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An Introduction to the Abrahamic Religions

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• Terence Lovat 3 , 4 &
• Robert Crotty 5  

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This chapter introduces the notion of Abrahamic Religions as it applies to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. It is contended that the notion constitutes a foundational sacred Story for each of the religions that is held in common. The chapter begins exploration of the major similarities and differences between and across the three religions in their conceptions of the sacred Story, similarities that bind and differences that divide them.

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• Religious Tradition
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Islamic Scholarship

• Interfaith Dialogue
• Late Medieval Period

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Introduction

As was implied already in the Preface, ‘Abrahamic Religions’ is a term enjoying wider currency than in the past. It has been in the past a more sharply Muslim perspective in that Islamic theology has displayed a clearer consciousness of the relationship between the three religions than have the theologies of Christianity or, least of all, Judaism. This has changed in recent times, however, with the notion of the ‘Abrahamic tradition’ being more commonly used as an overall term for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, there are other religions (e.g. Baha’i) that are able to be included as well. For the purposes of this book, however, we will restrict the meaning to the three main religions, religions that numerically constitute over half of the world’s total population.

Abrahamic Religions

The use of the term ‘Abrahamic Religions’ suggests that Judaism , Christianity and Islam derive from a common spiritual source in the ancestral figure of Abraham and that the three religions constitute a close family of religious traditions. There are certainly other commonalities in the three religions that derive from this symbolic common origin in Abraham. For instance, all three have overlapping geographical, ethnic, cultural and historical backgrounds in the Near East; each has spilled out from its Eastern centre of origin and developed into a world religion; each has made notable inroads into the Western world.

All three religions are monotheistic and it would appear (particularly from the overlap of their sacred texts) that their High God, although given different personal names in the three traditions (Allah, Footnote 1 YHWH Footnote 2 or Father Footnote 3 ), is the same. They all have a prophetic tradition with an established line of religious mediators (these are, for example, Moses (Musa) or Jesus (Issa) or Muhammad , Footnote 4 granted some differences in the status of the mediators).

The three religions rely on their own discrete body of sacred writings which are considered in some way to be the Word of God—the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures and the Qur’an . Descriptions of the divine inspiration that produced the books, however, differ. The textual corpora overlap: the Christian canon includes the Jewish canon; the Islamic canon is considered to be the authoritative version of the two earlier canons, each of which in its present state is considered by Muslims to be corrupted.

The three religions have a common linear view of religious history, with many points in common, and each claim that this history will have an eschatological end-point. Although there are some eschatological beliefs in common, they vary within the traditions.

Despite these commonalities, however, there is no agreed statement among the three on their mutual relationships. This must be clearly stated and accepted in a time when political correctness tends to blur the stark reality of divisions. Judaism is chronologically prior to the other two and, on this basis, would claim precedence on the basis of antiquity. It regards both Christianity and Islam as later deviations from itself, a proposition that neither Christianity nor Islam accepts.

Christianity recognises itself as having begun as a sect within Judaism in the first century CE, Footnote 5 founded by a human-divine Jesus, but then claims to have immediately developed into a discrete and superior religion. As such, it has defined itself as a radically reformed Judaism, the ‘New Israel’ based on a ‘New Testament’ which is both a formula of superiority and a canon of books, albeit that, in a more politically correct stage of dialogue, such terminology might be eschewed.

Islam, by its dominant story established in the seventh century of the Christian era, believes itself to be in succession to both Judaism and Christianity, inheriting their Scriptures and prophets (including Jesus/Issa) , although the new religion’s Scripture (the Qur’an ) and its line of Prophets supersedes both the Jewish and Christian categories. Specifically, Islam’s ‘last and greatest of the Prophets’, Muhammad , does not feature in either Judaism or Christianity. From the Islamic vantage point, while both Judaism and Christianity retain elements of religious truth from their past, both have lapsed into serious error.

The Abraham/Ibrahim Story

Nor is there common consensus on the interpretation of the Abraham/Ibrahim Story, identified above as the common factor in regard to the three religions. For Judaism , Abraham was the first Ancestor of Israel, the founding father of their religion, with whom God made a religious covenant and to whom specific promises regarding progeny and an inherited land were made. The Story of his obedience to God, when asked to sacrifice his son Isaac , was seen by later Jews as the highpoint of religious submission to the God of Israel. Later, the emphasis fell on Isaac, seen as the martyr-saviour of all people.

