Abrahamic Religions, and the Historians Who Dispute the Label

Aaron Hughes’s 2012 book makes the case that “Abrahamic religions” is not a description but an artefact. Before the mid-20th century, the word “Abrahamic” turns up almost exclusively inside interfaith polemic — each tradition claiming Abraham for itself, against the others, not shared with them. It was Christian supersessionist argument on one side and the Muslim millat Ibrahim on the other; neither used the term to unite three religions, both used it to say which one alone was the true heir. Only after 1945 — and, Hughes argues, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the wars that followed Israel’s founding, and the end of European colonial rule in North Africa — did “Abrahamic” flip from a mark of exclusion to a symbol of shared bond. What it became was, in Hughes’s own words, “a vaguely defined set of shared essential and phenomenological traits.” His complaint is not that the three traditions share nothing; it is that the category “forces an artificial order on three radically different traditions,” substituting an abstract, theological commonality for the historically specific ways they have actually related — sometimes closely, more often adversarially.

• 1945the rough hinge Hughes identifies, after which “Abrahamic” stops meaning exclusion and starts meaning bond
• p.35where Hughes writes the phrase “a vaguely defined set of shared essential and phenomenological traits”
• p.80where Hughes writes that the category “forces an artificial order on three radically different traditions”

Mark Smith’s two books make the case that Israelite monotheism is not a starting point but an outcome. Modelling early Israel’s pantheon on the one recovered at Ugarit — El and his consort Athirat at the head, lesser deities below — Smith reads Yahweh as beginning in a second tier, subservient to El, and only later becoming identified with El and raised to first rank. Explicit monotheism, denying other gods exist rather than merely declining to worship them, he dates rhetorically to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, as lineage-based social structure weakened and Assyrian and then Babylonian power closed in, reaching its clearest statement in Isaiah 40–55. A parallel argument runs through the patriarchal narratives: Thompson and Van Seters, writing in 1974 and 1975, broke a consensus that had dated Abraham’s stories archaeologically to the early second millennium BCE, concluding — in Thompson’s own words, reached here only through a page-cited secondary quotation — that the search for a historical Abraham is not a project the evidence supports. Ronald Hendel, writing three decades later, complicates rather than reverses that verdict: some elements of the tradition, he argues, may still carry genuine cultural memory of real antiquity even where nothing in them can be verified as literal history.

• 3 stagespolytheism, then monolatry (other gods exist but are not worshipped), then monotheism (other gods denied outright)
• Isaiah 40–55the text Smith reads as monotheism’s clearest rhetorical statement, from the exilic period

The same question — one clean break, or several messy ones — recurs in how Judaism and Christianity separated, and in how early Islamic history was written down. James Dunn titled his 1991 book in the plural, The Partings of the Ways, because he found no single moment of separation to point to. Daniel Boyarin goes further: in his account, Judaism and Christianity formed one unstable, shared cultural continuum well into late antiquity, and the border between them was drawn later, by particular writers on both sides — Boyarin’s own account gives the Christian apologist Justin Martyr a leading role in constructing “Judaism” as a bounded category, in the same act by which he asserted a bounded Christian one. On early Islam, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s 1977 Hagarism argued for building the history from contemporary non-Muslim sources rather than the traditional Islamic narrative, compiled generations after the events it describes; John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies, the same year, went further still, arguing the Qur’an’s own text shows signs of having developed over a longer period than a single seventh-century revelation. Neither claim, worth stating plainly, denies that Muhammad existed; the dispute is about how the earliest sources were formed and what they can support. The revisionists did not simply win: Crone herself later revised parts of her own argument, and Robert Hoyland’s 1997 synthesis absorbed the revisionists’ method — check the tradition against outside, contemporary sources — while reading the Arab conquests within the broader frame of Late Antiquity rather than treating the traditional narrative as either simply true or simply demolished.

