A violent dispute broke out at once, as half the learned world denied the authenticity of this “Avesta,” which it pronounced a forgery.  It was the future founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, William Jones, a young Oxonian then, who opened the war.  He had been wounded to the quick by the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards Hyde and a few other English scholars:  the “Zend-Avesta” suffered for the fault of its introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil.  In a pamphlet written in French, with a verve and in a style which showed him to be a good disciple of Voltaire, William Jones pointed out, and dwelt upon, the oddities and absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed.  It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he had adopted:  he cared very little for literary elegance, and did not mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the new and strange ideas he had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he gave them.  Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the contemporary of Voltaire.  His main argument was that books, full of such silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, of descriptions of gods and demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor the code of a religion so much celebrated for its simplicity, wisdom, and purity.  His conclusion was that the “Avesta” was a rhapsody of some modern Guebre.  In fact, the only thing in which Jones succeeded was to prove in a decisive manner that the ancient Persians were not equal to the lumieres of the eighteenth century, and that the authors of the “Avesta” had not read the “Encyclopedie.”

Jones’s censure was echoed in England by Sir John Chardin and Richardson, in Germany by Meiners.  Richardson tried to give a scientific character to the attacks of Jones by founding them on philological grounds.  That the “Avesta” was a fabrication of modern times was shown, he argued, by the number of Arabic words he fancied he found both in the Zend and Pahlavi dialects, as no Arabic element was introduced into the Persian idioms earlier than the seventh century; also by the harsh texture of the Zend, contrasted with the rare euphony of the Persian; and, lastly, by the radical difference between the Zend and Persian, both in words and grammar.  To these objections, drawn from the form, he added another derived from the uncommon stupidity of the matter.

In Germany, Meiners, to the charges brought against the newly-found books, added another of a new and unexpected kind, namely, that they spoke of ideas unheard of before, and made known new things.  “Pray, who would dare ascribe to Zoroaster books in which are found numberless names of trees, animals, men, and demons, unknown to the ancient Persians; in which are invoked an incredible number of pure animals and other things, which, as appears from the silence of ancient writers, were never known, or at least never worshipped, in Persia?  What Greek ever spoke of Hom, of Jemshid, and of such other personages as the fabricators of that rhapsody exalt with every kind of praise, as divine heroes?”