Which came first christianity or islam

The history of Judaism is essential to understanding the Jewish faith, which has a rich heritage of law, With about million followers, scholars consider Buddhism one of the major world religions.

Its practice has historically been most prominent in East and Southeast Wicca is a modern-day, nature-based pagan religion. Though rituals and practices vary among people who identify as Wiccan, most observations include the festival celebrations of solstices and equinoxes, the honoring of a male god and a female goddess, and the incorporation of The Inquisition was a powerful office set up within the Catholic Church to root out and punish heresy throughout Europe and the Americas.

Beginning in the 12th century and continuing for hundreds of years, the Inquisition is infamous for the severity of its tortures and its Mormons are a religious group that embrace concepts of Christianity as well as revelations made by their founder, Joseph Smith.

Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world, with more than 2 billion followers. The Christian faith centers on beliefs regarding the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. While it started with a small group of adherents, many historians regard The Bible is the holy scripture of the Christian religion, purporting to tell the history of the Earth from its earliest creation to the spread of Christianity in the first century A.

Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have undergone changes over the centuries, Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Muslims are monotheistic and worship one, all-knowing God, who in Arabic is known as Allah. Followers of Islam aim to live a life of complete submission to Allah.

Muslims contend that Muhammad was the final prophet. Mosques are places where Muslims worship. The Quran or Koran is the major holy text of Islam.

The Hadith is another important book. Muslims also revere some material found in the Judeo-Christian Bible. Followers worship Allah by praying and reciting the Quran. They believe there will be a day of judgment, and life after death.

Hijra In , Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Medina with his supporters. Sunnis and Shiites When Muhammad died, there was debate over who should replace him as leader. Some of these include: Wahhabi : This Sunni sect, made up of members of the Tameem tribe in Saudi Arabia, was founded in the 18th century. Followers observe an extremely strict interpretation of Islam that was taught by Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab. Alawite : This Shiite form of Islam is prevalent in Syria. Followers hold similar beliefs about the caliph Ali but also observe some Christian and Zoroastrian holidays.

Kharijites : This sect broke from the Shiites after disagreeing over how to select a new leader. They are known for radical fundamentalism, and today are called Ibadis.

Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. The Swiss Guard. In Europe, Jews had tended to be segregated -- voluntarily or not -- from the Christian population.

From the late 19th and through first half of the 20th century, many Ashkenazi Jews came to Palestine to escape the persecution and discrimination they faced because of their religion.

They once spoke Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish communities tended to be integrated into their respective societies. There is great difference of opinion among Israeli Jews over the role Jewish religious law should play in the state. Until recently, Orthodox Judaism was the only form of the religion formally and legally recognized in Israel. Although less conservative branches of Judaism now have partial recognition, Orthodoxy remains dominant politically and legally.

Many Israeli Jews describe themselves in terms of their degree of observance of Jewish law. About half call themselves secular ; about 15 to 20 percent see themselves as Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox; and the rest describe themselves as traditionally observant, but not as strict as the Orthodox.

In the United States, debate over the necessity of observing Jewish law has led to the development of three major movements. Orthodox Jews believe that Jewish law is unchanging and mandatory. Conservative Jews argue that God's laws change and evolve over time. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews believe that these laws are merely guidelines that individuals can choose to follow or not.

In addition, there are many Jews in the United States who are secular or atheist. For them, their Judaism is a culture rather than a religion. Jews believe in one god and his prophets, with special respect for Moses as the prophet to whom God gave the law. Jewish law is embodied in the Torah also known as the Pentateuch and the Talmud collected commentary on the Torah completed in the fifth-century C.

Judaism is more concerned with actions than dogma. In other words, observance of rules regulating human behavior has been of more concern than debates over beliefs in the Jewish tradition. According to Orthodox Judaism, Jewish law, or halakhah , includes commandments given by God in the Torah, as well as rules and practices elaborated by scholars and custom. Jewish law covers matters such as prayer and ritual, diet, rules regulating personal status marriage, divorce, birth, death, inheritance, etc.

Jews do not believe in the prophets after the Jewish prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad. Therefore, they do not subscribe to the idea that Jesus was the Messiah and the son of God, nor do they believe in the teachings of Islam. Christianity started as an offshoot of Judaism in the first century C. Until the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in C. The development of Christian groups derived from major and minor splits.

In the 16th century, Martin Luther, upset at the corruption of the Catholic papacy, spearheaded a reformation movement that led to the development of Protestantism. Christian missionaries proselytize all over the world, and there are large populations of Christians on every continent on Earth, although the forms of Christianity practiced vary.

Many early Christian saints lived in the Middle East. The tradition of asceticism denial of physical pleasures in order to come closer to God developed first in the Middle East, and the monastic tradition has its roots there.

These groups have different liturgical languages, rituals, and customs, and different leaders who direct their faith. The Coptic Church, the dominant form of Christianity in Egypt, arose from a doctrinal split in the Church at the Council of Chalcedon in The Egyptian government supports the Copts' rights to worship and maintain their culture, but there has been some violence against the community by extremist Muslims. The Maronite Church was started in the fifth century by followers of a Syrian priest named Maroun.

The Maronite Patriarch, based in Lebanon, guides his followers in the teachings of Maroun and other saints. Maronites are still one of the most powerful political communities in Lebanon. There are also Christian communities of different sects living today in Syria 10 percent of the population , Jordan 6 percent , the West Bank 8 percent , and Iraq 3 percent , with smaller percentages in other Middle Eastern countries.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Christians from what is now Syria and Lebanon then the Ottoman Empire emigrated to the United States and other countries. Although Christians are a minority in the Middle East today, more than 75 percent of Americans of Arab descent are Christian. Christianity developed out of the monotheistic tradition of Judaism; Jesus, its founder, was a member of the Jewish community in Roman Palestine. Its holy scriptures are the Old Testament the Jewish Torah with additions , and the New Testament written by the followers of Jesus after his death and containing the life story of Jesus and other early Christian writings.

Jesus is considered the son of God, born to the virgin Mary and come to Earth to offer redemption for mankind's sins. After Jesus was crucified and executed by the Romans, he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

It is often assumed that the God of Islam is a fierce war-like deity , in contrast to the God of Christianity and Judaism, who is one of love and mercy.

And yet, despite the manifest differences in how they practise their religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same God. The founder of Islam, Muhammad, saw himself as the last in a line of prophets that reached back through Jesus to Moses, beyond him to Abraham and as far back as Noah.

According to the Quran, God known as Allah revealed to Muhammad:. Thus, since Muhammad inherited the Jewish and Christian understandings of God, it is not surprising that the God of Muhammad, Jesus and Moses has a similarly complex and ambivalent character — a blend of benevolence and compassion, combined with wrath and anger.

If you were obedient to his commands, he could be all sweetness and light. To those who turned to him in repentance, this God was above all else merciful and all-forgiving.

But those who failed to find the path or, having found it failed to follow it, would know his judgment and wrath. The God of the Old Testament was both good and evil. He went way beyond the good when he told Abraham to offer his son to God as a burnt sacrifice.

He was a warrior God who murdered the firstborn of Egypt and drowned the army of Pharaoh. Yet he was also a compassionate and loving God, one who in the well-known words of Psalm 23 in the Book of Psalms was a shepherd whose goodness and mercy supported his followers all the days of their lives. He loved Israel like a father loves his son.

Yet, behind this God of tenderness and love, there remained a ruthless God of justice. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus preached doom and gloom.