Religious founder

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As religious leaders called comparative religious studies and popular parlance traditional people who actively or passively the impetus for the formation of a new religion should have given. This term is traditionally related to the history of the impact, i.e. it is retained even when the historical existence of the person is questionable. The founders of so-called world religions are (in the assumed chronological order):

The Hinduism known for many individual schools such. B. Vedanta or Vishnuitic , Shivaitic and Shakta schools of religious founders. Well-known religious founders of Hinduism are z. B. Shankara , Madhva and Chaitanya .

The designation as founder of a religion is controversial in many cases and does not necessarily coincide with the self-image of the so-called people, who in many cases only see themselves as reformers of an existing religion. Buddhists see Siddhartha Gautama as a rediscoverer of Buddhahood, not as its founder. Laozi did not represent a new religion, but a philosophy . Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as the Messiah sent to the Jews ; the foundations of Christianity, which after his death worshiped him as the savior of humanity, were only developed by Paul . And Mohammed is not presented in the Koran as the founder or founder of Islam, but as the most important and final prophet of a monotheism that has existed since the beginning of mankind .

Sometimes the lack of founders of religion (e.g. in the Theological Real Encyclopedia ) is cited as a distinguishing feature of the orally transmitted ethnic religions .

literature

Single receipts

  1. Hans Conzelmann: Geschichte des Urchristentums , 4th edition, Göttingen 1978, p. 1