SEVEN TESTAMENTS OF WORLD RELIGIONS And the Zoroastrian Older Testament

Apologies for ignoring my blog readers for the last several months, but getting the manuscript for SEVEN TESTAMENTS completed has been consuming almost all available energy. The ms has gone forward to Rowman & Littlefield and should appear in print after about nine months of gestation. Thanks to so many of you who have contributed in the earlier stages, as recognized in the acknowledgements.

SEVEN TESTAMENTS is the last to be written of this trilogy, the way a “foreword” usually gets written after a single volume is done. As you recall, THREE TESTAMENTS contains the complete texts of the Torah, the New Testament and the Quran, the sacred texts of Abraham’s family together for the first time with thoughtful commentary by expert authorities in each tradition.

FOUR TESTAMENTS does the same with the Tao Te Ching, Analects, Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita, with the realization that they too apparently have a common source in Vedic lore as refined and expressed by Zoroaster, whose influence in the primary scriptures of both East and West is at last being acknowledged and documented in an increasing number of places.

SEVEN TESTAMENTS therefore provides that background and shows in considerable detail how they all connect with different extrapolations, but with inferences of value to each other in this new day of Scriptural Reasoning. The seven creation stories now seem as clearly derivative as the seven apocalypses, recognized for some time now as all having been produced under the influence of the Zoroastrian Avesta. The Avestan sources are derived from both extant passages and the portions we call the Dead Zee Scrolls, now pieced together from clues in the seven primary texts of the world religions.