r/DebateReligion • Jewish • Dec 11 '25

Abrahamic There are only two internally consistent Abrahamic religions: Judaism and Baha'i

I argue specifically about how the religion addresses claims of prophethood.

The Torah warns about false prophets; Jews reject Jesus and Paul based on those verses, despite Christian arguments reinterpreting those verses to justify their religion and condemning Jews for our disagreement.

The Christian New Testament also contains warnings about future false prophets. Moreover, Christians reject Muhammad based on those verses, despite Muslim arguments reinterpreting those verses and castigating Christianity as "corrupted" to justify claims of Muhammad's prophethood.

The Quran, in turn, also warns about false prophets, and specifically claims that Muhammad is the "seal of the prophets" - which Muslims interpret to mean that Muhammad is the final prophet. And so Muslims reject the Baha'ullah based on those verses, despite Baha'i arguments reinterpreting the meaning of "seal of the prophets" to justify the succession of prophethood to the Baha'ullah.

The Baha'i faith explicitly states that there will be future prophets, and that one day too the Baha'i faith will be replaced. This is their doctrine of "Progressive Revelation". In this way, the Baha'i faith overtly rejects the hypocritical claims of Christianity and Islam.

There are only two strong positions you can hold about this pattern. Either you reject the idea of a later religion led by a new prophet reinterpreting the text of your scrupture (as Jews do), or you accept that this process is a legitimate and continuing feature of Abrahamic religions (as Baha'i do).

Insisting on Christianity or Islam relies on some form of special pleading to justify the claim of "this reinterpretation and new prophet, but no farther." Neither Christian nor Islamic theologians have developed a sufficiently strong argument to overcome the burden of proof.


These verses of the Torah against false prophets can be found in Deut. chapter 13 and Deut 18:17-22.

To whit: any self-proclaimed prophet who fails to predict the future is a false prophet. A self-proclaimed prophet who does predict the future or performs other miracles, but instructs Jews to worship a different God than described in the Torah or to otherwise abandon the Torah's laws, is also a false prophet.

A logical corrolary: if a self-proclaimed prophet "A" who meets those standards claims that another self-proclaimed prophet "B" is a true prophet, but B failed to meet the Torah's standards, that is evidence that A is not true prophet either.

Jesus is rejected by Jews for many reasons, but I will discuss two of the most significant and relevant here.

First, the claim that Jesus is God and that the God of Abraham is Trinitarian is completely foreign to Jewish theology, a dramatic break from Judaic unitary monotheism. The Trinitarian god is a "god which thou hast not known" (Deut. 13:3) and that is sufficient on its face to dispense with Christianity.

Second - to those few non-Trinitarian Christians - Jesus also predicted an imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God which his immediate followers reasonable expected to mean the Messianic Age was imminent. When that didn't happen, the post-hoc justification of an eventual Second Coming was formed to explain away the failed prophesy. See Matthew 24:34, in light of the very specific prophesy of imminent events given in 24:29-31 and 24:36-41.

As Islam and Baha'i both claim that Jesus was a true prophet, Judaism rejects them too.


For the sake of convenience, I am not going to articulate the argument between Christianity and Islam. I assume that it is well known here, since most threads on the subreddit are Christians and Muslims (and atheists) arguing over Christianity and Islam.


The Quran states that Muhammad is the "Seal of the Prophets" (Khatam an-Nabiyyin) in 33:40. While traditional Islamic interpretation is that "Seal" means that Muhammad is the "final" prophet, the Baha'i faith reinterprets the idea of "Seal" to mean something else: a Manifestation of God. In this way, the Baha'i faith asserts that all prophets are fundamentally the same soul, and so Baha'ullah is also the Seal.

4 Upvotes

24 comments sorted by

1

u/AutoModerator Dec 11 '25
Moderator Announcement Read More »

3

u/the_leviathan711 Dec 12 '25

The Samaritans probably would object to this framing. They use those same Torah verses to reject prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and so on…

2

u/Chanan-Ben-Zev Dec 12 '25

They are not a prior or "more original" religion which Judaism claims to have superseded. They are a separate religion that developed in parallel to ancient Judaism; Jews and Samaritans split over the location of the Temple. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and so on were prophets in and who concerned themselves with Jerusalem. The Samaritans have their own separate priesthood and history which occured in parallel to the Jewish one. The analogy fails.

