Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramæan motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out of the Zoroastrian religion of Achæmenid times and the remains of its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and confession (_patet_). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning with the collection and ordering of the _new_ Avesta; under Sapor I (as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine, law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a law-book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of the Persians, was--most significantly--preserved complete. A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This was Mani, who, rejecting “redeemerless” Judaism and Hellenism, knit together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful theological creations of all times--for which in 276 the Mazdaist priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in life abandoned his family to enter a Mandæan order) with all the knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity--a task which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.[442] He conceived of the mystical figures of the Johannine Logos (for him identical with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta legends, and the Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and himself he proclaimed to be the Paraclete of the John Gospel and the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now know, thanks to the Turfan discoveries which included parts of Mani’s works (till then completely lost), the Church-language of the Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians was--independently of the current languages--Pehlevi.