WHO INVENTED PARADISE?
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I enjoyed your commentary on the Islamic concept of paradise as it is described in the Koran [December 14]. Your generalizations are acceptable except for the statement that “Christianity, after all, invented the idea of paradise in the first place.” Paradise is a Zoroastrian concept. It was borrowed by Jews from the Persians beginning about 500 BCE, when Yehud was a Persian province. Zoroastrianism was a Persian state religion that appears to have evolved in the century before 500 BCE. The concept of paradise, though, has even more ancient Indo-Iranian religious roots. Zoroastrian concepts continued to infiltrate into Jewish thought during Hellenistic times, and some are found in such late-written books as Daniel. They are more prominent in Jewish literature produced after about 100 BCE, especially in the writing of those Jews whose traditions later evolved into Christianity.
Little is known with certainty about early Zoroastrianism, even such basic facts as when Zoroaster, the founder of the religion, lived. Tradition suggests he was born in 628 BC and died in 551 BC, but linguistic evidence in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scriptures, indicates that he was on the scene much earlier. Most of Zoroaster’s writings were destroyed in ancient times; what we have today was pieced together later from fragments.
