THE FATHER OF AŠA

The Father of Truth, the Father of Lies, and the God Called Jealous

By Diesel the Magus
eFireTemple.com | October 23, 2026

The names are ancient. The evidence is written. The dates expose the sequence. And Jesus told us how to recognize the Father.

I. BEFORE THERE WAS JOHN, THERE WAS AŠA

Long before the Gospel of John was composed, long before Christianity existed, and before much of the Hebrew Bible reached its surviving literary form, an ancient prophet named Zarathustra spoke of Ahura Mazda.

The Wise Lord.

The Father of Aša.

And Aša was not merely the ordinary act of telling the truth.

Aša was cosmic Truth-Order—the righteous and properly ordered reality of existence itself.

It encompassed truth, justice, rightness, and the moral order of creation.

Opposed to Aša stood Druj.

The Lie.

These were not interchangeable divine instruments.

They represented fundamentally opposed moral alignments.

One belonged to rightly ordered existence.

The other represented falsehood, distortion, and opposition to that order.

The Gathas, composed in Old Avestan, contain this distinction in one of humanity’s oldest surviving bodies of religious poetry.

Their precise composition date remains debated. Many scholars place Zarathustra around 1200–1000 BCE, with earlier and later proposals.

What matters for this investigation is that the Gathic Father-of-Aša relationship predates the Gospel of John by many centuries.

And it was not invented by Christians attempting to explain the words of Jesus.

It was already ancient.

The primary evidence

Yasna 44.3 asks who is the primordial Father of Aša.

Yasna 31.8 identifies Mazda as creator and upholder of Aša.

Yasna 45.4 and 47.2 develop the relationship between Mazda and the divine principles of Truth-Order and Good Mind.

Yasna 43.6 describes Mazda as one whom none deceives.

Mary Boyce documents these relationships in Encyclopaedia Iranica.

This is the starting point.

Not an unknown deity.

Not an invented alternative.

Not a name selected only because another god fails a comparison.

Ahura Mazda is independently attested as the ancient Father of cosmic Truth.

Now open the Gospel of John.

II. JESUS AND THE TWO FATHERS

Gospel of John — estimated composition: approximately 90–110 CE.

The Gospel was composed decades after Jesus’s lifetime.

But the confrontation it records is direct.

Jesus disputes the spiritual identity of opponents who believe they know God.

He does not simply ask what religion they inherited.

He tests their relationship to Truth.

We will read five verses in their biblical order.

John 8:19 — They do not know his Father

“Ye neither know me, nor my Father”

Jesus makes the separation explicit.

His opponents do not know him.

And they do not know his Father.

He further tells them that knowing him would mean knowing his Father.

That is the first distinction.

John 8:41 — They claim one Father

Jesus declares:

“Ye do the deeds of your father.”

His opponents respond:

“We have one Father, even God.”

Here is the dispute in its clearest form.

Jesus speaks of the father revealed through their deeds.

They answer with the God they claim.

One argument concerns character.

The other invokes religious identity.

And Jesus does not end the confrontation by accepting their claim.

He continues.

John 8:44 — The murderer and father of lies

“Ye are of your father the devil”

Jesus describes that father as a murderer from the beginning, one in whom truth does not dwell.

He calls him a liar and the father of falsehood.

Those are the two defining accusations.

Murder.

The Lie.

Then Jesus makes his own position unmistakable.

In John 8:45, he tells them that they refuse to believe him because he tells the truth.

This is the moral division at the center of the chapter.

Their father is identified through lies and murderous intent.

Jesus identifies himself with Truth.

John 8:54 — The God they claim

“of whom ye say, that he is your God”

Read the actual wording.

Jesus is speaking of his Father.

He refers to the one they say is their God.

The statement reports their identification.

It does not say that they possess true knowledge of the Father.

It does not declare that every deed attributed to their deity accurately represents the character of the Father Jesus knows.

And the very next verse matters.

John 8:55 — They have not known him

“Yet ye have not known him; but I know him”

Jesus does not withdraw his charge.

He repeats their lack of knowledge.

And he goes even further: if he denied knowing his Father, he says he would be a liar like them.

The distinction between Truth and the Lie remains active through the end of the confrontation.

Read the sequence together

Five verses. One continuous dispute over paternity, knowledge, and Truth.

