History of religion

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The history of religion refers to the written record of human

The concept of "religion" was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries.[3]^[4] Sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written.^[5][6]

The word religion as used in the 21st century does not have an obvious pre-colonial translation into non-European languages. The anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson writes that "what the West and the history of religions in its wake have objectified under the name 'religion' is ... something quite unique, which could be appropriate only to itself and its own history".^[7]

History of study

The school of religious history called the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, a late 19th-century German school of thought, originated the systematic study of religion as a socio-cultural phenomenon. It depicted religion as evolving with human culture, from polytheism to monotheism.

The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule emerged at a time when scholarly study of the

Origin

The earliest archeological evidence interpreted by some as suggestive of the emergence of religious ideas dates back several hundred thousand years, to the

In the 19th century, researchers proposed various theories regarding the origin of religion, challenging earlier claims of a Christianity-like urreligion. Early theorists, such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), emphasized the concept of animism, while archaeologist John Lubbock (1834–1913) used the term "fetishism". Meanwhile, the religious scholar Max Müller (1823–1900) theorized that religion began in hedonism and the folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880) suggested that religion began in "naturalism" – by which he meant mythological explanations for natural events.^{[8][page needed]} All of these theories have been widely criticized since then; there is no broad consensus regarding the origin of religion.

• The Upanishads, some of which date to the mid-first millennium BCE.
• The
  Tanakh.^[13]
• Complete Hebrew texts, also of the
  Tanakh, but translated into the Greek language (Septuagint
  300–200 BCE), were in wide use by the early 1st century CE.
• The Zoroastrian
  Sassanian
  -era master copy.

Some historians have labelled the period from 900 to 200 BCE as the "axial age", a term coined by

The historical roots of Jainism in India date back to the 9th century BCE with the rise of Parshvanatha and his non-violent philosophy.^{[14][15][need quotation to verify]}

Middle Ages

• Christianization of the Western world
• Buddhist missions to East Asia
• the decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent
• the spread of Islam throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and parts of Europe and India

During the Middle Ages,

References

Citations