iirc Judaism picked up the immortality of the soul from Hellenism in the Ptolemaic era, arguably inadvertently since they were NOT fans of Greek culture.
And Neo-Platonic influences on the early Christian church were the key to opening the door to the Renaissance 1000 years later.
Some Judaism. There were sects that did not believe in it:
> The Sadducees held no belief in afterlife, because they maintained that it was not taught in any of Moses' five books, the only authoritative Scriptures they accepted. Jesus pointed out that the basis of the belief in resurrection can be found within the books of Moses, specifically citing Exodus 3:6.[17]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_22#The_Resurrection_(2...
The Sadducees disappear from history after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century.
And more unique Christian theology like the Fall of Man, which made human thinking inherently corrupted by original sin, led to the argument that this could (must) be alleviated by new rational and objective methods. To quote from:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12857?...
> experimental knowledge was also deemed to be the more appropriate form of knowledge for a fallen world. It was commonly argued that while human beings in a prelapsarian state may have had direct access to the essence of things owing to a natural affinity between the mind and nature, that connexion had been lost as a consequence of the Fall. Knowledge after the Fall would now have to be painstakingly gathered from observations, aggressive experimental intrusions into (a fallen) nature, conducted by numerous individuals, over extended periods of time, and yielding only makeshift and probabilistic knowledge. Francis Bacon accordingly proposed that the object of the new natural philosophy was to seek, as far as possible, to restore the original connection between the human mind and the natural world that had existed in our prelapsarian condition.82 Subsequently, Robert Hooke, the first curator of experiments at the Royal Society, wrote that on account of an innate ‘derived corruption’, human beings have a natural tendency towards error. ‘These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason’, he concluded, ‘the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy’. Experimentation was thus a palliative for original sin
Except that Greek philosophy was not pagan at all. Greek (and Roman) religious practice was pagan (and polytheistic), but Greek philosophy was 'monotheistic', especially Aristotle (e.g., Unmoved Mover) which was key in forming Christian metaphysics.
By the 1200s God as a rational actor was near the centre of Christian thought:
* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:God_the_Geometer.jpg
A pagan is a person who follows a polytheistic or nature-based religion (generally outside of mainstream monotheistic faiths);[1][2] at least for the modern/current meaning of the word as most people probably use it. Aristotle (for one) was not polytheistic (cf. Unmoved Mover), nor did he have (from what I've read) anything that we could have a nature-based religion (gods/spirits of trees, rivers, etc).
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pagan
[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pagan