What would it take in a book to convince a rational person that it had been written by or directly inspired by a god?

Question

Many of the world's religions are based on a book or text that adherents claim to have been written by or directly inspired by a god, perhaps omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. My question is whether there is anything, in principle, that could be written in a text that would convince a rational person that the text must have been written by a god, and in particular, that it could not have been written by a human being, even a very insightful one?

Answer 1

Your question assumes there is no WILL in a person, but only pure REASON and that what should convince will in all cases convince. But that is surely not the case :)

As far as Judaism and Christianity go, the conviction (Faith) preceded the books.

Also, you make that false distinction, either written by God or written by men but the Bible takes that as wrong.

Jesus convinced His followers that He was the Son of God so that automatically validates the OT. And since it is simple history that He set up a Church , that Church validates what is and is not a teaching of Jesus.

But the WILL is the primary in all this, not reason. The person you are thinking of would be actively searching for what his reason could tell him and would be of good will when a revelation came. Unless God is good, anybody could be fooled.

Answer 2

Nearly all concepts of Ancient Religions had vastly different ideas of what a divine being was and how it operated in the world. Most ancient kingdoms were founded on the belief that divine beings or gods chose their ruler. In some cases, went so far as to say the ruler was the divine being itself. This made the ideas easier to swallow that divinely revealed and inspired texts were possible. In addition to this, long before the texts were penned, they were passed down through oral tradition which was an integral part of family and tribal life.

For a quick example, it's like you may have a great-great grandma who instilled a piece of wisdom into your great-grandfather. He tells his children, and so on. Now your entire ancestry remembers what your great-great grandmother said all those years ago (accuracy will not be mentioned here). It is now tradition to pass this saying along to your children and share it with their children, etc.

Now imagine that great-great grandmother of yours was God in the Ancient Near Eastern area. It became tradition to pass the tale along and faith to believe it was true.