The Argument of my Research Project

My claim is that the three texts will have enough similarities to come to a conclusion that all three texts have the same core or fundamental message meaning that all the texts are of the same religion and that the only reason for differnces between the texts is the passing of the texts through corrupt leaders (monarchs and clergy) over time.

This is a very hefty claim.

The reasoning that supports my claim is that all three texts were sent down to Prophets that were descendants of Abraham and all three religions are considered to monotheistic.

The evidence I seek to use is through running tf-idf on all three texts and analyzing word frequencies in all of them. I may need to look at the location/part of the text that specific words come up more often. I may need to look at word associations (which words come next to other words).

Any complications or objections I may have is that the texts I will be using are not going to be the “original” texts as I don’t have access to those excpet with the Qur’an. And even then, they are not all in the same language, so I have to be chooisng the english translations of all three texts. There are different versions of both the Torah and the Bible and so I will have to decide which ones to analyze. To combat this seeming subjectivity, I plan on choosing the three most widely-used or popular versions of each English langauge/translation of each text. I will somehow combine/compare the results I get of differences within different versions of each text before I move on to compare all three texts.

My warrant would be that because the reasonings I made are mostly accepted in the three religions and after consulting family trees, my claim does have some ground - since they’re all related, shouldn’t they all come with the same message reinforcing each other instead of coming down with entirely different religions?

As for the “type” of paper/project my research will take the form of, I believe mine will be some type of combination of “The Controversy Paper” and “The Historical Contextualization”. The limited research I made and my experience as a human in this world tell me that the claim I am making is very controversial and that it is most definitely a contentious topic that has not been agreed upon in either the world of acdemia or to the average Abrahamic religion-practicing person as the three religions are still seen as individual and thought to be fundamentally different that than the other two. This project may also have some aspects of historical contextualization as all three texts have been introduced to the world at different times with different prophets and understanding the historical context of the texts will probably be needed in order to make such a claim as I plan to make.

Written on October 31, 2016 by Saja Hamayel