Zoroaster scholars, philosophers, and theologians to test his knowledge on religion and jurisprudence. Among the summoned scholars was a Zoroastrian High Priest. Al-Ridha questioned the priest on his beliefs saying,“Tell me about Zoroaster, whom you claim is a prophet; what is your evidence for his Prophethood?” to which the response was “We did not see him, but the tales of our ancestors informed us that he had legalized for us what no other person before had made legal.” Imam Al-Ridha responded “This is the case with all other nations. Tales had come to them about what the prophets had accomplished, what
Zoroaster that it was a form of rational Deism, preferable to Christianity. Zoroaster was the subject of the 1749 opera, "Zoroastre", by Jean-Philippe Rameau. With the translation of the Avesta by Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, Western scholarship of Zoroastrianism began. An early 19th-century representation of Zoroaster derived from the portrait of a figure that appears in a 4th-century sculpture at Taq-e Bostan in south-western Iran. In E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel "" (1819), the mage Prosper Alpanus states that Professor Zoroaster was his teacher. In his seminal work "Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)" (1885) the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche uses the native Iranian