Avesta word for "praise-song" (Bartholomae: "Lobgesang"); that word is not actually attested in any text. The surviving texts of the Avesta, as they exist today, derive from a single master copy produced by Sasanian Empire-era (224–651 CE) collation and recension. That master copy, now lost, is known as the 'Sassanian archetype'. The oldest surviving manuscript ("K1") of an Avestan language text is dated 1323 CE. Summaries of the various Avesta texts found in the 9th/10th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition suggest that a significant portion of the literature in the Avestan language has been lost. Only about one-quarter of the Avestan
The Religion of the Future stated that he considered the book, alongside Ronald Dworkin’s "Religion Without God", to be an example of “religious atheism,” that is, a “new attitude to God” that “presents a new horizon for Christianity.” While strongly criticizing the book from a theistic standpoint, Chapman allows that this new religious atheism may represent a “maturing of the infantile atheism offered by the scientific naturalism perspective: it looks at the world and finds moral truth, objective value, and goodness.” Reviewing "The Religion of the Future" in "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer considered the book as the second part of the project