Within Christianity, the Abraham Story was skewed so that he was depicted as a spiritual forebear of Christians , a ‘Father of (Christian) Faith’, and he became a role model for the believing Christian. But then there was a second line in the Christian interpretation of Abraham. His obedience to God in almost sacrificing his son, Isaac, has been seen as a prototype of the offering of the life of Jesus, as the Son of God, by God himself (the Christian Father). In this second phase of interpretation, Abraham became the pre-symbol of God the Father, and Isaac became the forerunner of Jesus.

For Islam, Ibrahim is known as the ‘Friend of God’ and is one of the key prophets stemming from the first prophet, Adam, and culminating in the last and greatest of the prophets, Muhammad . It was Ibrahim who founded the Ka’aba in Mecca, the principal sanctuary of the Islamic religion. He is accepted within Islam as the first monotheist in history. His willingness to sacrifice his son was seen as a test of his faith, a test which he passed. In most Islamic tradition (and increasingly so in the modern period), however, it was not Isaac (Ishaq) whom Ibrahim was instructed to sacrifice, but Ishma’il (Ishmael).

Supersession

It needs to be said that both Christianity and Islam have an innate tendency towards supersession. Christianity has consistently claimed to have superseded Judaism; Islam has claimed to supersede both Judaism and Christianity. Christianity has often defined itself as the New Israel and so viewed the continuance of Judaism after the Christian period as an anachronism. It has interpreted earlier Jewish history as clearly pointing towards the coming of Jesus in a variety of forms (such as Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man). It has subsumed the Jewish sacred writings into its own canon and added the Christian Scriptures as the inspired, superior and indeed crowning addendum.

Similarly, Islam sees Muhammad as the last and greatest of the line of acknowledged prophets (and defines Jesus (Issa) as one of the prophets, but inferior to Muhammad). For Muslims, the Qur’an supersedes the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity (and, for some Muslims, also precedes them—see Chap.  5 onwards). The Qur’an was revealed by God, by means of the angel Jibril (Gabriel) to Muhammad, and Jibril recited the text from ‘the preserved tablet’ in heaven. Its inspiration and inerrancy are absolute. The Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures are inferior versions of the Qur’an .

In light of the above, it becomes clear that there can be no gainsaying the difficulties in establishing a dialogue between these three Abrahamic faiths, despite their commonalities. On the doctrinal side, there are three distinctive accounts of the founding of each religion. While Christianity and Islam might accept the pivotal role of Abraham in the establishment of Judaism, neither Judaism nor Islam will accept the divinity of Jesus and neither Judaism nor Christianity will accept the definitive prophetic status of Muhammad.

Furthermore, there is the claim that each of the canons of scriptures, which are not identical and are at times contradictory in content, is uniquely inspired and inerrant (although inspiration and inerrancy are commonly questioned in modern Christianity, less so in modern Judaism and hardly at all in Islam). There are also considerable and notable differences in religious practice, in spite of there being some interesting parallels. Added to these doctrinal and practical intransigencies, there has been and continues to be a long history of violent political friction between representatives of the three religious traditions (despite the periods of Convivencia ) and this history of violence has been interpreted in diametrically different ways in the three religious domains.

The Uneven Issue of the Enlightenment

There is also an academic impasse that limits the feasibility of mutual understanding. Judaism and Christianity in the West were more exposed to the period of the Enlightenment. From about the middle of the seventeenth century, Europe was convulsed by a new intellectual movement, called The Enlightenment that targeted Christianity, in the forms of both the Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant churches formed throughout the sixteenth century. This movement would last throughout the eighteenth century. Its goal was to reform the whole of society from the ground up. One of its main targets concerned the apparent irrationality of religion, which prescribed an ethical way of life to be accepted without question on the basis of ancient texts from the Bible and decrees from the Popes. Footnote 6 The Enlightenment wanted ‘Reason’ to replace religious tradition. The Enlightenment was also determined to remove widespread superstition that had become protected by religion and to counter the religious tyranny that had seen protestors and advanced thinkers silenced and executed.

