Was Jesus, Paul, The Pharisees And Early Christianity Heavily Influenced By Zoroastrianism?

[exmormonatheistofutah]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9GN8CD1tUqg

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

http://www.iranchamber.com/religions/articles/secrets_of_zoroastrianism.php

http://zoroastrian.angelfire.com/

[volgadon]

Popular theory, but sufficiently problematic.

[Robert F. Smith]

https://www.youtube....d&v=9GN8CD1tUqg

http://en.m.wikipedi.../Zoroastrianism

http://www.iranchamb...oastrianism.php

http://zoroastrian.angelfire.com/

Would you like to summarize the main points which attracted your attention? Would you say that Judaism (and Bet Hillel) was heavily influenced by Persian dualism, and was this something that could not be found in the Bible, Book of Mormon, and in ancient Egypt, i.e., the doctrine of the Two Ways?

[exmormonatheistofutah]

Christianity does appear to be much more like zoroastrianism than 1000 bc Judeaism though. Back then the Jews didnt believe in much of an afterlife, the hollowness of Shoel, unlike the Zorastrians who beleived in a heavenly garden and a temporary hell. The Zoroastrian Persians had a very heavy impact on Judeaism as a matter of enabling them to rule. Look up the etymology for the title "pharisees" . They were persian Jews. A reason Jesus may have had so much conflict with them may because he was a reformer from within their ranks?

Edited August 9, 2013 by exmormonatheistofutah

[exmormonatheistofutah]

Here is a summary of similarities that I had written earlier on my facebook page, which I use to share various topics on science, religion, philosophy, and my outdoor adventures. If your a facebook user, go ahead and give me a friend request if you would like...just to give you some identity behind my posts here.

"Especially in Mormonism, the basic concepts of god, Satan, devils, angels, appointed prophets for dispensations of time, virgin birth, millenial peace ended in a final battle between good and evil (the Battle of Gog and Magog), premortally created spiritual copies of our tangible selves, life purpose, paradise and purgatory, universal resurrection, eventual universal salvation, temples, rusicrution inspired masonry from which aspects of temple ordinances derived, many biblical phrases....these are all apparently derived from Zoroastrianism. Even the white temple raiments look similar to those worn by Zoroastrians."

https://www.facebook...and?ref=tn_tnmn

Edited August 9, 2013 by exmormonatheistofutah

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

It's all the same stuff. People get fanatically nitpicky and try to separate religions into discrete, independent systems, but it's all coming from the same source, it's all just variations on a few themes with idiosyncratic emphases in different places. (Darwin's 'Lumpers vs. Splitters' problem, and the subjectively arbitrary value-judgments it entails.) I mean, let's get real here, the Qur'an is basically an offshoot of the Bible; Christianity is basically a sect of Judaism; Judaism is tied to Canaanism, Hebrew Wisdom lit is pretty much Egyptian; Protestants are jumping off of Catholicism, Aquinas is reacting to Aristotle who's reacting to Plato who's reacting to Pythagoreanism, and on and on back to prehistoric neolithic religion and bear cults and animism and shamanism and whatever else. Yeah, we can focus on the hair-splitting sectarian differences if we wanna, but at a certain point it just gets kinda blowhard-y. Who influenced who? They're all just branches off the same tree that have been pruned to look a little different. I like a lot of what Nibs has to say in one of his speeches, New Light On Israel And Her Neighbors (even if it's kinda dated now). Check it:

Hebrew relationships with Persia are quite close, and we go into this here somewhat, as in Gnostic connections. The Persians seem to have had an inside track on the gospel. They have all sorts of things, which don’t turn up in other ancient religions, whose records are older, but this is the point. It doesn’t originate with the Persians, but they just assimilated this stuff. There is hardly also a thing which doesn’t meet us again in the apocryphal literature of the Jews and Christians, in a form indicating more or less close association with Iran.

