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EPISTLE I, CHAPTER IV, 10-17.
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operating characteristics, just contention, and complete powerfulness. 14. Also from the teaching of just high-priests, through the preservation of much evidence, and ascertained for the members of the assemblies of various provinces (shatrô shatrô), are shown the opinion and experience of most priestly men; and to make the various districts (küstako küstako) thrivingly steadfast, an unperverted one should be set up in all four quarters (pâdkôs) of the same province.
15. And a semblance of it is apparent even from that which the glorified Nishahpuhar, the supreme officiating priest?, and also other officiating priests of Adharmazd have said, that one is not to change any teaching of theirs thereon after it is provided, and not to render useless the statements of other authority thereon. 16. But that which they should accept from them as a certainty is to maintain the statements of other high-priests as pre-eminent; and not to change the operation of statements of another description has appeared lawful. 17. Even so it was as that same Nishahpahar, in the council of the glorified (anôshako růbâng) Khusro?, king of
1 This môbad of môbads is mentioned in Pahl. Vend. III, 151, V, 112, VI, 71, VIII, 64, XVI, 10, 17, AV. I, 35, and twenty-four times in the Nîrangistân (see Sls. I, 4 n). His name is spelt in various ways.
* King Khůsto, son of Kavad, who is best known by his title Nôshirvan, or Anôshirvan, immortal-soulled,' reigned A.D. 531579; and the statement that Nishahpahar was one of his councillors (made little more than three centuries after his death, and, therefore, probably correct) is of considerable importance for fixing a limit to the age of those Pahlavi books in which he is mentioned. These books are the Pahlavi Nirangistân, a late recension of the Pahlavi Vendidad, and the Book of Arda-Viráf, in which last it is
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