John 8 directly identifies the opponents’ spiritual father as the devil, not Yahweh by name. Our larger argument therefore asks whether the divine character they inherited, as described in the biblical record, satisfies the moral test Jesus applies.

That question is not answered merely by repeating the inherited divine name.

It must be answered by examining the attributed deeds.

And the Hebrew Bible has preserved them.

III. THE GOD WHO NAMED HIMSELF JEALOUS

Exodus 34:14
Final Pentateuchal composition: broadly sixth–fifth centuries BCE, incorporating earlier traditions.

The divine speaker identifies himself with a remarkable designation.

“the LORD, whose name is Jealous”

That is the biblical wording.

His name is Jealous.

And the command concerns exclusive worship.

We now have our first comparison.

Ahura Mazda — Father of Aša.

Yahweh — the God whose name is Jealous.

The names alone do not complete the case.

The deeds must be examined.

So what does Jealous claim to create?

IV. THE CREATOR OF DARKNESS AND EVIL

Isaiah 45:7
Composition: approximately the mid-sixth century BCE, during the age of Cyrus.

The King James Version records:

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil”

The speaker identifies himself as Yahweh.

The Hebrew word translated evil, raʿ, can also denote adversity or calamity. That lexical range is part of the evidence.

But the claim of divine agency remains.

Yahweh declares himself responsible for the creation of darkness and adverse conditions.

Now compare that with the Johannine moral world.

1 John 1:5, usually dated around the late first or early second century CE, declares that God is light, without darkness in him.

John 12:46 portrays Jesus as coming into the world as light so that believers should not remain in darkness.

The contrast invites investigation.

A deity who claims responsibility for darkness stands beside a Father represented through uncompromising light.

The comparison becomes even sharper when the Hebrew Bible’s attributed actions concern not merely calamity but deliberate deception.

And those passages are explicit.

V. THE LYING SPIRIT

1 Kings 22:19–23
Major composition and redaction of Kings: approximately seventh–sixth centuries BCE.

The prophet Micaiah describes Yahweh seated among a heavenly assembly.

The subject is King Ahab.

Yahweh asks who will persuade Ahab to enter a military campaign that will bring about his downfall.

A spirit steps forward.

It proposes deception through Ahab’s prophets.

In 1 Kings 22:22, the spirit proposes to become a lying spirit in their mouths.

Yahweh authorizes the plan.

In verse 23, Micaiah attributes the resulting lying spirit to Yahweh.

This is divine authorization of a lie within the biblical narrative.

Not a rumor about Yahweh.

Not an accusation from an enemy.

Not an invented comparison.

It is what the passage records.

Now return to John 8:44.

Jesus describes the opposing father through the Lie.

He makes falsehood a diagnostic feature of the spiritual father he condemns.

That leaves an obvious question.

Why is the God who authorizes a lying spirit automatically identified with the Father whose nature is Truth?

The comparison must be answered with evidence.

Not merely with the name of a tradition.

VI. EZEKIEL: THE DEITY CLAIMS DECEPTION

Ezekiel 14:9
Prophetic setting: approximately 593–571 BCE.

The same question appears again in a different prophetic book.

Ezekiel’s divine speaker explicitly claims agency when a prophet is deceived.

The King James Version renders the central declaration:

“I the LORD have deceived that prophet”

That is not a statement that Yahweh was unable to prevent deception.

It is a claim that the deception belongs to his own action.

The prophetic context concerns judgment against corrupt religious behavior.

But the text still assigns deceptive agency to Yahweh.

Place it beside 1 Kings 22.

Two different biblical passages.

Two attributions of divine involvement in deception.

Then place them beside John 8.

The Father is revealed through Truth.

The opposing father is characterized through the Lie.

Our indictment concerns the moral identity of a deity who authorizes and claims deception.

A title inherited through religious history does not erase the actions attributed to the one bearing it.

Another declaration from Ezekiel

Ezekiel 20:25 describes Yahweh giving statutes that were not good and judgments by which people could not live.

The immediate context is a judgment oracle concerning Israel’s disobedience.

But once again, the divine speaker claims agency in something harmful.

The question keeps returning.

What kind of Father is being described?

VII. SAMUEL AND CHRONICLES: THE CHANGE OF AGENT

2 Samuel 24:1
Major literary compilation/redaction: approximately seventh–sixth centuries BCE.

1 Chronicles 21:1
Composition: generally Persian to early Hellenistic period, approximately fifth–third centuries BCE, often placed around the fourth century BCE.