The demonology, the doctrine of angels, the resurrection, the asceticism, the war between light and darkness, the incarnate Word, the preexistence and return to the heavenly home, the heavenly glory with God the King of Kings, baptism, the pessimistic view of this life, the miracles, the martyrs, the prophecies, the apocalyptic visions, the secrets, the signs, the mysteries, each of these elements is at home in the Iranian religion.

They had all that stuff, you see, but you find it older among their neighbors. We don’t know where they got it from, or how long they had it. The prehistoric Persian year rite was equated by Gressman to the Christian Easter. The influence of Zoroaster is found to impregnate the philosophy of the Greeks, and Neoplatonism, and the Christians. Massive Iranian influence has been discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and hence in all the closely related writings of the pseudo-Clementines. Mullen notes how the movement represented by the Qumran community branches out to embrace Judaism, the swarming Baptist sects of the time, the Ebionites, Islam, and finally conventional Christianity. So it goes down the line. Tracing it, we trace clear back to Elam now, and the Mandeans. [...]

[i'll interject here a paragraph from Nibley's On The Sacred And The Symbolic: "There are two main centers of Gnostic teaching, the Iranian and the Syro-Egyptian, but in the end it all goes back to the popular traditions of Iran, Widengren concludes, and from it we get the Buddha, Mani, the Imam, the Manichaeans, Bogomils, Cathari, Baptists, Rosicrucians, Bohemists, Masons, Swedenborgians, and others."]

There’s a straight line. Well, here’s a quotation from somebody who ought to know. George Wittengren, in fact. He is the best authority on this today. He concludes that there is a straight line that leads from the old royal rites of Mesopotamia going back to seals 5,000, 6,000 years old, right down to Mandean baptism. The Mandeans were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in the running water. They were a very interesting sect, the Mandeans. This shows you what goes on. A few of them survived down there, about 2,000. But they say they came from Palestine, and they say they came from the very same place where the Dead Sea Scrolls people came, when Jerusalem fell.

First of all, they had been driven out into the desert because of the wicked Jews at Jerusalem, to preserve the gospel in its purity. They are connected with Jonadab Rekhab, who fled from Jerusalem just before Lehi did, for the same reason Lehi did. And he preserved his people pure and intact in the desert, as Lehi had intended to. And he settled out there, and his descendants are still living there. But no one would believe that they were Jews, because all their doctrines and their practices were so Christian. But now we know they are genuine old Jewish practices.

And this is the sort of Judaism that Lehi took out of Jerusalem with him, the kind you find in the Book of Mormon, not the kind you find in the Old Testament, which was very carefully edited and expurgated [...] later on. They took all these elements out. Now, we are finding this out today because of these older documents being discovered. And another interesting thing, of course, is the way Islam is coming into the picture.

Well, it’s hard for us to believe today that not many years ago the bible was regarded by higher critics and fundamentalists as a singularly isolated book. The Mormon scriptures presented what purported to be a type of early Judaism, which resembled not only Christianity, but betrayed elements of other ancient religious traditions as well. There is so much Iranian, so much Persian stuff in the Book of Mormon, for example. And it depicted a singular universality of outlook and mixture of cultures and blood in the Judah of 600 B.C.

Remember, only half the names in the Book of Mormon are Hebrew names. The other half are Egyptian with a scattering of a couple of Greek names and a few Hittite names, and a lot of Arabic names, good Arabic names, all in this mixture. But nobody knew anything about that then. They though the Bible was one book. Now, this is the picture we get. [...] You see how everything’s fusing together now. Everything’s running into everything else. As late as the 1920’s, so eminent a scholar as T. E. Peak could insist that the accumulating points of resemblance between the literatures of Egypt Babylonia, Greece, and Palestine, was a pure coincidence, they had nothing whatever to do with each other. There was no contact whatever between those civilizations. Well, how silly, when today we can walk from one to the other without any trouble, you can fly over them, well, of course, it’s embarrassing, because they are so close together. They are stepping on each other’s toes today. I mean, militarily, it’s a very dangerous situation.

