What major commentaries or schools of interpretation grew around them?

Great commentaries (al-Tabari, Ibn Kathir), four schools of law, and the science of hadith verification — all scholarship in service of the texts, never above them.

Not commentaries but whole traditions: Epicurean materialism, Enlightenment atheism, the Marxist critique of religion, existentialism (Sartre), the analytic philosophy of religion (Mackie, Oppy), and organized secular humanism.

Not commentaries but a philosophical literature: twentieth-century philosophy of religion sharpened the strong/weak distinction and the labels 'agnostic atheist' and 'agnostic theist', and academic treatments such as Anthony Kenny's The Unknown God and Robin Le Poidevin's short introduction carry the discussion today.

The church fathers (Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine); the medieval schools culminating in Aquinas; the Reformation commentaries of Luther and Calvin; and, since the 18th century, modern historical criticism — which the churches have variously resisted, absorbed, or embraced.

The midrash collections and the two Talmuds; the great medieval commentators — Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Nachmanides; the law codes of Maimonides and Joseph Karo; the Kabbalah of the Zohar; and, since the nineteenth century, academic biblical scholarship, accepted in different degrees by the movements.

In the Theravada, Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga and the Pali commentaries; in India, the Madhyamaka school of Nagarjuna and the Yogacara of Asanga and Vasubandhu; further east, whole schools of interpretation — Zen, Pure Land, Tiantai, and the Tibetan traditions.

The great Vedanta commentaries on the Upanishads, Brahma Sutras, and Gita define the main schools: Shankara's Advaita (all is one Brahman), Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita (souls are real but exist within God), and Madhva's Dvaita (God and souls eternally distinct). Mimamsa built the science of ritual interpretation, and the bhakti traditions added devotional commentaries of their own.

Traditional schools of exegesis (the Udasi and Nirmala orders and the gianis of the Damdami Taksal); the Singh Sabha scholarship of the late 19th and 20th centuries, including Sahib Singh's complete Punjabi commentary; and modern academic study in universities East and West.

Constitutional case law is its nearest equivalent of commentary: US Establishment Clause jurisprudence from Everson v. Board of Education (1947) onward, French Conseil d'État rulings on laïcité, and Indian Supreme Court doctrine. In the academy, Rawlsian public-reason liberalism and Bhargava's 'principled distance' work as rival schools of interpretation.

Streams of thought rather than commentaries: religious humanism (Dewey, Ethical Culture), secular humanism (Kurtz and the Council for Secular Humanism), the analytic defense of humanism (Grayling, Law), and pragmatist rebuilding of ethics after faith (Kitcher).

Whole academic disciplines — political philosophy, jurisprudence, economics — serve as its commentary tradition. The main rival schools: the classical and libertarian line (Hayek, Nozick) reading liberty as limited government, and the egalitarian line (Rawls, Dworkin) reading it as also requiring fair shares.

Academic feminist theory is its commentary tradition: liberal, radical, socialist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and intersectional schools, institutionalized in women's and gender studies departments since the 1970s.

An academic field grew around them: modernists (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm) who hold nations to be products of modernity; ethno-symbolists (Smith) who trace them to older ethnic cores; and normative schools — liberal nationalism (Tamir, Miller) and conservative defenses (Hazony).