The “River of Fire” and the “River of Molten Metal”. A Historico-Theological Rafting Through the Rapids of the Christian and Mazdean Apokatastatic Falls

Most recent studies have independently focused on the Christian Origenist background for some images and doctrines concerning the final apokatastasis (frašgird) in the later Mazdean Pahlavi sources. This intellectual interaction must be considered in the light of the fact that Zoroastrian theology did not place doctrines, such as the apocalypse, chiliasm and apokatastasis, in mutual opposition as, on the contrary, it so happened in some Christian frameworks. The present study will be specifically dedicated to the comparison between the Iranian image of the “river of molten metal”, which will purify the wicked ones and destroy Hell, and the “river of fire”, already evoked in the second book of the Sibylline Oracles, in the Apocalypse of Peter, etc., but which will be later referred to by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and mentioned in Syriac literature of the Sasanian and post-Sasanian periods as well. The resonances and correspondences between these representations of the apokatastasis deserve a special investigation, and their similarity seems to imply a potential contact between the Eastern Syriac Christian culture and the Zoroastrian theological milieu. This work will also show that there is no compelling reason to postulate an ancestral Iranian origin for this mythological framework, whose basic assumptions mainly reflect theological speculations of Late Antiquity, although bi-directional exchanges took place in the course of time since the Achaemenian period.