Today, however, we are being told, there’s a quotation from Albright in which he says, “The Bible strikes root into every ancient Near-Eastern culture. It cannot be historically understood until we see it in its relationship to its source in true perspective. The Hurian, Hittite, Sumerian, Ugaritic, Akkadian, must all be taken into consideration. [...] The Bible reaches out to all these cultures and draws them together in a single complex here. [...] It is now realized that Israel was no more isolated in her language than she was in her religion and culture, that Hebrew is heir to a large common stock of Semitic words, and borrows freely from other languages. [...]

The tremendous new world recovered by archaeology and philology, philological research, writes Albright, underlies and undergirds the Bible. To understand it, flexibility and willingness to change one’s own ideas are both absolutely essential. One of the things most powerfully brought home by post-war archaeology is “the essential uniformity of the earliest civilizations." [...]

[it was] first indicated by the studies of comparative literature and folklore. The scholars who pointed out numerous and striking parallels in medieval European, Greek, Indian, Arabic, and Chinese literature were at a loss to explain why they should all be telling the same story. “Until the missing texts are found,” quoting one here, “any explanation can only be the purest speculation.” But the missing texts were forthcoming; they were found. For example, we can now fill in the once gaping emptiness between the remarkable parallel Wisdom literatures of the Jews, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians, showing -- I think this is Lambert -- “that all three collections form part of a cosmopolitan whole.”

The Mantic sciences of the Babylonians, the Chinese, and the ancient Etruscans, how widely scattered they are. The Etruscans, way over there in Italy, the Chinese, way over there, and the Babylonians have the same peculiar Mantic practices, that is, divination by liver, and all that sort of thing. How do you explain that? Well, they are now being connected up. The gaps are being closed. [...] “I have slowly been forced to suspect,“ Professor Goodenough confesses, “that the spiritual history of the development of western man cannot be written as a series of disjuncted essays," an essay on the religion of Babylon, on the religion of Egypt, on the religion of so fourth and so on, up to the present, because that won’t work any more. He says he has slowly been forced to come to this conclusion. Rather, it must be seen to be a continuous adaptation of certain basic symbols. The dominant motif today in the world picture is that of continuity. [...]

“Everything hangs together, in which the historical element comes to life in the web of lively interchanges. This universal historic outlook is in direct opposition to our formal, classical concept of history of only a few years ago.” Hebrew prophecy, we are now told, grew out of a background of ancient near-eastern prophecy going back very far and spreading widely. “Everything in the Old testament, “ as Schofield observed, “has substantial analogies among other peoples.” Everything in the Old Testament has analogies among other people. But when we go to those other people, we find that all their stuff has substantial analogies to their neighbors, too. [...]

We begin to suspect the connection may be something more than a common biological and psychological background. It seems strange today that the really close ties between prehistoric Egypt and early Sumer, which are now taken for granted by everyone, they were practically the same people, should have been doubted and discredited for so many years. Nothing appears more obvious today.

One is reminded of the long controversy that was raised, and we have it here, in the library, among the philologists in the Pages of Antiquity (that’s the name of the journal), as to whether English and German were related languages. Now, anyone here would think that’s absurd. Of course they’re related! The word “man,” “house,” and anything else you’re going to talk about, they’re practically the same thing. Oh no, no sir, they wouldn’t accept that. The scholars said, that’s too easy, that’s too obvious, as to whether English and German were related languages. With typically conservative British scholars stoutly denying anything but the purely fortuitous resemblance between the two languages. That was purely accidental. [...]

Today, the prehistoric story of the contest between Horus and Seth, in Egypt, is recognized in the rites of the Sumerians, the Hittites, the pre-Hellenic Greeks by Montay, the greatest archaeologist in that field, who actually hyphenates “Sumero-Hittites.” He likes to hyphenate “Sumero-Hittites” here. So this makes our relatives, the Hittites, connected with the first people to use writing, along with Egypt, the oldest civilization in the world. Nobody knows where they came from.

