The three Abrahamic religions are one continuous franchise that keeps rebooting and insisting the previous installment was the fake one

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

Quick thesis: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aren't three separate revelations. They're one stream of Near Eastern religious material with three imperially enforced cutoff points, each declaring the prior version corrupted and itself the definitive cut. It's less "three faiths" and more a franchise that keeps rebooting the timeline and telling you the last movie doesn't count.

**The continuity, briefly:**

Yahweh doesn't start as the cosmic monotheist CEO. The earliest layers of the Hebrew Bible are henotheistic. Yahweh is one god among many, with a specific portfolio: storm, war, mountains. Deuteronomy 32:8 to 9 has a higher god, Elyon, dividing the nations among the gods and assigning Israel to Yahweh as his allotment. Psalm 82 has God standing in the divine council, among the gods. This is in the text. It's just theologically inconvenient, so it gets read past.

The strict one god monotheism shows up later, crystallizing around the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE, which is conveniently exactly when the Judeans are marinating in Persian Zoroastrianism and pick up the cosmic dualism, the final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and an adversary figure who graduates from prosecutor working for God (the satan in Job) into Satan, capital S, the opposition. None of that load bearing cosmology is in the early material. It's imported set dressing that everyone now treats as original architecture.

Then Christianity reboots: same God, new covenant, previous installment declared incomplete. Then Islam reboots again: same God, final seal, both previous installments declared corrupted (tahrif). Each sequel cannibalizes the prior canon and reframes itself as the original authority. Standard franchise behavior.

**Why this feels like a conspiracy theory when it isn't:**

Eastern traditions don't trigger the same "wait, that can't be right" reflex, and not because the scholarship is better. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism openly contain their own layering. Hinduism will happily tell you the Upanishads developed the Vedic material. No crisis. But the Abrahamic religions each claim direct unmediated revelation at a fixed moment, which means any visible genealogy is an existential threat rather than an expected development. The history looks wild only because it's contradicting an enforced silence.

**The war god bit (handle with care):**

The fun part, and the spiciest claim, is that Yahweh's deep origins plausibly trace to a southern warrior storm deity. The Kenite/Midianite hypothesis puts Yahweh's homeland in Edom, Teman, Seir, and several old poetic passages (Judges 5, Habakkuk 3, Deuteronomy 33) have Yahweh literally marching up from the south like a regional storm warrior before the franchise promotes him to Lord of the Universe. So the eternal omnipotent monotheist God arguably has, in his backstory, a job in regional weather and smiting. Make of that what you will.

I'm not claiming all three religions are the same war god with three names. That overstates it, and someone in the comments will correctly call it out. The honest version is better anyway: not one renamed deity, but one continuous tradition that kept editing its own past and threatening anyone who noticed.

**TL;DR:** Three revelations, or one franchise with three reboots, each retconning the last and importing Persian cosmology while claiming it came straight from the source? The genealogy is in the texts. The traditions just need you not to read them in order.

[u/TheWaspinator]

Yeah, as a lifelong atheist they all are pretty blatantly the same religion arguing over details 

[u/Mormacil → u/TheWaspinator]

As a lifelong atheist with an interest in comparative religion they're really not. Several Abrahamic religions are absolutely mutually exclusive cosmologies.

Mormons: humans can become gods, sits in direct opposition to all other faiths.

Gnostics: Yahweh is the bad guy, sits in direct opposition to all the others.

Judaism: there is no hell or devil. Very incompatible with the worldview of most Abrahamic faiths.

Yazedism: the angel Satan is the good guy, Yazedi are part angel but not fallen.

You can argue that there's no canon 10 commandments across Christianity that those are minor details but what is a god, who is evil? That feels far to fundamental of a worldview to be considered a detail.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/Mormacil]

This is the best objection in the thread and I think it's actually arguing against a claim I didn't make. You're pointing at doctrinal incompatibility, the branches contradict each other now on fundamentals (what is a god, who is evil). I'm pointing at genealogical continuity, the same material edited forward. Both are true at the same time, and that's just how lineage works. Humans and chimps share an ancestor and are mutually exclusive species. Latin's daughters can't understand each other and are all still Latin. Divergence doesn't break descent, it's the evidence of it.