• no single datewhat Dunn and Boyarin agree on, even though they disagree on almost everything else about how the separation happened
• not refutedthe right word for what happened to strict revisionism: its method was absorbed even where its most radical claims were not

Under Islamic rule, Jews and Christians held the legal status of dhimmi, “protected” non-Muslims: a poll tax (jizya) and legal subordination in exchange for protection of life, property and a measure of communal self-government. What that self-government looked like institutionally is where recent scholarship has revised the picture most sharply. The commonly described “millet system” — a settled Ottoman framework recognising Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish communities as self-governing bodies from the 1453 conquest onward — has, per a 2025 peer-reviewed study extending a 1982 argument, no grounding in the historical record for that period. The real, older distinction structuring Ottoman rule was the Islamic legal one between Muslim and dhimmi; “millet” as an organising idea of communal difference is a nineteenth-century development, tied to the Tanzimat reforms that began with the 1839 Edict of Gülhane — the same reforms that, in a further reversal, proclaimed the legal equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion.

• 1839the Edict of Gülhane, opening the Tanzimat reforms that both proclaimed legal equality and, later, hardened into “millet” as a category
• Muslim / dhimmithe real, older legal distinction the “millet” framework is now argued to have replaced, not continued

Christianity fell 1.8 percentage points to 28.8% of world population in 2020 (2.3 billion people, up from 2.1 billion, +6%), while its geographic centre kept moving south: sub-Saharan Africa passed Europe as home to the largest number of Christians, holding 30.7% of the world’s Christians (697 million) against Europe’s 22.3% (505 million) — a reversal of the position a century ago, when, per Philip Jenkins’s own figures, Europe alone held two-thirds of the world’s Christians and North America and Europe together held 83% of them. Islam grew fastest of any major religion, rising 1.8 points to 25.6% (2.0 billion, up from 1.7 billion) — an increase of 347 million people in a decade, which Pew states plainly is “more than all other religions combined.” Judaism, the smallest of the three counted separately, grew to 14.8 million people (0.2% of world population), still below the estimated 16.6 million Jews alive in 1939, before the Holocaust. Its own geography shifted too: the Middle East–North Africa region passed North America as home to the largest Jewish population, now holding 45.9% of the world’s Jews against North America’s 41.2%, driven mainly by Israel’s Jewish population growing from 5.8 million to 6.8 million over the decade; 85% of all Jews worldwide live in Israel or the United States. A separate, older Pew projection, from 2015, suggested that if 2010s trends held, Muslims (2.8 billion, 30%) would come close to Christians (2.9 billion, 31%) worldwide by 2050 — a projection Pew’s newer 2025 report neither repeats nor updates.

• +347mIslam’s growth 2010–2020 — Pew’s own words: “more than all other religions combined”
• still below 1939the 2020 world Jewish population, against the estimated pre-Holocaust count

None of this settles, or tries to settle, whether any of the three traditions’ revelations are true; that is a theological question, and this record has kept to what historians and scholars of religion have established rather than to what any of them should be believed to mean. What the record does show is that “Abrahamic religions” names a modern arrangement of much older, and often adversarial, material — a label built in the mid-20th century over three traditions whose own founding claims (an evolved rather than founding monotheism, a patriarch whose historicity cannot be shown, a scripture some argue took shape over time) are themselves the objects of historical dispute rather than settled ground any of the three, or the category over them, can simply stand on. The scholarship also refuses easy shapes on both sides of that argument: revisionism did not defeat tradition, it was partly absorbed by it; convivencia was not simply a myth, nor simply real, but a pragmatic arrangement each side is still arguing over how to characterise; and the plainest institutional fact in the whole record — that Rome formally reversed centuries of teaching about Jews in 1965, in two separate acts a matter of weeks apart — changed doctrine and practice without settling the historical arguments underneath it.

• method, not theologythis record reports what historians have established and where they disagree; it takes no position on any revelation’s truth
• a count, not a verdicthow many people practise each tradition today answers a different question from whether the category grouping them is sound