How are all the Abrahamic Religions related to each other?

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How are all the Abrahamic Religions related to each other?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The story starts with Judaism, which was one religion among many that existed amongst different tribes/ethnic groups in the ancient middle east. The Israelites (tribe) were fairly successful and conquered a decent amount of land and other tribes, making their religion fairly widespread, at least by the standard of the time.

That takes us up to Roman times, when the Romans conquered the middle east including the area inhabited by the Israelites. Being conquered by the Romans didn’t make the Israelites happy, so there was a lot of discontent, part of which manifested as the idea that there was going to be a savior who would lead the Israelites to freedom from the Romans. There were a number of potential prophets and uprisings. One potential prophet was a guy named Jesus. Some people believed he was the savior, while others didn’t. Those that believed he was the savior went and founded their own sect, which combined Hebrew religion with some new teachings. This became Christianity. Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, especially in Europe, and into parts of Africa and the middle east. Christianity ended up spreading far farther than Judiasm did.

That takes us up to around the year 610 AD. When a new religious leader pops up in the Arabian Peninsula named Muhammed. Like Jesus before him, he takes a lot of the ideas of the existing popular religion, and incorporates some new ideas. He and his followers end up spreading their new religion Islam over a wide region of the middle east, the far east, and northern Africa.

So you can think of it like a branching tree. What started with Judiasm split off around 100 AD into Christianity, and a branch that remained Jewish. Then there was another split 500 years later, where Islam split off from Christianity. All of these religions share some portion of their holy scriptures and basic ideas.

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