Before you examine any specific text or tradition, you need criteria. Not criteria designed to favour a predetermined conclusion — but criteria derived from what you already know about the God the evidence points toward. What would a genuine divine communication look like, if one existed?
This is not a question you can outsource to any tradition. Each tradition will tell you that its own revelation meets the criteria. The criteria themselves have to come from somewhere prior — from reason, from the nature of the God already established, from what communication between an infinite conscious being and finite conscious creatures would rationally require.
Criterion 1: Correspondence with what reason already knows
A genuine revelation cannot contradict what reason can establish independently. If the evidence from cosmology, philosophy, and consciousness points toward a God who is one, uncaused, conscious, and the ground of the moral order — then an authentic revelation would affirm these things, not contradict them. A revelation that described multiple gods, or a God who is contingent, or a God who commands what reason identifies as genuinely evil, would fail the most basic test.
This does not mean that revelation adds nothing beyond reason. It means that revelation and reason cannot be in fundamental conflict if both come from the same source. A God who created the rational order would not communicate in ways that violated it.
Criterion 2: A teaching that elevates
The God the evidence points toward is the ground of objective moral facts — the moral order is not arbitrary but reflects something real about the nature of being. An authentic communication from this God would carry a moral teaching that corresponds to and deepens the moral knowledge reason can reach on its own. It would not introduce arbitrary requirements or endorse what reason recognises as injustice. Where it goes beyond reason, it would do so in the direction of greater moral depth, not less.
This criterion allows for moral teaching that challenges and stretches human intuition — moral growth always involves some disruption of the comfortable. But disruption in the direction of greater justice, greater compassion, greater human dignity, is different from disruption in the direction of cruelty or arbitrariness.
Criterion 3: Transmission that can be verified
A communication intended for humanity across time would need to reach humanity across time — which means it would need a transmission history that can be examined. A revelation that existed only in the claims of one person, with no independent verification and no traceable chain of transmission, carries much less evidential weight than one whose transmission can be historically documented.
This does not require that every detail of transmission be perfect — human transmission is human. But it does require that the core of the communication be verifiable in its preservation. That we can establish, through historical methods, that what people received is substantially what was originally given.
Criterion 4: Internal coherence
A text produced by a single infinite mind over time would exhibit coherence — not the kind of coherence produced by careful editing after the fact, but the kind produced by a single consistent intelligence. Internal contradictions, doctrinal reversals, and fundamental inconsistencies across a claimed revelation are evidence against divine authorship. Coherence across a large and complex text, in circumstances that would make human consistency difficult to maintain, is evidence for it.
Criterion 5: Explanatory and predictive power beyond its time
A communication from a being who exists outside time might be expected to contain knowledge that exceeds what its human recipients could have known from their own resources. Not necessarily in the form of scientific predictions that read like a modern textbook — that would be anachronistic and almost certainly produce distortion. But in the form of descriptions that correspond to what later inquiry discovers, without requiring that correspondence to be forced.
The presence of such knowledge is not proof of divine origin on its own. But its absence would be a mark against. And its presence, combined with the other criteria, is part of a cumulative case.
Applying the criteria
These five criteria — correspondence with reason, moral elevation, verifiable transmission, internal coherence, and knowledge beyond its time — are not arbitrary. They follow from the nature of the God already established and from what communication from such a God to finite rational creatures would require.
The next step is to apply them. Not to all claimants simultaneously — the task would be unmanageable and the result would be confusion. But to the tradition that has the strongest historical claim to serious examination — the one that has commanded the allegiance of more than a billion people across fourteen centuries, that has produced a civilisation of remarkable intellectual and moral depth, and that claims not novelty but the final restoration of the original message.
That examination is a different kind of inquiry from the one you have just completed. The God question was philosophical and scientific. The revelation question is historical and textual. But it requires the same disposition: follow the evidence honestly, and be willing to update when the evidence is strong.