Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 360
•
Trim: 7 x 10
978-1-5381-2786-5 • Paperback • November 2019 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-5381-2787-2 • eBook • November 2019 • $42.50 • (£35.00)
Brian Arthur Brown is the author of 24 books on the quest for peace and harmony between First Nations and other Canadians, French and English in Canada, Canadians and Americans at war and in peace, Jews, Christians and Muslims in current issues and interfaith studies worldwide. His magnum opus is an award winning two-volume compendium Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran (2012) and Four Testaments: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita (2016), both from the Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group. He is currently a member of the Oxford Round Table at Oxford University and in 2015 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.
Foreword, Karen Hamilton
Prologue: Twenty Years in the Making
Preface: What's New in This Book?
Introduction, David Bruce
Disclaimers: What If? and Other Questions
Part I: Indo-European Connections in All Seven Testaments on World Religion
1. Breakthroughs in the Study of World Religions
2. From the Z Factor to Zoroaster, including a historic exordium by Friedrich Geldner
3. From the Foundations of the Earth: Vedic and Semitic Prehistories East and West
4. Commissioned at the River: A Priest Becomes a Prophet
5. The Silk Route: The Axis of the Axial Age
6. The Extant Avesta: Pieces of a Jigsaw Puzzle
7. The Fraternal Twins of World Religions
8. Monism and Monotheism in Actual Practice
Part II: Creation and Apocalypse in World Religions: Avestan Models in Torah, Tao Te Ching, Analects, Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita, Gospel, and Quran
9. The Dead Zee Scrolls: Zoroastrian Concepts Buried in the Scriptures of World Religions
10. An Essence of the Torah
11. An Essence of the Tao
12. An Essence of the Analects
13. An Essence of the Dhammapada
14. An Essence of the Bagavad Gita
15. An Essence of the Gospel
16. An Essence of the Quran
Part III: Appendices
A. Twelve Session Study Guides for Three Testaments and Four Testaments, David Bruce
B. Three Testaments: Shalom, Peace, Salam
C. Where the Bodies are Buried
D. Older Testaments: Encounters on the Way, a one-act play, William Thomas
E. Identifying the Tomb of Zoroaster
F. The Sogdians: Prime Movers between Boundaries, Jenny Rose
G. Sogdians in China: A Short History and Some New Discoveries, Étienne de la Vaissière
H. Plot Summary for a Movie about a Zoroastrian Tragedy
Epilogue: An Agenda for Another Twenty Years: Finding and Identifying the Dead Zee Scrolls
Afterword: Continuing the Magi Journey, including article by Mark Rose
Bibliography
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
- Concise descriptions of each testaments including interpretive essays written by notable scholars
- Each chapter has several pedagogical features such as maps, timelines and study guide questions
Appendices covering significant events in history that connects one or more testaments to each other