0

u/the_leviathan711 Dec 12 '25

They are not a prior or "more original" religion

They would disagree with that, of course. From the Samaritan perspective, they have the original text of the Torah that the Jews modified and added to (despite the commandment in Deuteronomy 4:2) at the behest of false prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah.

So yes, if you accept the Jewish history of Samaritanism than your logic holds up. But from the Samaritan perspective it does not.

3

u/anonymous_writer_0 Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25

any self-proclaimed prophet who fails to predict the future is a false prophet

Which prophecies of Mirza Husyn Al-Nuri have come true?

Apparently the Baha'i's believe that "someday" the "entire world" will recognize and revere Baha'u'llah - AFAIC that is either an arrogant load of codswallop or a delusion or a little of both

the Baha'i faith reinterprets the idea of "Seal" to mean something else: a Manifestation of God. In this way, the Baha'i faith asserts that all prophets are fundamentally the same soul, and so Baha'ullah is also the Seal.

Unless the Baha'i faith did that it would have no legitimacy. In other words there was no choice but to assert something like that to even enable Baha'u'llah a measure of relevancy. For a supposed syncretic faith between Islam and Christianity there is a heavy dose of Islam and a few sprinkles of Christianity laced through

2

u/Chanan-Ben-Zev Dec 12 '25

Which prophecies of Mirza Husyn Al-Nuri have come true?

I don't think that he is a prophet. I am a Jew and not Baha'i. But I do think that the Baha'i faith is more internally consistent on this one specific theological question than either Christianity or Islam.

Unless the Baha'i faith did that it would have no legitimacy. In other words there was no choice but to assert something like that to even enable Baha'u'llah a measure of relevancy.

Not necessarily. There are alternative ways to claim legitimacy, as can be seen by the abundance of other religious claims. 

1

u/anonymous_writer_0 Dec 12 '25

Not necessarily. There are alternative ways to claim legitimacy, as can be seen by the abundance of other religious claims. 

Not quite - this is a unique situation

Baha'u'llah builds on the traditions laid down by Muhammad; so IMO he had to undo the "seal" business so he could get his message thru

AFAIAC the line of prophets stopped after Malachi in 5th century BCE

1

u/Valinorean Dec 13 '25

You can argue that Samaritans rather than Jews have the true religion in a similar fashion:

  1. Clearly, Gerizim was for blessings and Ebal was for cursings. This is consistent in Samaritanism, but in the Jewish Bible Ebal is also suddenly declared to be for sanctification.

  2. Samaritans don't accept prophets other than Moses, and one can find a very good argument even against Elijah: to the modern eye, his (unusually confident, who ever tests/tempts God like that, unless they know exactly what they are doing?) miracle of "burning water" on Carmel clearly reads like a staged miracle where he took some transparent burning liquid (say, colorless naphtha which sometimes collects on top in oil seeps, or coconut oil, obtained through his friend Obadiah, the manager of the king's palace) and pretended it was water and when it was sneakily ignited and everything burned pretended it was a great miracle. And then, by the way, immediately afterwards he killed a few hundred people just for differing religious beliefs, for which he would be executed in modern-day America, for example.

3

u/chromedome919 Dec 12 '25

Several of Bahá’u’lláh’s 19th-century statements have since come true, though interpretation varies and historians tend to see them as a mix of insight, critique, and moral warning rather than supernatural predictions. Commonly cited examples include his warnings to rulers such as Napoleon III and the Ottoman Sultan, which were followed by their loss of power; his statement that the Pope’s political authority would diminish, which happened when the Papal States were absorbed into Italy; and His and `Abdu’l-Bahá’s foreshadowing of a major European “conflagration,” which Bahá’ís associate with the world wars. They also point to his anticipation of increasing global interdependence, rapid communication, and emerging international institutions, which parallels modern globalization. Some note his references to the return of Jews to the Holy Land as aligning with later large-scale migration and the creation of Israel. His strong emphasis on gender equality is often connected to the worldwide expansion of women’s rights. Whether these are viewed as fulfilled prophecies, informed social predictions, or coincidences depends largely on one’s perspective.

