From Revelation to Tradition: The Textual Journey of Three Religions

This article comparatively examines the five books of the Torah, the four canonical Gospels, and the Qur’an, focusing on their textual structures, the distinction between revelation and human narratives, and the historical development of religious authority. It explores how the Mishnah, Talmud, Christian canonical and interpretive traditions, and Sunni and Shia hadith collections acquired authority in relation to sacred texts. The study also considers early Qur’anic manuscripts, particularly the Sana 1 palimpsest, and proposes a sociometric framework for investigating citation networks, transmission chains, and source priority. The central argument is that the functional similarity lies not in the Qur’anic text itself, but in the religious narrative and interpretive traditions that developed around sacred texts.