Zoroaster prophecy that saw a return of Sassanid emperor Bahram: Shoghi Effendi also stated that Zoroaster lived roughly 1000 years before Jesus. The Greeks—in the Hellenistic sense of the term—had an understanding of Zoroaster as expressed by Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Agathias that saw him, at the core, to be the "prophet and founder of the religion of the Iranian peoples," Beck notes that "the rest was mostly fantasy". Zoroaster was set in the ancient past, six to seven millennia before the Common Era, and was described as a king of Bactria or a Babylonian (or teacher of Babylonians), and with
Zoroaster and myths. Zoroaster's name in his native language, Avestan, was probably "Zaraϑuštra". His English name, "Zoroaster", derives from a later (5th century BCE) Greek transcription, "Zōroastrēs" (), as used in Xanthus's "Lydiaca" (Fragment 32) and in Plato's "First Alcibiades" (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin "" and, in later Greek orthographies, as Ζωροάστρις "Zōroastris". The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic transliteration or semantic substitution of Avestan "zaraϑ-" with the Greek ζωρός "zōros" (literally "undiluted") and the Avestan "-uštra" with ἄστρον "astron" ("star"). In Avestan, "Zaraϑuštra" is generally accepted to derive from