Why read Shared Stories, Rival Tellings?

Book cover of Shared Stories, Rival Tellings: Early Encounters of Jews, Christians, and Muslims

Book description

While existing scholarship informs us about early contact between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, the nature of that interaction, and how it developed over time, is still often misunderstood. Robert Gregg emphasizes that there was both mutual curiosity, since all three religions had ancestral traditions and a commanding God in common,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Shared Stories, Rival Tellings as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

John Tolan

Author

In this book, Robert Gregg focuses on the narratives around a number of key figures in the sacred history of the Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are “shared stories” because these various writers agreed on most (but not all) of the biographical details of these figures. Indeed, the “rival tellings” often reflect intimate knowledge of each other: the Jewish stories about Mary and Jesus are implicit responses to (and refutations of) Christian beliefs, and the Mary of the Qur’an is a rebuke to both Christian and Jewish versions. Retelling and reinterpreting these stories is a key activity in the construction…

From John's list on making you realize you don’t know what religion is.