From Cyrus to Jesus via Daniel and the Magi: From the Septuagint to the Christian Apocrypha. An Intercultural Journey

Cyrus the Great, as the liberator of the Jewish people from the Babylonian captivity, and in his quality of first “promoter” of the reconstruction process of the temple of Jerusalem, was called in Deutero-Isaiah 41,3, “the Anointed” of the Lord. Thus, literally, and simply, Cyrus was a “Messiah” (maš iaü), a remarkable designation translated in the Septuaginta as that of Χριστός. Very simply, Cyrus and Jesus were two Χριστόι, and this connection was a matter of important speculations concerning a sort of translatio imperii from a human king to a divine one. The present article focuses on some narrations, attested in Greek, Slavonic and Arabic sources, concerning the active role of Cyrus as the king who sent his Magi to Jesus, a story which despite its anachronism, played an important role in the program of conversion of the Iranian lands to Christianity.