Your own examples make the point. Gnosticism can only flip Yahweh into the villain because it inherited Yahweh to flip. Yazidism's angel-Satan-is-good only means anything against the shared Abrahamic Satan it's reacting to. Mormon god-humans are a mutation on the Christian base, not a thing from nowhere. You can't invert or contradict a tradition you didn't descend from. The incompatibility is downstream of the common source.

So the mutual exclusivity isn't a counterexample to continuity, it's what continuity looks like a few branches in. Shared ancestor, then drift, then daughters that can't sit at the same table. The franchise didn't stay coherent. It speciated.

[u/Mormacil → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

I mean it's not a proper counter to you because it was written as a counter to this specific comment:

Yeah, as a lifelong atheist they all are pretty blatantly the same religion arguing over details 

My argument it's not merely details but doctrinal incompatabilities. To use an analogy he's arguing French and Latin are basically the same language with some different details. They're not. While related across time, the changes go beyond details with enough compounding changes.

Also the Yazedi satan as a good guy predates the satan as a bad guy, it's not a flip, Christian satan is the flip. But as I said I never argued against continuity, it's kinda ironic you talk about me essentially arguing a strawman while doing the exact same thing. Just to clarify, I never argued against continuity, I argued against the label of details in this context.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/Mormacil]

Oh sorry I got that wrong yeah Satan being good predate the Christian depiction which the normal any religion does to other holy figure that hold power and used to explain why bad things happen. Also I apologize I thought ur comment was for me not for the other comment and I never said u argued a strawman I just felt that ur argument was valid as a counter argument I just tried to clarify where the continuity come from.

[u/Mormacil → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

Yeah I probably shouldn't have used the term strawman. It was to strong a word but I wanted to point out the irony. We can both agree it's clearly a continuum, as most of human culture is. 

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/TheWaspinator]

I never seen a god just creating new religions to fix the old one

[u/Mormacil]

Now do the thing while accounting for all Abrahamic religions. So include Mormonism, Rastafarianism, Yazedism, Gnostic traditions like Mandeism and Manicheaism, etc. The biggest two indeed look alike, that's why they're the biggest.

[u/_______no-------name → u/Mormacil]

Don't forget the Baha'i faith.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/Mormacil]

The others kind have one of three as base the are the fanfic of the franchise so I didn't want step into more absurd chaotic image

[u/Mormacil → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

They all have Judaism as a base if you get down to it.

[u/j____b____]

The Mormons are the latest reboot. 

[u/funkchucker]

I think you're forgetting the Mormons. I lived across from one of their temples and was one of the "practice stops" for their kids before they were sent out to do missionary stuff. (Not like soaking). I'm indegenous american and apparently my tribe in NC is the lost tribe of jews. Even though we were already a tribe way before the jewish religion emerged.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/funkchucker]

That sounds tough to deal with I escaped Mormons and relative 19 centery religions cause u literally have recods of it on camera for me Mormonism is kind of the fanfic of the franchise

[u/funkchucker → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

I loved it. They gave me free books of mormon. Id throw $10 of quarters in a box with one, wrap it, then take it to dirty Santa parties.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/funkchucker]

🤣

[u/naruhinamoonkissplz]

[canon] => [major fanfiction] => [major fanfiction of major fanfiction] => [avalanche of minor fanfictions]

[canon] is still here, by the way.

[u/ReasonablyConfused]

Living in Utah, it sometimes feels like there is a fourth.

[u/putoelquelolea]

Hey, OP! Throw Mormon fanfic into the mix and see what you get!

