How are all the Abrahamic Religions related to each other?
In: 2
First, they all follow Yahweh.
There are many theories as to where Yahweh originated but it is definitively known that he had more believers than just Hebrews since he was one among a pantheon. Many of the old testament stories have cognates with Egyptian mythos, other middle eastern mythos, as well as some Proto-Indo-European mythos. At some point in their history, Jews chose to focus solely on Yahweh and began to claim that no other god was real but their chosen one.
Christianity came about as a branch of Judaism in that it ‘fulfilled’ a Jewish prophecy, as many claim, though much of the Christian mythos was derived more through the Council of Nicaea as they hand picked which stories would be accepted and which would be ignored. While most scholars tend to accept the reality of Jesus’ existence, much of the new testament as we know it is inconsistent and contradictory. Wit the additions made by the church since the first council meeting, and the countless dissenters creating their own version of Christianity after the fact, it’s hard to say they bear much more than a tangential relationship at this point.
As Jews and Christians began to outnumber Arabs in their own city, Muhammad saw that the individual desert clans fought with each other too much to ever remove these outsiders from their cities. Despite not following their beliefs, many of these nomads had already come to accept a reality in the beliefs of their trade partners so as a way to unite the separate clans, he claimed that their god had chosen to enlighten the Arab peoples, through him, with the real truth and thus Islam was born.
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