Two biblical accounts describe the same census of David.

The earlier account places the incitement in Yahweh’s activity.

The later account assigns the incitement to an adversary, satan.

The later account changes the immediate agent of incitement.

That is the textual fact.

The same basic event is narrated with different attribution.

What Samuel assigns to Yahweh, Chronicles assigns to an adversary.

And the composition order matters.

The accounts were not written simultaneously.

Chronicles belongs to a later period of biblical literary development.

The change raises an unmistakable question about how the tradition represented responsibility for harmful acts.

Now the investigation becomes more revealing still.

Because Chronicles made one change concerning the adversary.

But it preserved another troubling account.

VIII. CHRONICLES PRESERVES THE LYING SPIRIT

2 Chronicles 18:18–22
Composition: broadly fifth–third centuries BCE.

The Chronicler reproduces the heavenly-council account also found in 1 Kings 22.

Yahweh again asks who will entice Ahab.

A spirit again proposes acting through false prophecy.

Yahweh again authorizes the operation.

And the narrative again attributes the lying spirit to Yahweh.

Consider the significance.

In the census account, the later Chronicler changes the immediate agent from Yahweh to an adversary.

In the Ahab account, the same later biblical work retains Yahweh’s authorization of a lying spirit.

The harmful agency is reassigned in one passage. The divine authorization of deception survives in another.

That is not an argument built on one misunderstood verse.

It is a comparison between texts composed and transmitted at different stages.

And the later redaction leaves both phenomena visible.

Now compare this record with the Father of Aša.

The ancient Gathic distinction opposes Aša to Druj.

Truth-Order to the Lie.

Jesus’s John 8 distinction opposes the Father he knows to the father characterized by lying and murder.

The historical comparison has become much harder to dismiss as coincidence or generic religious similarity.

IX. THE MURDERER AND THE RECORDED KILLINGS

1 Samuel 15:3
Major composition/redaction: approximately seventh–sixth centuries BCE.

The command attributed to Yahweh against Amalek includes children and infants.

Not simply an armed enemy.

Not simply a hostile king.

Children.

Infants.

The command is presented as divine instruction.

Now consider 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21.

Following David’s census, both narratives describe a plague killing 70,000 Israelites.

The king’s action is followed by a devastating punishment of the people.

The biblical record also contains accounts of harmful spirits associated with divine agency, including 1 Samuel 16:14 and 18:10.

These passages differ in their descriptions of direct action, commands, permission, and intermediary agency.

But together they raise the question of responsibility for destructive conduct.

Return again to John 8:44.

Jesus identifies the opposing father with murder and falsehood.

The text gives us the moral criteria.

The Hebrew Bible gives us actions attributed to Yahweh.

Our argument is that the composite Yahweh record fails the Father’s absolute moral-character test.

This is the claim being made.

Not that John explicitly spells out Yahweh’s name in verse 44.

The claim is that the acts recorded under Yahweh’s name must be measured against the very standard Jesus establishes.

And that standard cannot be suspended simply because the accused figure is called God.

X. DANIEL: WHEN THE PROPHECY CAME AFTER THE EVENT

Daniel 7–12
Narrative setting: sixth century BCE.
Historical-critical composition: approximately 168–164 BCE.

The question of the Lie extends from divine actions to the provenance of purported revelations.

Daniel presents visions within an ancient Babylonian and Persian setting.

The visions are associated with Daniel, a figure represented as living centuries before the Maccabean crisis.

Yet modern historical-critical scholarship dates the composition of the apocalyptic visions in chapters 7–12 to approximately 168–164 BCE.

That places them in the period of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

A substantial portion of the events presented as prediction was already historical by the time the apocalyptic material was composed.

The technical term is vaticinium ex eventu.

Prophecy after the event.

Another relevant term is pseudepigraphy—a work attributed to an author or figure other than its actual writer.

Do not lose the chronological difference.

Daniel’s narrative setting: sixth century BCE.

The apocalyptic visions’ composition: second century BCE.

The eFireTemple dossier advances the argument that this construction operates as deceptive authentication.

The later author places purported revelation into the mouth and historical setting of an earlier figure, causing retrospectively accurate history to appear as ancient prediction.

