dharma Holidays and the Zoroastrian Tishtrya.
At the time of Ashoka, there already were a couple of faiths based on this holy book, but most people didn't have access to the exact contents and so people started mixing in their own ideas.
Later Mazdak strived to restore the original faith whilst some of the core ideas of this religion became intrinsic parts of most of the popular modern religions.
However, clearly God had different objectives than having a large following of these exact teachings at all times.
Persian / Indus Valley Origins
Many other translators assumed the texts to be of Persian, not Indus Valley origins - as modern Zoroastirainism originated in Persia -, disregarding the histrorical linguistical evidence and connections. This results in many words being translated with their more modern Persian translation, rather than their older meaning. For example "Za rath ushtra" in persian would be "Zarath" = golden + "ushtra" = camel, but in India, "Za" means "leave", "rath" means "being with", and "Ushtra" means "buffalo". So depending on the presumed origin of the text the translation can change drastically sometimes.
Changes to match Peoples Ideas
When it comes to translating ancient text associated with a particular faith, the bias of the translators needs to be accounted for. Apparently some translations didn't like to have a "Bad God", and chose to interpret the texts differently to exclude that. Some seemed to dislike the occurence of "Dragons" in 11:6b. The word in the Aryan language is "Azim", it appears in many later Persian texts and always means "dragon", but clearly some translations appeared to dislike the magical connotation and excluded it. We've translated the word as "Dinosaurs", considering the literary context.
Religious Agendas
Zoroastrianism features a lot of ideas that have no basis in these texts, but Religions always like to interpret their modern views into ancient texts as proof of the validity of their faith.
For example: the "Gathas" often speak about, "wisdom", "compassion", "authority" and "strength". Modern Zoroastrians believe that God has six archanagles called the Amesha Spentas, the angel of wisdom, the angel of compassion, ...
Obviously such religious agendas lead to some translations drastrically misrepresenting the meaning of these words as angels rather than qualities of a person.
Some translations appear to dislike their myths and stories being contradicted by this book (like the story of Noah, where God destroys the world with water, but in the Persian Zoroastiran version god destroys the world with a long winter and Noah builds a big building for all the animals, instead of an ark). Zoroastrian translations obviously aren't particularly keen on their cultures legends to be contradicted, so they simply alter the translation to fit their preconcieved views. Interestingly this book speaks of this myth as being merely a justificating of a competing religion to justify animal suffering (See 3:8).
An easy way to test for this particular misrepresentation is to look at 3:9 / Yasna 32:9, where "apo" should be translated as "rain". If we look at 11:4 / Yasna 44:4 many of those translations will now happily translate "apo" correctly as "rain", prooving that this isn't merely a case of a preferring a certain translation for "apo".
Other translations clearly come from a more Christian background and choose to not translate "god of kindness" (leaving it as "spenta mainyu") to imply it's somehow related to the Christian "holy spirit" which is seprate from God.
How would we tell that this translation hasn't been altered to fit our modern values and scientific perspective?
This is certainly hard, as lots of religions and religious texts have changed quite a bit over the centuries. For example the Christian Old Testament (or Jewish Torah) have well known alterations that have popped up over time.
The only way we could verify our translation would be if history showed other people of the same faith having the same interpretation as we have, proving our translation to at least be consistent with what they believed.
Luckily there are people in history that had interpretations of this religious text that match our modern translation very closely.
Obviously this doesn't cover all the topics and no translation of an ancient text can claim to be completely accurate to the authors intent, but we've tried our best to do justice to the original and are continually working on improving the translation further.
What if there was another book that contained the same information from a different origin?
That would also help us verify that our translation is correct as it would be very unlikely to make the same mistakes when translating from an entirely different language.
And yet... this is the case!
On some topics the ancient chinese translation of the Dao De Jing is almost word-for-word identical.
As soon as that translation is up to our standards we'll publish it's contents here.
The Issue of Word Endings
One difficulty with the translation of this book is that most words have word endings, that specify the tense, actor, gender or grammatical case, to further clarify the meaning of the word. The original language this book was written in was hieroglyphic though, so no such word endings could have existed, as there are no dots or lines indicating further specification:
When the book was later translated into Old-Avestian from the Indus Valley hyroglphys the interpretation of the person doing the translation was captured in the word endings. It's hard to make a final judgement on these word endings, as sometimes they're clearly supporting the meaning of these words and the person doing the translation must have had much better knowledge of the original language than we have today, however, sometimes the word endings appear to be somewhat biased and don't necessarily support the translation. For the current iteration of this translation, we've mostly ignored the word endings, but have yet to do another pass, looking at each word ending individually and deciding weather further meaning can be derived from it.
Who made this Translation?
