Goldziher held that no religion originated from sudden divine revelation

Evidence

Such a fluid view of the historical development of Judaism permitted Goldziher to make two crucial claims. The first was that no religion—not even the original monotheistic faith—was the product of a sudden religious revolution; rather, it evolved by adopting that successful Jewish strategy of borrowing (and rejecting) from surrounding cultures. In other words, no faith could claim to hold the lien on doctrinal truth born of divine revelation. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 398

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how a 19th-century Jewish scholar’s historicist reading of religion prefigured modern secular theories of religious evolution and undercut exclusivist truth claims.