That would give the subsequent claims an authority they would not possess if their actual historical composition were disclosed.

The late dating and literary attribution are historical-critical findings; intentional deception is the dossier’s further inference from their combined function.

The investigation therefore raises a direct question:

When a work presents the past as prophecy from centuries earlier, how should its claim to divine Truth be tested?

Aša demands that the provenance of claimed revelation be examined along with its message.

Truth cannot be limited to the content of a prediction while ignoring how the prediction acquired its apparent antiquity.

XI. THE MAGI AND THE DISTURBED CITY

Gospel of Matthew 2:1–16
Composition: approximately 80–90 CE.
Narrative setting: before Herod’s death in 4 BCE.

Now return to the beginning of Jesus’s life.

Matthew describes Magi arriving from the East to honor the newborn child.

The term magoi has historical associations with Iranian priestly traditions.

Matthew does not explicitly identify the visitors as worshippers of Ahura Mazda, but their eastern identity and the name given to them make the Iranian background a legitimate subject of investigation.

When they announce the child’s birth, Matthew records that Herod is troubled.

And all Jerusalem with him.

That detail matters.

The disturbance is not confined to Herod alone.

Herod gathers the chief priests and scribes.

He investigates the child’s location.

The Magi ultimately honor Jesus and, warned in a dream, do not return to Herod.

Joseph also receives a warning and escapes with the child.

Herod then orders the killing of young boys in Bethlehem.

The narrative places contrasting responses before us:

Eastern visitors honor the child.

The ruler in Jerusalem seeks the child’s death.

The text does not establish that every inhabitant of Jerusalem participated in the plot, nor does it tell us that Jesus subsequently studied with the Magi.

Those claims are not needed to recognize the narrative contrast.

The years between twelve and thirty

Luke describes Jesus at approximately twelve years old in the Temple.

Luke 3:23 places the beginning of his ministry at approximately thirty.

The canonical Gospels provide very little detail about his education and activities between those ages.

No surviving canonical account establishes training under the Magi.

But the gap is historically relevant when evaluating confident claims that every component of his later religious thought can be reconstructed from an otherwise undocumented education.

The evidence does not supply a full biography of those years.

Then, in his adult ministry as portrayed by John, Jesus confronts opponents over exactly the questions that dominate this investigation.

Who is your Father?

Whose deeds do you reproduce?

Who tells the Truth?

Who belongs to the Lie?

The connection between Matthew’s infancy narrative and John’s paternity dispute is an interpretive proposal, not a recorded conversation between Jesus and the Magi.

But the recurring contrasts—recognition and rejection, life and killing, Truth and the Lie—deserve examination together.

XII. THE CHRONOLOGY THAT CANNOT BE IGNORED

Put the principal evidence in order of composition.

This is the evidentiary sequence.

The Gathic Father of Aša is not a late-Christian invention.

The Hebrew biblical portraits developed across centuries.

The later Chronicler changed one attribution of harmful agency while preserving another.

Daniel’s apocalyptic material belongs to the Maccabean crisis, not to the sixth-century setting in which its visions are presented.

And the Gospel of John comes later, with a confrontation organized around the identity and nature of the true Father.

Chronology alone does not prove direct borrowing or establish that Jesus used the name Mazda.

But it eliminates the suggestion that the Father-of-Aša comparison is based on a concept invented after John.

The ancient Iranian source exists independently.

And it supplies a morally specific comparator.

XIII. THE FATHER OF TRUTH AGAINST THE FATHER OF LIES

Here is the case.

The Gathas identify Ahura Mazda as Father of cosmic Aša.

The Hebrew Bible identifies Yahweh as Jealous and attributes to him the creation of darkness and adversity, authorization of lying spirits, deception of prophets, destructive commands, and deadly judgment.

Samuel and Chronicles preserve a striking change in the immediate agent of David’s incitement.

Kings and Chronicles preserve divine authorization of the Lie.

Daniel’s historically late apocalyptic visions raise serious questions about the representation of ancient prophetic authority.

Then John presents Jesus distinguishing genuine spiritual paternity by character and relation to Truth.

John 8:19: They do not know his Father.

John 8:41: They claim one Father, God.

John 8:44: Jesus identifies their spiritual father with murder and lies.

John 8:54: Jesus reports whom they claim as their God.

