Jewish, Christian and Islamic Origins

What cultural and societal processes shaped Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions? Discover the varied religious roots of modern society, studying the testimonies these traditions left behind.

The Department of Jewish, Christian and Islamic Origins is a major European centre for the study of the origins and cultural contexts of the three religious traditions. Based at the non-confessional Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society of the University of Groningen, the department is unique in its combined focus on the multi- and interdisciplinary analysis of the texts and artifacts of these traditions. Traditional disciplines such as history, archaeology, philology, literary analysis and interpretation, codicology, palaeography, and epigraphy are combined with cutting-edge developments in fields such as artificial intelligence and forensics with a view to cracking the mysteries of the ancient religions of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

Besides the study of the foundational texts of the Jewish and Christian Bibles, and the Quran, the department puts a strong focus on the alternative traditions not included in the official Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures, but recorded in the famous Dead-Sea scrolls, Jewish and Christian apocrypha, the Nag Hammadi collection, pre- and early Islamic inscriptions and Quranic manuscripts.