We might mention that for years conservative scholars denied that there ever were any Sumerians, or that there was a distinctive Sumerian language. It took years to prove to them that that was so. In fact, it would seem that conservative scholarship is equally enthusiastic in denying relationships between ancient peoples, and denying their individuality. First, they deny that there are distinctive Sumerians, Hittites, or pre-Hellenic Greeks -- they have done that all in our generation -- and then they deny that they were closely tied to any other people. The longest and most stubborn denial was the connection between Babylonia and Egypt, which, as we have seen, scandalized critics of the Pearl of great Price as late as 1960. But Egypt was not only aware of the existence of Babylonian, Minoan, and Phoenician civilizations in the beginning, but her merchants and priests were quite at home in those lands. The early Sumerian epics, written in the Aramean cuneiform, not in Egyptian, were first found in the great library in Upper Egypt, and in pure Akkadian, a northern Mesopotamian dialect, in another library in central Asia Minor, along with a Hittite translation.

If the prehistoric Act of Thomas speaks exactly like the Book of the Dead and the prehistoric Egyptian Pyramid Texts, that’s no accident, for the Memphite theology can be traced in an unbroken line, we mentioned before, right down. The Greek theatre is now held to be of Egyptian origin, and the depth and great age of Greek dependence on Egypt for spiritual, scientific help, becomes more apparent every day. When we read [...] of Aristotle of the four souls, writes Cyrus Gordon, we are dealing with the Aristotelian development of the basic, eastern Mediterranean concept, whose intimacy is already attested in the pyramid texts of the 3rd millennium B.C.

Long ago, Sir Flinders Petrie made the surprising statement, “We are the heirs of Egypt rather than Hebraism in our Christian ideas.” He based this conclusion of the fact that conventional Christianity has come through the minds of the doctors in the University of Alexandria, a strongly Egyptianized institution. Greek thinkers classified with wise men of Egypt, and wise men of India, and visited them both. [...] Now this is the thing: From the earliest times in all these civilizations, people traveled -- prophet and bard and merchant, all the time, and teachers and scholars, and they would travel from one great university to another. When? As early as we can go back.

The nine earliest records we get from Mesopotamia, the earliest production we have, the earliest writing we get from Egypt, were produced in schools -- and these schools were visited by traveling scholars from distant lands. So, they were exchanging these ideas, these concepts all the time. They would give sermons in each other’s temples, and they preached a single gospel everywhere you went. It was always that way, as far as we can see.

From prehistoric times the great cult centers were also schools of international fame. They played no small part in producing that surprising state of uniformity that characterized all the old religious writing and cult practice, no matter where they come from. The mobility of religious personnel, such as prophets, explains the spread of religious teaching and institutions. The original impulse to see the origin of a Biblical element in whatever ancient non-Biblical writing the same elements occur has long since been discredited. Today nobody sees detailed parallelism. When a thing occurs in the Bible and you find it somewhere else, it doesn’t mean that the Bible got it from there. The Bible is just as old, the Bible has just as much priority as anybody here. But how do we account for this, then? Nobody today sees parallels between the religion of Christ and the cult of Marduk, Anton Mortgat points out. No one today would derive the eastern story from numerous statements of Biblical and patristic writing, which also do appear in Gnostic works, largely pirated. On the other hand, it is a rare scholar today who would deny the reality of those resemblances. The resemblances are real, they are not accidental; they are all preaching the same sort of thing, and they are no longer attributed to mere coincidence. To explain their significance is at present the major prospect of Biblical studies, the major program or project.

When H. J. Schepps affirmed that primitive Christianity, the Ebionites, the Moslems, and the Catholics, are equally legitimate witnesses and proponents of the message of Jesus, he is offering an interpretation of the phenomenon, the overlapping of all these with each other, the sharing of common basic teaching. But how did they all come to share the same ideas? One mechanism we have just mentioned -- the traveling prophets, teachers, and so forth. Another is the migration of the sectarians. When Jerusalem fell, the sectaries of the Dead Sea, along with others, scattered all over the Near East, just like the Jews. The Jews aren’t the only people who have undergone the diaspora. You see, the Jews, “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed,” because of Abraham. They were scattered. Again and again they were scattered throughout the whole world. You find that in the most unlikely places, there they are. Well, this has continued, and other people have had the same thing happen. Other nations have been scattered, too. So that means everybody is mingled with everybody else. It’s this constant stirring. If you stir the colors, or the soup or whatever it is, you are going to get a uniform substance, and this is exactly what happened.