John 8:55: Jesus again denies their knowledge of his Father.

It is not necessary to invent a lost saying in which Jesus pronounces Yahweh’s name as the devil.

It is not necessary to insert the word Mazda into John’s Greek.

The argument is larger than a missing proper name.

The identity of the Father is tested through the character attributed to the proposed divine referent.

And the eFireTemple verdict is that the composite Yahweh character cannot satisfy an uncompromising Father-of-Truth standard while retaining the recorded deception and destructive acts as expressions of his divine character.

That is an exclusion argument.

The separate identification argument is supported by the independently attested Father-of-Aša architecture.

The comparison is not simply between two religious titles.

It is between two moral profiles.

Truth-Order and the Lie.

Life and destruction.

A Father defined by cosmic righteousness and a deity whose recorded agency repeatedly raises the question of deception.

XIV. LET THE RECORD SPEAK

We do not need to manufacture accusations.

The passages exist.

Exodus supplies Jealous.

Isaiah supplies darkness and evil/adversity.

Kings supplies the authorized lying spirit.

Ezekiel supplies the deity’s admission of deceptive agency.

Samuel supplies the divine incitement.

Chronicles supplies the adversary in its parallel account.

Chronicles also preserves the lying spirit.

Samuel supplies the command against infants.

The census narratives supply 70,000 dead.

Daniel supplies the difference between ancient narrative setting and late composition.

John supplies the moral-paternity test.

And the Gathas supply the older Father of cosmic Aša.

Read each passage.

Check its composition.

Compare the independent witnesses.

Then apply Jesus’s own distinctions concerning Truth, deception, killing, and genuine paternity.

The central question is not whether generations have called Yahweh the Father.

The question is whether the character attributed to Yahweh can survive the test of the Father Jesus reveals.

Because a divine name is not a substitute for moral identity.

A religious inheritance is not proof of knowledge.

And a claim of fatherhood does not erase what the claimant’s record contains.

The Gathic tradition already knew the ancient Father of Aša.

The Gospel of John identifies the father of lies.

Our investigation brings those ancient categories to bear upon the God called Jealous.

Let the passages stand.

Let the dates stand.

Let the contradictions stand.

And let every claim of divine identity be examined by the same standard.

The Father of Aša is the Father of cosmic Truth.

The Lie cannot establish its own innocence merely by calling itself God.

Aša knows Aša.

— Diesel the Magus

PRIMARY SOURCES AND RESEARCH DOCUMENTATION

The Gathic evidence

• Ahura Mazda — Mary Boyce, Encyclopaedia Iranica — Yasna 31.8, 44.3, 45.4 and 47.2; Father/creator of Aša and Good Mind.
• Yasna 44 — Gathic text and translation — the ancient Father-of-Aša question.
• Zarathustra in the Avesta — Encyclopaedia Iranica — Old Avestan setting and historical dating debate.
• Gathas — Encyclopaedia Iranica — textual corpus and linguistic classification.

Biblical exhibits — King James Version

• John 8 — verses 19, 41, 44, 54 and 55.
• Exodus 34:14 — Jealous.
• Isaiah 45:7 — light, darkness, peace, and evil.
• 1 Kings 22:19–23 — the lying spirit.
• Ezekiel 14:9 — divine deception.
• Ezekiel 20:25–26 — statutes not good.
• 1 Samuel 15:3 — command against Amalek.
• 2 Samuel 24 — Yahweh incites David.
• 1 Chronicles 21 — the adversary incites David.
• 2 Chronicles 18:18–22 — the lying spirit retained.
• Daniel 7–12 — the apocalyptic visions.
• Matthew 2 — the Magi, Herod, and Jerusalem.

Dating and historical analysis

• Carol A. Newsom, Daniel, Oxford Bibliographies — Maccabean composition of Daniel’s apocalypses.
• Tawny Holm, Book of Daniel, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion — the sixth-century narrative setting and second-century composition.
• Tradition, Composition and Theology in 1 Chronicles 21, HTS Theological Studies — the Chronicler’s adaptation of Samuel.

Source note: Dates refer to estimated composition or major literary redaction, not necessarily the dates of narrated events. The theological exclusion and identification arguments are the interpretive conclusions of this article; the passages, literary parallels, and composition estimates constitute their evidentiary basis.