It’s matter of definition of “Major World Religion”, but if you put a gun to my head an forced me to answer I would say: “Why are you doing this to me? Why is this question so important to you!?”
I think it’s thought of as “major” because its scriptures are included in the Christian scriptures. If you can’t divorce Christianity from the Old Testament, you can’t ignore the Judaic content in the biggest religion in the world. and I think that in that context, its “majority” is not an incorrect assessment, despite the small number of practicing Jews.
Islam certainly has influences of Judaism, but not in the same way. Without Christianity, I don’t think Islam would be enough to make Judaism seen as major.
Yep, but is influence alone enough to qualify a religion as ‘major’? Should Christianity be seen as a radical strand of Judaism? I think the answer is probably that there’s a fair amount of subjectivity in the definitions as there are whenever we choose to define things. That said, purely in number of adherents, whilst there are much larger religious groupings than what we would commonly understand as Judaism, it is by no means a small grouping in World terms: if you wanted to call Christianity, Islam and Hinduism the ‘megareligions’ Judaism would be one of the largest groupings after those three.
To my mind, there are only three religions (or rather groupings of religions) which have solid claims for universality - Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
After those, you have two very massive but not very cohesive groupings of religions - broadly, “Hinduism” and “Chinese folk religion” (which includes bits of Taoism and Confucianism in varying mixes - also, Buddhism) which are pretty pegged to locality.
Judaism is in the third tier. What makes it more significant that mere numbers of adherents would suggest is the factors already mentioned: that its adherents were widespread in an extensive diaspora; that members of two of the three truly universal religions look on it as ancestral; and that Jews are credited, rightly or wrongly, with having influence and importance out of proportion to their numbers.
Asymptomatically fat:
While I wouldn’t say Christianity in its current state (as opposed to, say, the small sect it was in the first three centuries or so) should be considered a form of Judaism, I do think the fact that many - possibly even most - of the “lessons” taught by Christianity are actually Jewish ones re-packaged is enough to qualify Judaism as “major.” Remember, when discussing what’s a “major religion”, you’re talking about the religion itself, i.e., the belief system and its teachings. The question is not whether Jews are a major population group, but whether JudaISM is a major religion.
I see what your saying, but despite the subjective nature of the question I just don’t think that defining a religion as major purely on it’s influence on one other religion is a definition that is likely to be widely recognised.
In terms of the question of whether Christianity and Judaism are the same religion, it can objectively be said there’s two religious groupings, which most people including most members of the two groupings would recognize as separate religions. Given the variable nature of conformity and tolerance of different beliefs in religion, that is about as an objective definition of separate religions as you are probably going to get. But the question of beliefs and influences brings up separate questions about what constitutes a separate religion from an objective point of view and I don’t see how the question of number of adherents can be avoided, otherwise ‘major’ may just become a value judgement.
If I had to argue Judaism is a major world religion I would however argue that it is a religion with a largeish number of adherents from which the two religions with the largest number of adherents sprang from (in slightly different ways). Despite the fact there have always been much larger (in number of adherents) religions than Judaism, a history of World religions could not ignore it.
On the other hand if I were to argue that it was not a major world religion I would simply say that the number of followers it has is a drop in ocean compared to the total number of people holding religious beliefs in the World.
We’d probably still be in the top 5 either way.
I’m admittedly intrigued, though, by cmkeller’s specific point: that, when Christians travel the world distributing copies of the New Testament, they include a much bigger copy of the Old Testament, patiently explaining to anyone who’ll listen that once upon a time, there was a God who nuked Sodom and Gomorrah, and He told Moses to tell the Israelites to nick their penises and stay away from bacon, plus Samson had super-strength as long as he didn’t get a haircut, and the prophet Elijah worked a bunch of miracles involving fire and water and for some reason bread; and, oh, the stories I could tell you about Hezekiah and Nehushtan back in the day! Anyhow, that all happened exactly like the Jews say – and, years later, a bunch of other stuff happened too."
And that’s weird.
Muslims don’t include a copy of the Tao Te Ching with every Koran, and Sikhs don’t preface their remarks by pressing the works of Homer into your hands and talking excitedly about the Greek gods – but Christians are out there in hotel room after hotel room, dropping off books that go on and on like a rabbi, all “Noah’s Ark” this and “Tower of Babel” that, right up until the part where it’s all hey, remember David, who killed Goliath and fathered Solomon? Well, here’s a fun story about genealogy!"
This goes back to the Romans. Christianity arose in the Roman Empire and the early Christians had to take the Roman politics into account.
One big thing among the Romans was that religion was a civic duty. You didn’t just worship as an individual to please the gods. You were expected to be part of community worship. The belief was that if some individuals in the community failed to give the gods the proper respect, the gods might become angry and do something bad to the entire community. So everyone was expected to participate and failing to do so was seen as a criminal act.
Jews and Christians had problems with this. They were monotheists and their religion required them to not just worship one God but to do so exclusively.
But one other aspect of Roman culture was a big respect for tradition. So the Jews had an out. They could point to the long history of their religion. And while the Romans weren’t converted, they respected the fact that the Jews were following traditions that were hundreds of years old. So the Jews were essentially given a pass of community worship.
The Christians however did not automatically share in this exemption. Their religion was not sanctioned by centuries of tradition - it was founded by a guy who had lived only a few decades ago. The Romans had no respect for a religion that young.
So the Christians were motivated to link their religion with Jewish history even while they cited Jesus as having changed everything. Rather than reject Jewish scriptures as being rendered meaningless by Jesus’ appearance, they said that Jewish scriptures foretold Jesus’ appearance and therefore Jewish history was actually Christian history. Christianity therefore had traditions that went back hundreds of years even though it had just been founded.