Description: Seven Testaments is volume one of a trilogy, introducing and supplementing the already popular academic texts, Three Testaments: Torah Gospel and Quran (2012) and Four Testaments: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita (2016).
Review Quotes:
"Brian Arthur Brown's Seven Testaments of World Religion and the Zoroastrian Older Testament (hereafter, "7+Z") gives Zoroastrians the opportunity to note how their histories may have influenced another seven global religious traditions and their creation/apocalyptic stories. . . . What 7+Z does irrefutably, is illustrate that interfaith dialogue and collaborative thinking regarding ways of being and ways of knowing (religious formation), occurred." --Fezana Journal
"In Seven Testaments, Brian Arthur Brown and his 'sacred circle' have succeeded - with rigorous scholarship, tender devotion and divine insight - in opening humanity's greatest treasures to be a universal legacy." --James T. Christie, University of Winnipeg, G7 Global Consultant in Multifaith Dialogue and Religious Liberty "In Seven Testaments Brian Brown again elucidates more pieces of the intellectual puzzle of the Axial Age period. It is now incumbent upon scholars in many different disciplines to search their own fields for more of the story." --Richard A. Freund, archaeologist, Bertram and Gladys Aaron Professor of Jewish Studies, Christopher Newport University "Is Tao-Te-Ching informed by Bhagavad Gita or vise-versa? Or might they share a common source in Brown's Zoroastrian 'Dead Zee Scrolls'? That is the proposal he has for the 'parallel sayings' of Buddha and Jesus also. Perhaps there was more happening on the Silk Route than we knew." --Victor Mair, editor of the Columbia History of Chinese Literature and of the Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature "Brian Arthur Brown succeeds in bringing the largely overlooked teachings of Zoroastrianism into the mainstream of religious thought, and convincingly shows that its foundational concepts underlie all Seven Testaments of World Religion." --Kersi B. Shroff, Zoroastrian interfaith activist; Attorney at Law; Chief, Western Law Division, U.S. Library of Congress "Seven Testaments is compelling and thought provoking for the astute reader... What if Zoroastrianism played so prominent a role in the developments of these other traditions? What would it mean for the adherents of these traditions? Perhaps there was a commingling of Judaism and Zoroastrianism in Babylon, resulting in Vedic influences which can be discerned in Christianity and Islam?.... What I find Seven Testaments to have done well is to broach these and other questions concerning the development of the world's great Axial traditions. The fact is, however, despite the vignettes provided by Brown and the other contributors, that the above questions are left open, leading the reader to seek out the other two volumes of the Seven Testaments Trilogy--I know that I will." --Reading Religion