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Posted on 1/9/26 at 10:42 pm to High C
quote:
Aren’t the true Persians pagans?
Depends how far back you go, and how you define the term.
Pagan is from the Latin “paganus” which meant something like “a rural dweller”. Some kind of way it morphed among the Christian movement into people who are not Christian or Jewish.
So Persians were “pagans” from when that term developed probably in the second century CE up until they fell to Islam. Christians didn’t consider Muslims pagan, maybe because Muslims themselves were an offshoot of Jewish Christianity.
Persians from around 1000 BCE were Zoroastrians. Their religion formed from Persian polytheism, likely similarly to how Yahweh became exclusively worshipped eventually as a reform of Israelite polytheism itself derived from Canaanite polytheism. So some Israelites began to exclusively worship Yahweh (and merged him with Baal Hadad and El Elyon and Egyptian Aten). Previously in Egypt, Pharoah Amenhotep renamed himself Ahkenaten as a theophoric name for the god he made his subjects worship exclusively- Aten. Jews began to call Yahweh Adoni (Jewish D is equal to Egyptian T) which means “my Aten” when they were scared pronouncing the Tetragrammaton “YHWH” would get them struck dead. As kings of great nations grew in power, they wanted to centralize around one deity and unite their people under a single deity - it meant less conflict and better economies.
What’s so funny is that the Persians - the Zoroastrians - financed the construction of the new temple in Jerusalem after the Persians conquered Babylon and freed the Jewish slaves. In Isaiah 45:1, Cyrus the emperor of Persia is called Yahweh’s messiah. The funny part is that the Christians forgot all this and didn’t realize how much Zoroastrianism influenced Yahwist religions (including what became Christianity and what because Judaism). They may have called them Pagans but without them (and their god Ahura Mazda, the savior figure called the Saoshyant, and the Satan - Angra Mainyu), they would have never invented the concept of Jesus and Satan in the first place.
I think confessional Jewish scholars and maybe Christians too (definitely the secular ones) understand the roots of their religions are owed to the he Persians. Muslims though totally don’t give any credit to them. Muslims understand their roots in Christianity and earlier Yahwism, but deny the Persian roots.
So without the Persians conquering Babylon and then injecting their own ideas into the heads of the newly minted Zadokite priests of the governor Zerubbabel, we wouldn’t have Judaism, Christianity, or Islam as we know them today.
Posted on 1/9/26 at 10:58 pm to lake chuck fan
quote:
Man..... lol..... your just such a grandiose douche bag that you possess zero self awareness.
SFP has unpopular legal and political opinions, but he is absolutely correct on this topic. The Israelites and Judahites (and Moabites, Ammonites, Phonecians, Edomites, etc., but not the Philistines nor the tribe of Dan) are simply newer evolved divisions of Canaanites - culturally, linguistically, genetically, and with shared religious traditions.
Yahweh most likely technically wasn’t a Canaanite deity, but was likely from nomads south of Canaan, in the Sinai or south Arabia. In the Bible, Yahweh is repeated represented as coming from Seir, Midian, Horeb, Sinai, and Parab. He was adopted around the time of the Bronze Age collapse by the Edomites, and later adopted by what became the Israelites and Judahites. Yahweh possessed the same powers and attributes of the Canaanite storm deity Baal Hadad, so some Israelites attempted to merge the two, and eventually merged them with Baal’s father El Elyon and with the Israelite goddess Asherah, aka El Shaddai. “Shad” is Hebrew for breast. El Shaddai means something like “breasted god” and always comes up in the Bible with fertility blessings.
The earliest reference to Yahweh was from the Egyptians describing a people group from Sinai or Arabia called the Shasu that they defeated.
That same Yahweh became your Jesus, and Yahweh/Baal’s father El Elyon became Jesus’ father in Christianity.
This post was edited on 1/9/26 at 11:06 pm
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