The Root: A Single Argument
A synthesis The picture of reality that most of the Western and Islamic world takes for granted as "religion" — one supreme God presiding over a cosmos split between good and evil, human life as a moral test, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell as the wages of a life, a savior, and a world made new at the end of time — has a root. And the root is older than the Bible.
What this resource contributes
A synthesis The picture of reality that most of the Western and Islamic world takes for granted as "religion" — one supreme God presiding over a cosmos split between good and evil, human life as a moral test, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell as the wages of a life, a savior, and a world made new at the end of time — has a root. And the root is older than the Bible. Strip the inherited assumption that this worldview began at Sinai, follow the evidence backward, and it leads out of Israel, through the Persian centuries, to the vision of a prophet who taught it before any of the texts that now carry it were written: Zarathustra. This is the single argument the whole series builds, and it can be stated without a single overclaim, because every link in it is on the record. The chain Israelite religion was not born with the worldview it ended up with.