Try starting with Judaism back in 500bc, what were their beliefs & how did they change? The Jews then did not have much of a clear concept of an afterlife but a shadowdy place called Sheol where all dead souls went, good or bad.
The main things I already listed that could be linked to Zoroastrian/Persian influence & will leave it to your imgination to see how well they figure into later thought motif of the Jewish sect called "Christianity"
they were
The Idea of monotheism God of Light
The idea of angels, particularly guardian angels.
The idea of a Messiah savior
The idea of a final Judgment.
The idea of bodily resurrection
The idea of the Devil as a powerful force for evil in his own right rather than simply as some kind of mischievous or "testing" figure.
One thing that they introduced into Jewish thought was duality, a foreign undeveleoped concept prior to the influence of the Persians. While the Pharisees and the follow-on Christians version of duality is slightly different than Zoroastrian duality, the point is that the concept of an evil counterpart to God of Light & Good did not exist among the Israelites until the Persian influence
It is in Christianity that the doctrine of the Devil is almost identical to the Zoroastrian concept. The Devil, or Satan, is a being who CHOSE to be evil, through pride, just as Zarathushtra's evil spirit chose to do evil; and this devil, as Christians believe, not only roams about attempting to corrupt people, but has corrupted the physical world as well, just as Ahriman does in the later Zoroastrian teachings. Christianity also adopted Jewish - and Zoroastrian - apocalyptic myths about cosmic battles and the upcoming end of the world into its own doctrine. The Christian book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament canon, is a later example of a form that goes back all the way through its Jewish sources to the distant, ancient worlds of Iran and Mesopotamia.
Evolution |
