I was thinking about something similar the other day. I was wondering if, from a historical perspective, it would be valid to look not just specific sects, but all Abrahamic religions, as ‘schisms’ from the original Judaism. One thing is that religious studies scholars and historians may see transformation of one sect into an unambiguously distinct religion as more of an ‘evolution’, like speciation in biology, than ‘schisms’, as we typically think of them in human societies.
I think of the change from Judaism to Christianity as too significant to be viewed as merely a schism. Similarly, it would seem strange to classify Islam or Mormonism as “Christian schisms” in the same way that one would classify, say, the Old Catholic Church as a schism from the main Catholic Church—it’s certainly true that Islam and Mormonism both take Christianity and then add a new prophet and his book on top of it, but that seems too significant to qualify as just a schism. To me, schisms are often notable for the relatively small nature of the differences that they are splitting over, and by the time you’re adding new holy books and substantially reinterpreting the past teachings you’ve gone beyond that phase.
(To give a nonreligious example, I would say “we’re going to make a new forum with exactly the same purview, target audience, and board structure as the old forum but with different moderators” is a schism, while “we’re going to make a new forum that addresses substantially different topics while still including some of the old stuff” is not.)
I was thinking about something similar the other day. I was wondering if, from a historical perspective, it would be valid to look not just specific sects, but all Abrahamic religions, as ‘schisms’ from the original Judaism. One thing is that religious studies scholars and historians may see transformation of one sect into an unambiguously distinct religion as more of an ‘evolution’, like speciation in biology, than ‘schisms’, as we typically think of them in human societies.
I think of the change from Judaism to Christianity as too significant to be viewed as merely a schism. Similarly, it would seem strange to classify Islam or Mormonism as “Christian schisms” in the same way that one would classify, say, the Old Catholic Church as a schism from the main Catholic Church—it’s certainly true that Islam and Mormonism both take Christianity and then add a new prophet and his book on top of it, but that seems too significant to qualify as just a schism. To me, schisms are often notable for the relatively small nature of the differences that they are splitting over, and by the time you’re adding new holy books and substantially reinterpreting the past teachings you’ve gone beyond that phase.
(To give a nonreligious example, I would say “we’re going to make a new forum with exactly the same purview, target audience, and board structure as the old forum but with different moderators” is a schism, while “we’re going to make a new forum that addresses substantially different topics while still including some of the old stuff” is not.)