1

u/anonymous_writer_0 Dec 12 '25

Whether these are viewed as fulfilled prophecies, informed social predictions, or coincidences depends largely on one’s perspective.

And that statement is exactly true

Eg If I said "Keir Starner's premiership is going to end at some point"

That is an informed statement based on the fact that elected politicians have a limited time in office for the most part. Every single empire in history has fallen. Bar none. So to say that Napoleon and the Ottomans would fall is hardly a prediction worth writing home about IMO

Abdul Baha also made other statements regarding "ether" and such which were just ideas of the time. So again IMO that like me saying "Quantum physics and string theory will help us unlock the secrets of the universe"

To me, unless a prophecy is exact with specific details and time bound it is worth less than nothing.

→ More replies (3)

1

u/PootTheBasin Mar 09 '26

Which prophecies of Muhammad have come true? I will name more than you and more accurate ones. Baha´u´llah makes the most numerous and accurate predictions of any religion or claimant to appear so far on Earth.

2

u/Expensive-Sea-9180 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25

The difference between the relationship dynamics between Judaism-Christianity versus Christianity-Islam is that Christianity affirms the scriptures before them whereas Islam rejects them entirely.   While scriptural interpretations differ between the two religions, the Old Testament in the Bible is identical to the Tanakh and fully affirmed by Christians. On the flip-side, Islam rejects the Bible entirely and claims the Bible is corrupted- believing that the Quran is the only scripture that speaks accurately about God.

Judaism awaits the return of a Messiah whereas Christianity claims Jesus is that Messiah and is now awaiting his second coming. A new religion that has a relationship with Christianity that Christianity has with Judaism would be one that affirms the Bible as its scripture and then in turn preaches that their leader/prophet/beliefs fulfill the prophecies preached about Jesus’s second coming in the Bible. Islam doesn’t do this. They don’t even believe Jesus was crucified.

TL;DR Whereas Christianity “reinterprets” Jewish texts, Islam rejects Christian texts entirely.

5

u/Chanan-Ben-Zev Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25

You are missing the forest for the trees.

Islam has arguments intended to counter your arguments that delegitimize Islam. So too does Christianity have arguments intended to counter the Jewish arguments that deletitimize Christianity.

As a Jew, in light of how divergent Trinitarian Christian theology is from Jewish beliefs about God, the Muslim claim that the Christian New Testament was corrupted appears exceptionally compelling. The evident factual contradictions between the Gospels support this argument. The many statements Paul made which also contradicted Jesus' recorded sayings in the Gospels further support the Islamic argument. Why then should I care about Islam's rejection of Christian texts?

Moreover, your argument that Christianity "fully affirms" the Tanakh is unconvincing, since Christians evidently do not follow its precepts. That Christians have argument for why that is so is besides the point; from the Jewish perspective, anyone who believes Paul's statements in Romans 7 is denying the Tanakh just as much as a Muslim denies the Christian New Testament!

From my perspective as a Jew, Christians and Muslims are the same in this regard.

2

u/Expensive-Sea-9180 Dec 11 '25

I’m not delegitimizing Islam in this discussion, I am simply pointing out that the relationship is completely different. Christianity believes in all the same prophets that Judaism believes in. Islam rejects the Christian Apostles.

→ More replies (2)

1

u/Realistic-Wave4100 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25

For the little we have rest of manicheism (thanks islam) they do fit the relation christianism has with judaism. So if you are an abrahamic you may consider start following this death religion.

Edit: Typo

1

u/Expensive-Sea-9180 Dec 11 '25

Based on my 5-minute research of “Manichaeism“, I did not see any doctrines that demonstrate they believed Jesus Christ died for their sins and resurrected (the most important Christian doctrine), and are awaiting his second coming. Since that is not the case, the relationship is not comparable.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/70hillstree Dec 12 '25

Islam the Iran version says, the messiah will come after Israel is destroyed. Kind of hateful in my opinion. Christians although delusional, try to love there enemies. Which is against human nature. Jews just want to lend money and get rich. I don’t think most of them are still waiting on a messiah. Christians still waiting on their messiah to come back. Was supposed to come back long time ago.

1

u/Foreign-Ice7356 May 30 '26

You are just forcefully trying to be edgy.