Edited August 9, 2013 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[Nemesis]

When starting a topic posting just a link is not appropriate. In the future please try to start and direct a discussion when creating an opening post.

Nemesis

[volgadon]

Jon D. Levenson provides food for thought.

"That Ezekiel’s experience begins with a vision of desiccated bones readily suggests a connection to Zoroastrianism, an ancient Iranian religion in which an expectation of a resurrection of the dead figures prominently. Understandably, it has been proposed from time to time that the Israelites borrowed their own expectation from these Iranian sources, and the possibility of Zoroastrian influence remains real. There are, however, some important differences between the Zoroastrian and the Israelite ideas. For our purposes here, the most important of these is that unlike the Israelites, for whom burial was essential, the Zoroastrians exposed the corpses of their deceased. Ezekiel’s conclusion that God will lift the Israelites out of their graves thus fits the Iranian model poorly, though his initial vision of the bones scattered across the valley fits it better. Perhaps we are dealing with a somewhat clumsy effort to adapt the Iranian idea to an Israelite context. The historical leaps that even this more modest proposal requires, however, must give the historian pause. For it seems unlikely that there was strong Zoroastrian influence as early as Ezekiel’s time (first half of the sixth century b.c.e.) in his venue (Babylonia). In any event, when a fully developed expectation of resurrection appears in Judaism in the second century b.c.e., its idiom and description do not coincide with what we would expect from the Zoroastrian sources."

Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life, 157-158.

[Buzzard]

I have no doubt that there will always be similarities in religions, for two reasons: First, they are all trying to answer the same questions, so no surprise that they often come up with similar conclusions. Second, and most important for us LDS, remember that Adam had the gospel. As his descendants spread across the world and apostatized, there would still be threads of the true gospel left in their philosophies.

[thesometimesaint]

Here is a summary of similarities that I had written earlier on my facebook page, which I use to share various topics on science, religion, philosophy, and my outdoor adventures. If your a facebook user, go ahead and give me a friend request if you would like...just to give you some identity behind my posts here.

"Especially in Mormonism, the basic concepts of god, Satan, devils, angels, appointed prophets for dispensations of time, virgin birth, millenial peace ended in a final battle between good and evil (the Battle of Gog and Magog), premortally created spiritual copies of our tangible selves, life purpose, paradise and purgatory, universal resurrection, eventual universal salvation, temples, rusicrution inspired masonry from which aspects of temple ordinances derived, many biblical phrases....these are all apparently derived from Zoroastrianism. Even the white temple raiments look similar to those worn by Zoroastrians."

https://www.facebook...and?ref=tn_tnmn

Post hoc ergo promter hoc.

[exmormonatheistofutah]

From all of the studying that I have conducted, it seems that monotheism evolved from polytheism in proto indo-european/ iranian/saharan religions in the second millenium bc at the earliest (the zoroastrians as the earliest) Can someone please show me archeaological evidence supporting monotheism as a precursor to polytheism as would be claimed by those who believe in the Abrahamic religions? It would be most appreciated.

Edited August 9, 2013 by exmormonatheistofutah

[The Nehor]

No, but Satan did learn from Ahriman.

[ERayR]

https://www.youtube....d&v=9GN8CD1tUqg

http://en.m.wikipedi.../Zoroastrianism

http://www.iranchamb...oastrianism.php

http://zoroastrian.angelfire.com/

My conclusion is that both were influenced from a common source.

[Storm Rider]

From all of the studying that I have conducted, it seems that monotheism evolved from polytheism in proto indo-european/ iranian/saharan religions in the second millenium bc at the earliest (the zoroastrians as the earliest) Can someone please show me archeaological evidence supporting monotheism as a precursor to polytheism as would be claimed by those who believe in the Abrahamic religions? It would be most appreciated.

