Judaism/Christianity/Islam From whence (tradition vs historical)

Factual Questions
1

Sorry about the title :wink:

What I would like some of you scholars to relate to me is a short telling of the beginnings of each of these three religions, and the differences between the traditional (religious) story of their birth, and what we can support/discredit historically.

I know, a tall order, but I’d be happy with a very abstract telling, no need for too much detail. I hope to go off and explore some related texts based on what I read here.

I’ll start off with what I know, and I’d like to be corrected and expounded upon if possible:

Judaism: Tradition tells the story of moses and the exodus from slavery and oppression in Egypt to the new nation of Israel, where God lets the isrealites know he’s looking out for them so it’s time to start a worshipping.

Historical evidence, I believe points to the more likely possibility that the story of exodus is a myth, and the peoples who became the israelites where always local peoples who where never enslaved by Egypt en mass (correct me if I’m wrong).

Christianity: We all know the story of jesus, but essentially a long time after exodus, Isreal is conquered by Rome. Jesus Preaches about a new way of worshipping (the same) god and ends up crucified. His words are carried by a large group of people who split off from traditional judaism and become early christians.

Historically I believe we can say with a decent amount of certainty that there probably was a preacher named jesus who kicked off christianity, but the specifics of his life are likely partially or completely made up sometime after his death by early christians.

I’m probably wrong in many places above, but more importantly I’m lacking any knowledge at all about the beginnings of Islam. I was shocked to hear one of my muslim friends claim that it was a sect of Christianity which broke off in the early middle ages rather than either a sect of judaism or even an entirely new people as I had beleived.

Any responses would be heartily welcomed! :slight_smile:

2

The first thing that occurred to me was for you to check encyclopedias. Believe it or not, when it comes to religion, Wikipedia isn’t bad. The reason is because there are so very many people who are either adherents or critics who are quick to contribute and/or criticize.

You could also go to Amazon and search “history of Judaism” (substitute others). If you do that, you’ll get thousands of results, but you should certainly be able to find a starting place.

3

Beginnings of Islam are traced back to the story of Abraham (Abram) and Sarah in the OT. They didn’t trust God to provide them with a son (as God had promised) as it seemed impossible as Sarah (Sarai) was well passed concieving age when the promise was made. She gave Abraham to Hagar, her handmaid and they concieved Ishmael. (All related in Genesis 16 if you want to look it up and I encourage all to do so as you would with anything.) The line of Islam is traced through Ishmael. The line of Christ (the line of David) is traced through Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac. So there ya go the way I understand it. I have so many books on world religions but I just don’t want to look it up.

I have actually found some errors in Wikipedia. Not really related to religion but to some of the other stuff that I look up (philosphy, ancient history, etc). Tread carefully when it comes to that and similar websites (in other words, any website where you don’t really need credentials to contribute). But it is a good idea to go to amazon or the like and look for books on the history of the 3 world religions.

4

Islamic praxis is a continuation of ancient Arabian Goddess religion. In Mecca before Muhammad they worshiped the triple Goddess, Allât, al-‘Uzzá, and Manât. Muhammad discarded the pagan deities and superimposed a monotheistic theology that stressed its Judaeo-Christian heritage. Meanwhile, much of the pagan cultic practice survived, adapted to the new theology.

Cybele, the goddess to whom the Pantheon in Rome is dedicated, was of Anatolian origin and probably went back to the Neolithic, given the religious art at Çatalhöyük. Her cult stone was brought from Phrygia to Rome in 204 BC because the Cumaean Oracle had said that Rome would be saved from Carthaginian attack if they worshiped Cybele. The stone was described as about three feet long, tapering, dark brown in color. This is identically the description of the Black Stone set into a corner of the Ka‘bah. The two stones could be twins. The cultic practice of setting up a sacred stone was widespread all over the ancient Middle East. Archaeologists call this kind of stone baetyl. The story of Jacob at Bethel is a classic example of this.

5

This is false, or better exagerated and distorted.

The religion in the Arabian Peninsula was not a “goddess” religion whatever the lies of those strange people running around looking for goddesses under every rock, but a mixture of many religions.

There was of course Hubal and the goddesses, but many others, as well as Christians, Hanifs and Jews.

For the beginning of Islam, it is clearly started by the Prophet Mohammed, although if you believe or not the revelation depends on whether you say it was divince inspiration or inspired by the various monotheistic influences he was exposed to.

The claim by this person that a lot of pagan practice survived in Islam of course again is just a claim like the one below, made up to suit the person’s belief, no one knows enough about the practices to really say.

Meaning you want this to be so, of course no one knows.

6

Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. I didn’t touch it because I knew someone else was going to. I have heard Muslim Apologists speak and I had NEVER heard anything about goddesses or the like.