The Enlightenment was given an initial voice by a series of great philosophers. Among the more prominent were Voltaire (a pen-name for François-Marie Arouet) and Denis Diderot. The latter undertook a mammoth Encyclopédie to which the greatest thinkers of the age contributed. The issues became clearer as the Encyclopédie spread from country to country.

There was first the demand that all thinking be based solely on reason. It was not to be based on the Church’s reading of the Bible or on Church tradition handed on unquestioningly from ancient times. The Enlightenment heralded the birth of the scientific method and science quickly disassociated itself from religion. It was a revolutionary attitude to religion in general. Many of the philosophers took up Deism, a belief in an uninvolved God who set the cosmos in motion but then withdrew and allowed it to take its own course. Voltaire called this God ‘The Great Watchmaker’. This was at odds with both Jewish and Christian thinking.

Since that time, many religious thinkers and academics have come to an understanding of some forms of relativism and the possibility of conversing with the ‘Other’ within a pluralistic community of ideas. In this context, they learned some elements of literary criticism and, applying the principles to their sacred writings, acknowledged the diversity of styles and content in them and used literary principles to interpret the texts. As a result, they came to some sort of compromise on questions related to the divine inspiration of those writings and the meaning of their inerrancy.

The history in Islam is different. While it is widely acknowledged that it was the scholarship of medieval Islam that broke new ground in all academic pursuits, including textual criticism that provided the underpinnings for much of the approach to scholarship that characterized the Enlightenment period in the West (Whittingham 2011), nonetheless the Enlightenment did not have the same degree of impact on Islam and this has created a difference in the dominant approach to textual understanding and criticism in the three Abrahamic faiths.

Hence, the critical methods of textual analysis that have become characteristic of Jewish and Christian scholarship in recent times, and that may well have been implicit in much of Islam’s ‘Golden Age’ of scholarship in the Middle Ages, have been less characteristic of Islamic scholarship for most of the last century or so. Assuming this is the case (and some Muslim and non-Muslim scholars might well disagree), Judaism and Christianity have, in this time, been subjected to a more intensely critical form of scholarship than has been the case for Islam. This has then created a particular obstacle in dialogue between the three religions, although there are increasing signs of this critical form of scholarship rising within Islam again (Butt 1989 ; Talbi 2002; Ata ur-Rahim and Thomson 2012; Sardar 2004, 2006; Pedry 2010; Whittingham 2011; Yale 2011). Regardless of the persistence of this obstacle or not, the terms of Convivencia were always that any differences were accommodated and became part of the engagement.

In this book, we put forward the proposal that the fact that the three religions refer to the figure of Abraham and his descendants in a substantial way in their sacred Stories and teachings may be one step in establishing a way forward towards interfaith dialogue and tolerance. If the focus could be concentrated on the one substantial area of unity, then more commonality may become apparent than has been supposed, a commonality that has been veiled because of historical estrangement, different paradigms of thought and animosity.

This optimism is strengthened by the fact that, seemingly at least in one extended period in history, active co-existence between the three religions has actually worked, when Jews, Muslims and Christians in Andalusia (southern Spain) and other areas around the Mediterranean basin lived in a state of relative peace and co-operation for extended periods. This was in spite of the fact that none of the participant groups—Jews, Muslims or Christians—was itself homogeneous either in ethnic provenance, religious belief or practice. In some way, religious tolerance interacted with cultural pluralism and brought about an intellectual and cultural ferment of the highest order in that period.

We propose that if the mechanism of co-existence in these examples could be unpacked and understood, then some advance may be made in suggesting possibilities of comparable harmonious co-existence for the modern world.

From this point, we proceed to finish Section A with a theory of religion, that is, to consider the theoretical underpinnings of religious culture and suggest a program for religious dialogue and toleration that might be suitable for the Abrahamic religions. For some readers, this will be an important theoretical underpinning component. Others may wish to proceed straight to Section B, or even C or D. The book can be read in a variety of ways depending on one’s interests and vantage points.

