I personally believe that at some point in the far distant past, probably just after the Fall and before other religions had time to develop, there would’ve just been the singular understanding and following of God by the descendants of Adam & Eve. As time progressed, this “image” of God was distorted, and the different religions of the day began to emerge. This would explain why so many religions (that of the Ancient Egyptians, the Canaanites, Greece, etc.) all had common themes present in their origin myths and in the characteristic of their chief gods. For the Egyptians it was the creation myth of Ra, for the Greeks it was the characteristics of Zeus, and so on. When you really look into it, a lot of the more ancient religions share a
lot in common. Too much, in my opinion, to explain it away by saying that it was just coincidence.
We know from many of the books of the OT that the Israelites turned away from God many, many, many times. Sometimes they did this by cutting him out altogether from their religion, at other times they did this by worshipping multiple deities in addition to him. So we have a biblical precedent that evidences the corruption of the true religion by mankind. Would it really be so unreasonable to say that this is how the other early religions emerged? With most, if not all, sharing a common ancestry in the true God, before being corrupted, twisted, and added on to by man?
Many people like to say that the reason these religions share so much in common is because they stole their ideas and from other religions. Atheists especially love to make this point because they believe it acts as a means of invalidating those religions. I answer instead that rather than stealing ideas for each other, the reason for these similarities is due in least in part to their common ancestry.
We also know from historical data that religions most certainly can evolve from one thing into another entirely, and that this has happened on
multiple occasions throughout the course of human history.
With that being said, I don’t believe that Ra or Zeus or any other deity is an accurate viewpoint of the true God. They are corruptions that hold a common ancestry in God that have been so far removed from the original and true depiction of him that they could only ever be referred to as shadows of something long since gone from that religion. I believe this is also part of the reason why God chose the Israelites as the chosen people, and why Jesus told us to preach the good news to the world. Because it was time to correct the errors that the other religions of the world had fallen into throughout the course of their veering away from their common ancestry by bringing them back into the true understanding of the Divine.
As to whether or not the multiplicity of those religions’ other deities was based originally in a singular entity I cannot say, though I don’t personally believe it to be the truth. They were simply additions, rather than fragmentations. I could be wrong though.
I hope this helps answer your question
