Was there a single ancient religion that all others sprang from?

Question

Many religions share same stories, Christianity, Judaism and Islam for example (the ones I know of at least). Some of those stories could even be traced to earlier civilizations in the Middle East region, like the belief in resurrection, God (gods) intervention in the worldly affairs, heaven, hell etc. My question is could we trace these ideas to one ancient religion? That is was their a religion to have been a focal point of all religion of which basic religious ideas came up and been absorbed and modified by other religions? Or were they generally the product of many stories of many unrelated not connected religions which developed separately?

Answer 1

Religions are cultural concepts, they evolve through the time, adapting some ideas from others, providing some new ones, etc. For example, having Christianity of 500 AD, you'd be able to point out some concepts taken (directly or not quite so) from Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Neoplatonism, etc. Then, Christianity itself influenced Islam, Manicheism, lots of Gnostic denominations. Putting these influences graphically, the graph would be in my opinion pretty dense.
The answer to the question would be, that yes, we'd be able to point out some religions, like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, hypothetical Proto-Indo-European cult, etc., which had greater influence than others, and developed concepts used later by many others through the time. But, whose influence was greater, more inspirational, etc., that's highly speculative and controversional, hence - there will be no concrete answer.

Answer 2

No I dont think we could trace it all back to one religion. Religion is a big part of the human experience the need to create a mythical realm where we go after death, seems to be a part of just about every culture. The major religions of today are likely derived from several older religions.

Answer 3

There are lots of religions that was inspired by others.

Roman mythology is in fact almost fully taken from the Greeks. There are some differences, like gods' names and heroes (Ulysses vs Oddyseus), and the main difference is the legend of foundation of Rome (Romulus, Remus and she-wolf).

In the Acts of Apostles chapter 17 there is a story about St. Paul in Athens where he finds an altar "to the unknown god" and he uses this to introduce Christian God to people. This altar was made because there where many cultures (Persian, Egyptian etc.) having their own gods, which were not treated as wrong by the Greeks, but some kind of supplement to their pantheon. I think many foreign gods became also Olympian gods, for example there was always a god responsible for some territory or terrain feature (like gods of rivers, forests etc.). They were accepted while visiting new countries.

And of course the idea of one god (God) is an Israeli development, which was then taken (or improved) by Christianity and then by Islam. Combination of many religions led in later times to creation new ones, like eg. Voodoo.

However, answering to your question. Some religions state, that they were revealed by god(s). In fact, the latest sources of the religions are holy books of themselves and there is no written moment "ok, for now we were atheists and we begin to believe that the truth is out there".

We can only imagine what is the reason of "creation" of gods, of course if they had not existed forever. The natural forces which were not to be explained by small brain, were inspiration of gods. There are lots of natural forces that have (good or devastating) impact on the environment (like rain, thunderbolt, grow of flora, large animals, astronomical events etc.), or on the human himself (like fire that is hot, death of old age). I think that primitive man seeing these random events must have thought that there is some kind of supernatural control in this.

I don't know when this happened, but I think this is the answer to your question: the oldest religion of man is the Nature itself. Because it is much stronger than human, not controllable, not explainable and sometimes acting like it was pleased or angry, this can be considered by the oldest god.

In every (I think) religion gods can control the Nature, like an archer controls his arrow, spearman controls his spear, a farmer controls his corn, a shepherd controls his flock. This control seems to be such obvious, that nothing in the world should have not been left without control. The feeling that everything has its controller fulfils one of human basic needs: the need of security.

Answer 4

Well, the obvious answer is that both Christianity and Islam emerged from Judaism. Christianity is pretty easy to see, since most of us in the West have at least a passing familiarity with the documents (particularly the New Testament) which note the early consolidation of a particular apocalyptic Jewish death cult into what we now know as the Christian religion.

The direct link between Judaism and Islam is a bit more tenuous and, given the poor relationship between the adherents of those religions right now, controversial. However, Wikipedia notes that there was at the very least a bit of tolerance between Mohammed and the earlier religions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic%E2%80%93Jewish_relations#Religious_figures

In the course of Muhammad's proselytizing in Makkah/Mecca, he initially viewed Christians and Jews (both of whom he referred to as "People of the Book") as natural allies, sharing the core principles of his teachings, and anticipated their acceptance and support.

I read a narrative a few years ago whose name completely escapes me that hid a fairly plausible explanation for this camaraderie: that Islam itself arose from a coalition of Arabs and messianic Jews, and that while Muhammed himself may or may not have been born Jewish, he based much of Islam on Jewish teaching. It was an interesting book, wrapped up in the narrative format because it was aimed at the general public rather than academia.

Otherwise, I've heard people (not all of them evangelists) insist that LDS is not a Christian religion, and if you believe this to be the case, then that is most certainly an example of a large religion which has its basis in another one. There is no question that Joseph Smith drew heavily on the Old and New Testaments for inspiration.