Abstract
The thesis concerning the Jewish-Christian origins of Islam has been continuously defended and developed by a good number of authors, even if the proponents of this line of thought have never constituted a school nor followed a unitary or homogeneous discourse. At the other end of the spectrum, many scholars strongly reject the ‘Jewish-Christian connection’ insofar as it introduces a speculative and unnecessary category in the study on the origins of Islam. The matter has aroused irreconcilable stances, studies that remain alien to each other, or simply seem to ignore the status quaestionis. From the traditional perspective, the debate seems to have reached a deadlock, however, and to explain a possible legal, cultural, and religious ‘Judaeo-Christian’ continuum that could be shared by the early Islamic audience, it might be useful to look around the spectrum of mixed beliefs and practices between the Jewish and Christian orthodoxy that can be found at a time very close to the arrival of Islam.
Highlights
It is a commonly accepted fact that Islam was not a sudden innovation in the religious landscape of its time, but that it emerged gradually from a ‘primordial soup’ in which pre-existing monotheisms and Arab cultural forms coexisted (Wansbrough 1970, 1977; Costa 2020)
More in line with the so-called revisionist movement, argues that the situation was much murkier on the ground. According to this revisionist position, in order to remap the situation in which Islam was born, it would be necessary to consider the evidence pointing to the fact that Arabian, and
Christianity that is reflected in the Qur’ān would be a kind of marginal and Nontrinitarianist movement that might be close to some “Jewish Christian” groups (De Blois 2010, pp. 622–23)
Summary
It is a commonly accepted fact that Islam was not a sudden innovation in the religious landscape of its time, but that it emerged gradually from a ‘primordial soup’ in which pre-existing monotheisms and Arab cultural forms coexisted (Wansbrough 1970, 1977; Costa 2020). The first one, which we might call ‘the standard Orientalist position’, would assume that the new doctrine was influenced[1] by the main religions of the Middle Eastern environment in the forms in which we know them: Judaism, Christianity Monophysite and Nestorian, Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, and Arab polytheism. Another line of research, more in line with the so-called revisionist movement, argues that the situation was much murkier on the ground. In this we should include the multiple ‘Jewish’ ways of belief and worship that continued to persist thanks to almost two different circumstances, that is, the evolution of the original Christianity of Jewish origin or the continuous mutual contact between Christians and Jews
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