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Notes -
I'm not sure what part of pigeonburger's narrative makes it implausible that Christians might have done a good job of convincing pagans of this?
Indeed, on a more macrohistorical level, one of the observations I would make is that firstly polytheism seems remarkably fragile or weak in the face of robust monotheism, and secondly monotheisms seem remarkably resilient to each other.
Both Christianity and Islam expanded remarkably quickly and did excellent jobs of sweeping over pagan resistance - what efforts there were (sorry Julian) were mostly ineffective. Even factoring in that both Christians and Muslims used the sword and other incentives to an extent, they did this very rapidly. (And the sword by itself hardly seems to explain it - after all, polytheists are just as good at using brute force as monotheists.) To an extent we can continue to see this today, where traditional religions frequently don't put up much of a fight, looking through more recent evangelical or da'wah efforts in Africa or Asia. Hinduism is probably the only great polytheism to have resisted very strongly, and Hinduism has always had a bunch of quasi-monotheistic tendencies of its own.
Meanwhile, Christianity and Islam have both been noticeably ineffective at converting each other. There are a handful of exceptions (Muslims in Spain, Christians through parts of the Middle East), but for the most part, and barring a handful of individual exceptions, monotheist-to-monotheist conversions are quite rare. Judaism is also a strong example here. The biggest exception I think of here is Zoroastrianism, which did mostly collapse in the face of Islam (though it took a few centuries; most of early Islamic Persia remained Zoroastrian for a few centuries), and maybe you could argue Manichaeism or something as a Roman monotheism that also fell before Christianity, but in general it seems that when a monotheistic religion gets entrenched, it is extraordinarily difficult to convert people away from en masse.
Of course, today there's a third combatant in the ring in the form of atheism/secularism/irreligion, and it seems to be doing pretty well at smashing both Christianity and Islam. Perhaps in a few centuries my descendants will be discussing how zero-theism outcompeted monotheism just as monotheism outcompeted polytheism. But please forgive me if I hope that is not the case.
I think a big problem for premodern paganism was the lack of a Bible or Qu’ran as a way to unite the faith and to unify the practices and mores. Pagans were more open, but also less United and had fewer touchstones of belief — tribes outside of yours might not know your gods and even if they did, didn’t know the same mythology or worship in the same way.
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It seems like substituting "Abrahamic religions" for "monotheistic religions" in your model makes it fit with fewer epicycles.
Perhaps, but then I think I would have to deal with a new epicycle - what makes Abrahamic religion different to other monotheism? If there's an Abrahamic advantage separate from just monotheism, what is it?
A pro-social covenant premise?
Abrahamic religions have a common premise that not only is [God] real and present, but that while love may be unconditional favor is not- if you / your collective society sins greatly, not only will god permit the outsider to overthrow you, but God may throw the first meteor. On the flip side, the way to earn / retain gods favor is a bunch of tenants / commandments that, coincidentally, happen to be good for healthy societies that can succeed in cooperation, unleashing those benefits of scale.
This sort of covenant premise is not inherent to monotheism. You could believe there is one god, but that it expects nothing of you and implies no type of action. You could believe there is one god, but they are eternally absent. There could be one god, but it hates you. There could be a god and a covenant, but the demands are less socially beneficial. Etc.
It's interesting to note that the other ancient monotheistic religion which survives to this day, Zoroastrianism, is also very pro-social and big on sin reducing the favor of God.
The difference is that Abrahamaic religions command their adherents to improve the world. Zoroastrianism does not; in Zoroastrianism the adherent is commanded to do charity, but it doesn't actually matter if that charity helps the recipient. There is no equivalent to teach a man to fish as there is with Christian charity, which is big on education, hospitals, etc in comparison.
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Hard to tell since almost all modern monotheism is derived from Abrahamic religion, which itself probably takes its monotheism from Zoroastrianism. Even Sikhism which is the other major non-Abrahamic monotheistic faith was strongly influenced by Islam.
Sikhism is an interesting one to me - I wasn't terribly familiar with it until the first time I visited a gurdwara and heard a lot from a Sikh community in themselves. I already had some academic and practical knowledge of both Hinduism and Islam for context, and as they explained their history, doctrines, and practices to me it felt blazingly obvious what Sikhism is.
That is, and with apologies to any Sikhs here, to me Sikhism reads as what you get out of a Hindu reform movement in a place where there is a lot of Islam already in the water supply. There's a lot of it that feels midway between Hinduism and Islam, or as a kind of hybrid. If you come from a Hindu background (as Guru Nanak did), become convinced of the oneness of God in a way that goes a little beyond the soft-monotheism of a lot of Hindu theology, and are surrounded by Islamic influences but are not interested in just becoming Muslim yourself... well, it's fairly intuitive where that ends up.
Anyway, I don't think I would be convinced that Abrahamic monotheism ultimately originates in Zoroastrianism? I think there are Zoroastrian influences in the mix in places (the magoi Matthew references, famously, but also the Zoroastrian influences are especially visible on Islam), but the genealogy is too hard to trace through ancient Judah, I think. I find it more plausible that monotheism independently evolved in several different places historically - after all, if you glance at anything from Hinduism to European paganism to even Chinese traditional religion, I'd argue there are a number of proto-monotheistic trends that often seem to appear. Most of them didn't get to full monotheism the way that Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic religion did, but Brahman or Heaven or the Stoic vision of God or what have you are enough to make it plausible to me that concepts of a unitary divine can just evolve independently.
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I feel compelled to point out that this is evidence Christianity is correct.
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