While it is generally recognized that the majority of the texts which survive in the Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) language were redacted in the ninth-tenth centuries CE, Zoroastrian priests continued to receive traditional educations in the Pahlavi language well into the nineteenth century. Though most Zoroastrian literary texts composed in Iran after the Mongol conquest were written in New Persian, learned priests continued sporadically to compose new texts in Pahlavi into the nineteenth century. Likewise, though Indian Zoroastrians had reportedly forgotten Pahlavi by the fifteenth century, the language was revived through contact with the Iranian priestly establishment such that Indian priests too came to compose new texts in Pahlavi. By the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for a single learned Iranian Zoroastrian priest not just to read but to author new texts in both Persian and Pahlavi. What purpose did Pahlavi, usually understood to be a ‘dead’ language, play as a language of creative composition alongside Persian for Zoroastrians? In this talk, I sketch out the history of the little-studied 'Late Pahlavi' literature within the context of what we know about Persianate Zoroastrian education. I discuss certain features related to the circulation, genre, and language of these texts. I argue that the heterolingualism of medieval and early modern Zoroastrianism allowed Zoroastrians to express different forms of religious subjectivity which were simultaneously part of an atemporal Zoroastrian tradition, while at the same time situated historically within the broader Persianate world. At the conclusion of this paper, I briefly consider the impact that European philology and the historicization of 'dead languages' has had upon Zoroastrian communities.