In Section B, we will examine in depth, using critical literary techniques common in the Western world, the sacred Story of Abraham/Ibrahim , Sarah, Hagar/Hajar , Isaac/Ishaq and Ishmael/Ishma’il in Judaism, Christianity and Islam to uncover the commonalities and the differences in the mainstream interpretations of the Story.

In Section C, we will intensify our appraisal of the Islamic account of these events, hoping to illustrate both their internal cogency and the ways in which they have become central to the theologies employed by radical Islamism.

In the final section, we will look at the historical exemplars of Convivencia in the Late Medieval period and consider the case for Islam, in particular, playing a role as the leader of an enlivened and contemporary Convivencia. At this concluding moment, we would hope to have drawn some substantial conclusions and provided a way forward for further dialogue. We know that the three Abrahamic religions will need to put aside presuppositions and prejudices about each other. There will be proposals put forward in the book that will cause consternation, but we ask that such proposals should be openly considered. Furthermore, the way forward, we stress, will depend on robust forms of education, social policy and informed and active media being in place.

The divine name Allah probably derived from the Arabic al ‘ilah (The God).

In the Hebrew Scriptures the name for God is written only in consonants (as was mostly true for all Hebrew writing). Even when the texts were vocalised, the divine name was exempt. We can conjecture that YHWH stood for ‘Yahweh’ but this is not certain. Later, it had become customary for the divine name to be substituted in public discourse with ‘Lord’ or ‘adonai . After vocalisation, the vowels of ‘ adonai were placed beneath the consonants of YHWH. This gave rise to the hybrid form of Jehovah, which never existed in antiquity. In this text we will use YHWH (and suppose its pronunciation is Yahweh).

While the God of Israel was occasionally addressed as ‘Father’, the term was taken on by the early Christians as their particular name for their God (not seen as in any way distinct from YHWH). Possibly the original form was Aramaic ‘abba . The meaning of ‘abba can be ‘Daddy’, but there is debate as to whether this was the intention of the usage. When ‘abba was translated it became pater , which is ‘Father’. The Christian philosophical theory of the Trinity refers to the Divinity, in which the Father is one element in a later construction that was motivated by Greek philosophical analysis and rather acrimonious political debate. In what follows ‘Father’ refers to the Christian statement on YHWH.

We acknowledge here the standard Muslim reverence shown to the Prophet in the English acronym, PBUH (Peace be upon him) whenever his name is mentioned. While it will be silent hereafter, we wish to show that we understand the respect that is attached to any utterance of his name.

This is the politically correct way of designating time in an academic discourse, in contrast to the three separate formulas devised by the three religions. BCE stands for ‘Before the Common Era’ and corresponds to the Western BC, while CE stands for the ‘Common Era’ and is the equivalent of the Western AD. 500 BCE is equal to 500 BC and 500 CE is equal to AD 500.

The Pope (‘Father’) was the name eventually given to the Christian Bishop of Rome. He is considered by Roman Catholic Christians to be in the line of succession from Peter, who had been nominated by Jesus, in the Christian Scriptures, as the Christian leader after Jesus’ own death.

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Lovat, T., Crotty, R. (2015). An Introduction to the Abrahamic Religions. In: Reconciling Islam, Christianity and Judaism. SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15548-7_1

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Philosophy and the Abrahamic Religions: Scriptural Hermeneutics and Epistemology

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(page 1) p. 1 Preface

• Published: January 2020
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Abraham is a figure from antiquity; stories about the putative discoverer of the One God contain material that may date from the third millennium bce . His name entered Old English from Hebrew as early as the eleventh century ce , although the term “Abrahamic” did not appear in its original sense—“relating to, or characteristic of the biblical patriarch, Abraham”—until 1699. “Abrahamic” in this book means principally “belonging to the group of religions comprising Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which trace their origin to Abraham,” a twentieth-century usage. This definition updates the commonplace observation that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the “Abrahamic religions”—are somehow closely related. Not everyone likes this expression or its categorical implications. Some scholars object that the term “Abrahamic” can mislead, especially insofar as it may exaggerate the three religions’ similarities and the likelihood that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can set their differences aside. Others regard the categorization itself as incoherent, given adherents’ fundamental divisions over matters such as what scriptures they consider canonical and how they understand God’s nature.

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