Ancient scroll may yield religious secrets

This is an interesting story, however . . .

Monotheism as it descends from the Judeo-Christian tradition was undoubtedly imbibed from Aryan sources during the Babylonian captivity. Modern Christian and Jewish theologians deny it, but the early portions of the Bible acknowledge polytheism. The word elohim is used in Genesis, and elohim means gods, plural. False claims are made that this is similar to the royal pejorative, but that first appears in history in the usage of Caesar Ausgust, literally more than five centuries after the Babylonian captivity. In Mithraic tradition, derived from the worship of Ahura-Mazda, monotheism is asserted after the deity is first described as the chief god, and then as the true god while all others are false, and finally as the only god. Exactly the same sequence appears in Jewish scripture. The early portions of the Bible are described by literary scholars of the text as Elohist texts, precisely because of the use of the plural elohim. It is only later that the Yawehist (or monotheistic) portions of the Bible appear, and only after a narrative sequence in which the diety is first asserted to be the supreme god, then the true god in comparison to false gods, and finally as the sole god. The evidence is very strong that early Israelites included large numbers of worshipers of Baal and Ashtoreth, and that there was a continuing struggle between the proponents of Yaweh and of Baal, which was only finally resolved after the Babylonian captivity. Futher, there is good evidence that original Israelite script was a script used by priests in a society which was otherwise almost entirely illiterate. Ugaritic texts suggest that the worship of Baal and Ashtoreth survived right up to the time of the Babylonian captivity. After the return from the captivity, Hebraic script was devised and used, and inferential evidence suggests that a good deal more of the population became literate. Subsequently, a move was made to "re-adopt" Israelite text, but there are sufficient differences to distinguish the ancient Israelite script from the revival script.

I suggest that the contention that Orphism influenced the monotheism of Christianity is only an example of ethno-centric self-promotion on the part of Greek scholars (whether that is scholars who are Greek, or non-Greek scholars of Greek culture and texts).