Avesta of particular manuscripts. A pre-Sasanian history of the Avesta, if it had one, is in the realm of legend and myth. The oldest surviving versions of these tales are found in the ninth to 11th century texts of Zoroastrian tradition (i.e. in the so-called "Pahlavi books"). The legends run as follows: The twenty-one "nask"s ("books") of the Avesta were created by Ahura Mazda and brought by Zoroaster to his patron Vishtaspa ("Denkard" 4A, 3A). Supposedly, Vishtaspa ("Dk" 3A) or another Kayanian, Daray ("Dk" 4B), then had two copies made, one of which was stored in the treasury, and the other
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