Replace Christianity with Islam in the italized part (italized by me) and you would have another true statement.

7

It was already italized. :smack: So I am going to quote the part I meant below:

The claim by this person that a lot of pagan practice survived in Islam of course again is just a claim like the one below, made up to suit the person’s belief, no one knows enough about the practices to really say.

8

What do people here think about Luxenberg’s thesis? Was Islam likely derived from Monophysite Christianity? And was Mohammed likely a Christian?

9

It seems very premature and speculative.

If you do not believe, of course, in Mohammed’s revelation, it would be logical to see Mohammed being very influenced by Christian and Jewish and Hanif influences then becoming strong. It is certainly there, and not made up “Goddess” rubbish that ignore the male gods that one finds influences.

Calling the Prophet “a Christian” would seem to be taking a text analysis very far.

Trying to be neutral, it seems to me clear that Islam starts as the Revelation of Mohammed who saw his Revelation as purifying and bringing Monotheism to the Arabs and others. You can believe or disbelieve Mohammed’s correctness of course.

But one must admit the first century after Revelation is very obscure.

10

I found this review here http://www.livius.org/opinion/Luxenberg.htm which seems quite scholarly and critical of this Luxemberg thesis.

11

maziiadar: Thank you very much.

12

Welcome. In fact your links excited my interest to search for solid seeming discussions to learn more.

I share these two also:
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/luxreview1.html
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/luxreview2.html

They are hostile, but seem serious and make points similar to the other. It seems it would premature to run after this ‘German’ hypothesis with enthusiasm.
Perhaps more interesting are those old Yemen Qurans mentioned?

13

The Yemen Qur’an manuscripts (masâhif) were a nonissue. There turned out to be no real variants in the text (nass) of the Qur’an, only in the reading (qirâ’ah). Variant readings have always been known and accepted, from the very beginning, so to find them in old manuscripts is not even news. See the book ‘Ulûm al-Qur’ân by Ahmad von Denffer for some examples of variant readings which are both considered correct by Qur’an scholars.

The reason for variant readings historically was that Arabic orthography at the time of the Prophet was defective: many letters were indistinguishable from other letters, and vowels, sometimes even long vowels, were not written. If the original ‘Uthman recension text were all we had to go on, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to read. The way the fulltext of the Qur’an was preserved was by memorization and oral recitation. The memorizers (huffâz, singular hâfiz) were relied upon to check one another as well as to be able to read the written text, which served only as an aide-memoire, since it was assumed that Muslims would commit the whole thing to memory.

The sketchy written text gave only the bare outlines of words; meanwhile Arabs speaking different dialects all memorized the text. When reading the same written word, they might pronounce vowels differently, and sometimes this made for a different word. It wasn’t a problem. In Semitic languages generally, words sharing the same consonantal outline have similar or related meanings anyway. (This allowed the Lebanese Christian author Kamal Salibi to write The Bible Came from Arabia, a brilliant achievement of scholarly crackpottery.)

Then in the second century AH scribes developed ways of writing Arabic clearly, with all the vowels indicated and different letters clearly distinguished. Now specific dialectal readings could be transcribed, and the result was the recording and codification of the acceptable variants. After that, pretty much only one of the several possible readings became used worldwide. The obsolete readings from the early days were forgotten, known only to pedants of ancient Qur’an lore. So when they discovered those manuscripts in Yemen, the media tried to sensationalize this as casting doubt on the authenticity of the Qur’an’s text, but in fact it remains as impeccable as ever.

14

maziiadar: Again, interesting reading. I suspected that whole idea was a bit strange, but it sounded just plausible enough to my ignorant ears to merit a post in here.

I always kind of wondered how the Semetic vowel-less orthography managed to preserve words well enough to prevent splintering. I suppose that in some cases, the answer comes down to ‘it didn’t’.

I wonder when Dan Brown will seize upon this. :wink:

15

I just read that long, detailed review, and the reviewer did a great job with comparative Semitic analysis. I had to chuckle: Luxenburg is exploiting the defective writing and similarities in Semitic languages that allowed Kamal Salibi to come up with The Bible Came from Arabia, which no one ever took seriously, but it provided hours of philological amusement for me to gently make fun of. What Salibi did with Hebrew and Arabic, Luxenburg is doing with Aramaic and Arabic. There are already lots of Aramaic loanwords in the Qur’an (e.g. the well-known kursi) that were identified ages ago, it isn’t a secret.

As soon as I saw this thread discussing Syriac Christian origins of Islam, I thought “it’s that old Bahira story again.” Then I was surprised to see that Luxenburg does not even acknowledge this well known story so similar to his own thesis. Strange.