Judaism
Judaism's oldest text is the Tanakh, an account of the Israelites' relationship with God from their earliest history until the building of the Second Temple (c. 535 BCE). One of his grandsons was Judah, from whom the religion ultimately gets it name. The Israelites were initially a number of tribes who lived in the Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah. After being conquered and exiled, s
ome members of the Kingdom of Judah eventually returned to Israel. They later formed an independent state under the Hasmonean dynasty in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, before becoming a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, which also conquered the state and dispersed its inhabitants. From the 2nd to the 6th centuries Jews wrote the Talmud, a lengthy work of legal rulings and Biblical exegesis which—along with the Tanakh—is a key text of Judaism. Christianity
Christianity began in the 1st century as a sect within Judaism initially led by Jesus. His followers viewed him as the Messiah; after his death they came to view him as the incarnate son of God who was resurrected and will come at the end of time to usher in a new world. Within a few decades the new movement split from Judaism. After an initial period of persecution by the authorities Christianity, became the state church of the Roman Empire, but has been split into various churches from its beginning. Islam
Islam is based on the prophecies of Muhammad, as recorded in the Qur'an. Islam teaches, in contrast to all other Abrahamic religions, that every prophet preached Islam, providing a historical back-story for the religion by co-opting Jewish and Christian prophets, and adding some additional ones, such as Alexander or Cyrus the Great as Dhul Qarnayn and al-Khidr, with the corrected version of this same faith. It is held that Allah allowed former revelations to be corrupted, being laid out in the final revelation, the Qur'an. These teachings were presented, and are still regarded by Muslims, as the direct revelation and words of Allah, believing that the earlier scriptures were corrupted over time. Islam (meaning "submission", in the sense of submission to Allah) is universal (like the other faiths, membership is open to anyone); like Judaism, it has a strictly unitary conception of Allah, called tawhid or "strict" or "simple" monotheism, the doctrine of Allah's nature, which the basic principles of are expounded in Surah 112 of the Qur'an, called al-Ikhlas.[48] The cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem (from which, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was teleported to from Mecca, from whence he rode a winged camel called Buraq through the seven heavens, accompanied by the Archangel Gabriel, but also theorised by non-Islamic scholars to be a vestige of the Jewish Messianic roots of Islam[50]) are central to Islam.