Please define what you mean by monotheism. Is it the Trinitarian type, the Islamic type, or the looser LDS type. There are a lot more isms today. I have always thought of myself as a monotheist; but not a modalist type.

[Robert F. Smith]

It's all the same stuff. People get fanatically nitpicky and try to separate religions into discrete, independent systems, but it's all coming from the same source, it's all just variations on a few themes with idiosyncratic emphases in different places. (Darwin's 'Lumpers vs. Splitters' problem, and the subjectively arbitrary value-judgments it entails.) I mean, let's get real here, the Qur'an is basically an offshoot of the Bible; Christianity is basically a sect of Judaism; Judaism is tied to Canaanism, Hebrew Wisdom lit is pretty much Egyptian; Protestants are jumping off of Catholicism, Aquinas is reacting to Aristotle who's reacting to Plato who's reacting to Pythagoreanism, and on and on back to prehistoric neolithic religion and bear cults and animism and shamanism and whatever else. Yeah, we can focus on the hair-splitting sectarian differences if we wanna, but at a certain point it just gets kinda blowhard-y. Who influenced who? They're all just branches off the same tree that have been pruned to look a little different. I like a lot of what Nibs has to say in one of his speeches, New Light On Israel And Her Neighbors (even if it's kinda dated now). Check it:

Nice quotations from his Nibs, even though the transcriber couldn't spell the names of Widengren and Schoeps correctly.

[Robert F. Smith]

Christianity does appear to be much more like zoroastrianism than 1000 bc Judeaism though. Back then the Jews didnt believe in much of an afterlife, the hollowness of Shoel, unlike the Zorastrians who beleived in a heavenly garden and a temporary hell. The Zoroastrian Persians had a very heavy impact on Judeaism as a matter of enabling them to rule. Look up the etymology for the title "pharisees" . They were persian Jews. A reason Jesus may have had so much conflict with them may because he was a reformer from within their ranks?

Even though Rab Hillel was a Jew who migrated from Persia, the accepted scholarly consensus is that the term Pharisee is derived from "Hebrew perushim, meaning 'separate.' This designation probably refers to their self-imposed separation from ritually impure food and from the tables of the common people, . . ." (Lawrence Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1994/1995, p. 76).

A more balanced appraisal of the Israelite view of the afterlife can be found in the following:

Collins, John J., “A Throne in the Heavens: Apotheosis in Pre-Christian Judaism,” in J. J. Collins & M., Fishbane, eds., Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), 43-58.

Johnston, Philip S., Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Leicester, England: Apollos/Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002).

Kennedy, Charles A., "Dead, Cult of the," in D. Freedman, ed., Anchor Bible Dictionary, II:105-108.

Marks, J., & R. Good, eds., Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin H. Pope (Guilford, CT: Four Quarters, 1986).

Richards, Kent H., "Death (OT)," in D. Freedman, ed., ABD, II:108-110.

Smith, Janet, Dust or Dew: Immortality in the Ancient Near East and in Psalm 49 (Eugene: Pickwick, 2011).

Tromp, N. J., Primitive Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the OT (Rome, 1969).

Vawter, Bruce, "Intimations of Immortality in the OT," Journal of Biblical Literature, 91 (1972), 158-171.

Ziony Zevit drew some rather interesting correlations with Egyptian views of the afterlife from excavations of Israelite burials at Tel 'Eton (see his The Religions of Ancient Israel [2001], 246-247).

[mfbukowski]

https://www.youtube....d&v=9GN8CD1tUqg

http://en.m.wikipedi.../Zoroastrianism

http://www.iranchamb...oastrianism.php

http://zoroastrian.angelfire.com/

Haven't read any of the thread so far but I have studied Zoroastrianism quite a bit.

There are four ways of looking at this, depending on how willing you are to stray from literalism.

In order from literalistic to relativistic:

1-. God revealed the gospel to Adam, and Zoroastrianism was a remnant of that truth

2.- Zoroaster was a genuine prophet and another dispensation we don't know about, but eventually his true revelation was distorted

3- All revealed religion has some truth in it but some work better than others.

