According to J.M.
Chaterjee (“The Ethical Conceptions of The Gathas,1934), when the Jews were taken in conquest into the court
of Nebuchadnezzar, they reformed their religion along Zoroastrian
lines. Jews spent two generations among Zoroastrians and returned
with most of the material for the Old Testament. Some people have
even thought that Abraham was Zarathustra.
Moses seems
to owe many of his ethical ideals to Zarathustra. Joshua reformed
the community from Egypt to the older religion of Zarathustra. When
Moses led his people out of Egypt in the 13th
century BC into Palestine Zarathustra was already seen in
inscriptions of the 14th
century. Worship of God at Sinai follows the train of Zarathustra.
The Jews learned from the Iranian religion of Zarathustra the idea
of the celestial hierarch, the idea of duality, temptation by the
devil, the concept of non-idolatry, non-symbolical image worship, or
the good-evil nature of deity, Resurrection, the concept of heaven
and hell, and the evil spirit.
The Iranian religion of Zarathustra continues the
same since its founding with no abrupt change or breach with the
past. Zarathustra largely agrees with the ancient Proto-Indo-European classics since the
Rig Veda.
Christianity developed
from this Zoroastrian/Jewish history. I think Buddhism too might have
influenced the Jewish sect of the Essenes concerning piety, celibacy,
the absence of personal property and of money; Simon J. Joseph
said the influence of Essenes can be detected in the pages of the New
Testament.
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