So, its the height of arrogance & ignorance to think that one man's large civilization did not in turn affect anothers,that Christianity which is an offshoot of Judaism did not get influences from an earlier influence. Its very Darwininian to see Christians stamping out all other religions & gnostic thought too, burning books & killing "heretics", very Darwinian ( so you could be blissfully in denial to this day)
One can note example after example of the influence of the Persian on the early Hebrew & ideas that were to directly manifest later in Christianity, this is just the same as we see happening in Nature, in interactions between animal species, or interspecies all the time, its not "god" but of "Nature".
Duality
One thing that Persian Zoroastrian/Mithra introduced into Jewish thought was duality. This was a foreign 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 did not exist among the Israelites until the Persians.
Messiah, King of Kings
Lets consider Cyrus who was unlike other kings before him and his reputation preceded him which is why the Jews were ecstatic about his march on Babylon where they were held captive. I also believe that even the Babylonians themselves welcomed him with open arms and he took their city without a fight. His style of governance was one of patronage. He allowed his subjects to keep their temples and to worship their supreme deity, unlike previous Assyrian kings of the region who opted to loot and burn down the temples of the conquered and crush their idols to dust.
Duality, Resurrection,Magi,Heaven & Hell, Angels & AfterLife
Either he or his successor even underwrote the Jewish return to their homeland and even went as far as funding their rebuilding projects which I'm sure endeared them to the Jews. What seems to have happened next, however, was the Persian king sending a delegation of "priests" (some believe these were Persian Magi or holymen, versed in the Persian relgion of Zoroastrianism & Mithra) back to Judah to teach the inhabitants this new religion that had some very interesting concepts (hell, angels, demons, deism, afferlife, cosmic wars and so on) absent in older Judaism.
Pharisee/ Parsi/Pharsi
One point of interest to me has been with the Pharisees. Their names seems to have derived from the Persian word Parsi/Pharsi, which I believe is a region in southern Iran (ancient Persia) where Zoroastrianism may have begun or where the Persian holymen may have resided. The Jews did not have a concept of an afterlife other than a shadowdy place called Sheol where ALL dead souls went, good or bad. The Persians, however, had a rather interesting religious view that involved a resurrection of the souls to paradise or damnation which was carried over into New Testament Judaism and Christianity.
Pharisee vs Sadducee (afterlife or not)
It appears that the Pharisee sect (Pro-Persians) was responsible for spreading concepts like these amongst the common folk who stood to gain the most from such a blissful afterlife. Their rivals, the Sadducees, who upheld the status quo and original Jewish teachings appears to have rejected such concepts as foreign and this is evidenced in the New Testament. In a story where the Sadducees confronted Jesus about a question regarding wives in the afterlife, the writer was careful to add a side-note stating that the Sadducees did NOT believe in "the resurrection" which I think is a VERY important point because it highlights a point of contention between the two camps. Why was this mentioned other than to show that the Sadducees who harkened back to the ancient priestly (aristocratic) tradition were not willing to go with the NEW concepts that were held by the majority common folk?
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