Medieval Europeans classified all world religions under a four-part scheme.

Evidence

At the end of the medieval period the general assumption was that there were four main world religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism. In time the more obvious of the great priestly and text-based religions of India, Japan, and China could be more or less accommodated in this grouping as the parallels between them and the known religions were so evident. Comparisons were particularly frequent between Indian religions and Judaism and the production of texts of comparison has continued to this day. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the medieval four-religion taxonomy (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, paganism) as the baseline grid into which all later discoveries were slotted.
• XREF: Connects to the Complaints About Immodesty material on how European observers projected their own categories onto foreign cultures — same classificatory impulse.