Was there Buddhism before Abraham's time?

Answer 1

A:If Abraham was a real, historical person, then he lived long before the time of the Buddha. On that view, Buddhism did not exist at the time of Abraham.

However, there is no archaeological evidence that Abraham ever existed, and in fact the biblical account is contradicted in some important ways by what we now know about the ancient world. The consensus of historians and Old Testament scholars is that the Abraham of The Bible was not a real person. On that view, it is meaningless to talk about the time of Abraham and therefore meaningless to think of him living before Buddhism. Judaism, as we understand it today, and Buddhism both arose during the Axial Age.