4- Humans take their conceptions of God culturally and see Him in terms that work for them. Conceptions of God are Ideals of what we want to be and become, and are cultural models that work within certain cultures.

I can see all four of these being equally true or false.

All we know as individuals is the path God has called us on to follow, but that is something we can know with certainty through revelation.

Edited August 10, 2013 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

From all of the studying that I have conducted, it seems that monotheism evolved from polytheism in proto indo-european/ iranian/saharan religions in the second millenium bc at the earliest (the zoroastrians as the earliest) Can someone please show me archeaological evidence supporting monotheism as a precursor to polytheism as would be claimed by those who believe in the Abrahamic religions? It would be most appreciated.

What does history have to do with religion?

You actually think that religion is about facts?? How is your question relevant to anything?

Edited August 10, 2013 by mfbukowski

[Robert F. Smith]

Haven't read any of the thread so far but I have studied Zoroastrianism quite a bit.

There are three was of looking at this, depending on how willing you are to stray from literalism.

Literalistic:

1-. God revealed the gospel to Adam, and Zoroastrianism was a remnant of that truth

2.- Zoroaster was a genuine prophet and another dispensation we don't know about, but eventually his true revelation was distorted

3- All revealed religion has some truth in it but some work better than others.

4- Humans take their conceptions of God culturally and see Him in terms that work for them. Conceptions of God are Ideals of what we want to be and become, and are cultural models that work within certain cultures.

I can see all three of these being equally true or false.

All we know as individuals is the path God has called us on to follow, but that is something we can know with certainty through revelation.

Sounds very much like a sociological description of Mormonism.

[mfbukowski]

Someone might say: "Independent of your perceptions, how do you know that God has revealed something to you?"

My answer: Independent of your perceptions how do you know this is a table?

Better yet: Independent of your perceptions how do you know you love your wife?

[mfbukowski]

Sounds very much like a sociological description of Mormonism.

Agreed! I suppose it is "sociological" as much as anything else Edited August 10, 2013 by mfbukowski

[Robert F. Smith]

From all of the studying that I have conducted, it seems that monotheism evolved from polytheism in proto indo-european/ iranian/saharan religions in the second millenium bc at the earliest (the zoroastrians as the earliest) Can someone please show me archeaological evidence supporting monotheism as a precursor to polytheism as would be claimed by those who believe in the Abrahamic religions? It would be most appreciated.

I personally heard the late Egyptologist Klaus Baer (then of the Oriental Institute, Univ. of Chicago) say Aug 20, 1974 at BYU that Amon-Re-Ptah subsume all gods and that all gods are three, and three are one. Moreover, Ptah the Creator God/ Chaos (Memphis), is both male & female. All the gods arose from him, are joined to him, and are him. “The divine” is a monophysite substance and could be seen as one god, as in Coptic Christianity. Erik Hornung doesn't share this view, but, as James P. Allen says, "the Egyptian understanding of divinity was similar to the later Christian concept of the Trinity: a belief that one god can have more than one person." (Allen, Middle Egyptian, 45). In other words, metaphysical monotheism.

[strappinglad]

The Lord's course is one Eternal Round ..... and round and round and round. The circular pattern of men's thoughts about God are not unlike the periodic rise and fall of women's dress fashion . Truly there is nothing new under the sun.

[volgadon]

Look up the etymology for the title "pharisees" . They were persian Jews.

Wow, can't believe that I missed this. Bob is absolutely right. Pharisees are Parushim (sing. Parush), whilst Persian Jews are Parsim (sing. Parsi), or Yehudei Paras. We have very close family friends in Israel who are Persian Jews, my younger sister even spoke Parsi until the age of three.

[Ragster]

Without contributing notably to the discussion .... as one of Parsee descent (my grandfather was Parsee) - and having read his pronouncements on his faith - I have no problems considering myself Parsee, and Mormon, simultaneously.

As he points out, so long as one adheres to the principles of 'Good thoughts, good words, good deeds' one can be considered a Parsee, no matter what other philosophy or religion on professes. And if one doesn't, what is that other religion worth?