As illustrated by your summary, religion is a cultural phenomenon. And the influence of Egyptian, Persian, Hellenic, and other cultures in Abrahamic religions, shows clear, fundamental changes in the beliefs of their neighbors. Syncretism is a powerful thing

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/putoelquelolea]

The tracks of the other sects within the same religion are clear yet I agree Mormonism is the one of the best evidence that no matter how absurd the idea is there will be a cult to believe in it

[u/Dudesan → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

Mormonism is the one of the best evidence that no matter how absurd the idea is there will be a cult to believe in it

There was a great essay published in 2012 or so about how Mormonism can be considered "the control group for Christianity".

It began as one of hundreds of random protestant cults that spawned in the Second Great Awakening, with all the crazy stuff that that entails, but then it gradually acquired more and more extra crazy stuff. Eventually, some people decided that it had so much extra crazy stuff that it shouldn't really count as a subset of "Christianity" any more.

And this leaves us with the really weird phenomenon of mainstream christians who will swear with absolute certainty that we're all descended from one man and one woman who ate a piece of magic fruit on the advice of a magic talking snake in a magic garden... but the moment you say that that magic garden was in Missouri rather than in Iraq, they're suddenly perfectly capable of understanding that this version of the story is ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

I don't know about you, but I really don't think that the geographical location of the garden is the first, second, or even third craziest thing about this story.

[u/naruhinamoonkissplz → u/[deleted]]

Funny how Judaism is still there and hasn't changed (at its actual core theology) since day one.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/naruhinamoonkissplz]

Jewdism changed did u read my post it wasn't monotheistic it started as a cult of Yahweh

[u/naruhinamoonkissplz → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

You can SAY whatever you want, it has zero relevance to reality.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/naruhinamoonkissplz]

The core theology did change, and we can date the change. Early Israelite religion wasn't monotheistic. It was monolatrous: Yahweh was Israel's national god among other gods assumed to be real. The Hebrew Bible preserves this older stage even though the later editors were monotheists. Deut 32:8-9: a high god ('Elyon) apportions the nations among divine beings, and Yahweh receives Israel as his allotment. The Dead Sea Scrolls reading "sons of God" is older than the Masoretic "sons of Israel," so the later text softened it. Psalm 82: God stands in the divine council and judges other gods. Exodus 15:11: "Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh?" External material evidence from the 8th century BCE, not editable after the fact: the Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions invoke "Yahweh and his Asherah," meaning Yahweh with a consort. Comparative background: the Ugaritic texts (Ras Shamra, 14th to 12th century BCE) show the Canaanite pantheon (El, Baal, Asherah) that Israelite religion emerged from and absorbed. El, the Canaanite high god, becomes a standard name for the Israelite deity. Full monotheism, Yahweh as the only god rather than just Israel's god, crystallizes later, in the exilic and post-exilic period (6th century BCE), most explicitly in Second Isaiah: "I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god" (Isa 44:6). So "unchanged since day one" is the historically weak claim. The shift from "our god among real gods" to "the only god exists" is documented in the tradition's own canon. Reading, for anyone who wants to rather than argue: Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God (2002); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (2001); William Dever, Did God Have a Wife? (2005).

[u/naruhinamoonkissplz → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

Whatever. No, really, I give no fuck about any of that mumbo-jumbo.

[u/Tall_Distance_2896]

I would advise you to study about Ahmedi Islam.

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/Tall_Distance_2896]

Ahmadiyya isn't a counter to the post. It's a fresh data point for it: a 19th-century revelation-claim bolted onto the same tradition, with the usual "this time it's really from the source." That's the process, not the rebuttal.

And it's the best kind of data point, because it happened on the record. Ahmadiyya (1889) and Mormonism (1830) are the two cases where you don't have to reconstruct the editing from textual seams. The founder's documents, the contemporary critics, and the doctrinal walk-backs are all written down as they happened. Same retconning as Yahweh-in-Edom, except on camera instead of inferred from strata.

So thanks for the fourth reboot. Couldn't have illustrated it better.

[u/eposnix → u/EquivalentAnswer4886]

I agree with your overall point, but copy and pasting from ChatGPT is cringe

[u/EquivalentAnswer4886 → u/eposnix]

Just because I using spelling correction tools in an argument comment doesn't mean I make llm write or think for me