Every translation is the work of many people over hundreds of years. Since the book was orignaly found in India, a lot of different people have strived to understand and decode its language. Each person worked on the foundation of those beforehand and tried to eliminate mistakes whereever they could. Eventully modern discoveries proved that the book did not come from Persia and cleared up a lot of difficulties people had with translating the book over the centuries.When was this Book orginaly written?
Some say the Indus Valley civilization was 4500 years ago, Indian Scientists have carbon-dated it at between 6000 to 8000 years ago. It lasted for around 2000 to 3000 years, and we don't know more about the exact timeframe where Zarathushtra lived during this period. Taking all these things into consideration, the book was written some time between 5000 and 8000 years ago.Preservation
Many holy books have changed over time. When we look at changes made to the Bible, we find some stories are added - like the women caught in adultery (John 8:1-8). Other times authors exaggerate, for example the giant goliath in the original is 7 feet tall, but in modern versions he is 10 feet tall. Even the prophet Jeremiah in the bible complains that dishonest scribes are changing the bible (Jeremiah 8:8). Early Islamic authors often quote verses of the Quran that no longer exist in the modern Quran or they quote them differently highlighting that there must have been changes over time. Most sayings of Buddah clearly originate much later than the original teachings, yet are widely accepted by the Buddhists as coming from him.Therefore one would assume this holy book to be no different in this regard, however, there are good reasons to think otherwise:
Although, Zoroastrians have been looking after these scriptures for the last 2500 years, in the case of Christianity and Islam the respective holy books were in languages that the people understood. But this book was kept an ancient Aryan language, which no one in Persia could read. The people would often chant this book as though it were a magic spell without literary meaning. So there was little incentive to change anything about the texts and even if people wanted to change the texts, they would not have been able to because they did not know the languge particularly well. Instead of changing these texts in the original languge they wrote commentaries of what they thought the ancient book said, which - in fact - changed quite often, but the original writings remained untouched.
Earlier Preservation
Since we're fairly certain that the book hasn't changed in Persian times, changes would've originated during the early Mazdian or Ajivikan periods. However, the other teachings of those faiths were filled with magic stories, talking fish, giant snakes, gods with magic swords, monkey gods, elephant gods, dancing blue faced gods with many arms and many faces, etc. Babylonians and Egyptians had similar ideas, as did every other religious writing from that time period. The reason why we belive that this text has been divinely protected from change is because it is the only "non magic story" text that exists from that time period. If these cultures had modified the texts, we would expect those magical ideas throughout the changes. There are in fact later stories that Zoroastrians attribute to the "Gathas" (i.e. worshipping a magical fish) that clearly state that they're later than Zarathushtra and tell unrelated made-up magical stories. As both the literary context of the texts and the authors themselves clearly reject the idea of being part of this book, we've obviously excluded them from this translation.Belief of Reduction
Some scholars believe, that one line has gone missing from the text; citing the fact that 13:15 has only 19 words, but all other verses in the chapter have between 25 and 30 words. Similarly, such statistics also point out, that 15:6 is too long, as it has 32 words, which leads some to conclude that it may have been two verses with missing pieces, that the author may have combined.We reject this interpretation, as the actual contents of the verses don't show any irregularities. However, just to cite the bare statistics, here are the number of words per verse in chapters 13 and 15, so you can arrive at your own statistical interpretation of those figures:
Chapter 13:
26, 28, 24, 32, 27, 27, 29, 25, 29, 30, 26, 25, 27, 25,
Chapter 15:
25, 25, 25, 28, 26,
What did the original transcripts look like?
As the book orginated from the Indus Valley, it must've used their hieroglyphic writing to share and preserve the texts. Sadly, so far we haven't found any original manuscripts, but we can imagine what such a transcript would've looked like, from other bronze plates found in the Indus Valley.
The plate appears to depict Yima, the Indus Valley version of Noah / Ut-napishtim with crossed legs and his usual hat alongside some sort of cup and a plant. He appears to be accompanied by 31 hieroglyphs, which is similar to the number of words in the verses of this book (although it's unclear how they were translated from their earlier hieroglyphic form, where words may have been added or removed depending on language properties). However, this may depict the usual way of representing writings in this culture. If that were the case, that would explain why the book sometimes doesn't disclose who's speaking in some verses, which would be very obvious if originally accompanied by a drawing of the speaker. There's a chance that different lines represented different sentences, and no clear symbols to subdivide the text into smaller sentences or phrases. This is a feature the language appears to share with the non-hieroglyphic translations, making it sometimes difficult to clearly denote where one phrase begins and anotherone ends. Usually alternative interpretations are somewhat nonsensical, but in some cases this poses quite a challenge in interpreting a verse correctly. Obviously it wouldn't be particularly wise to draw too many conclusions from such a small sample size, but it invites to explain some of the shortcomings of the preserved texts.