How the Baha'i Conception Is Attested

The Baha'i doctrine of one God made known through a succession of Manifestations is attested directly in the Baha'i Faith's own central scripture rather than inferred from practice. The Kitab-i-Aqdas, Baha'u'llah's Most Holy Book, is the faith's primary book of laws, and Baha'u'llah's wider corpus of writings, collected in volumes such as Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, sets out the doctrine of progressive revelation explicitly and repeatedly: religious truth is revealed gradually, Manifestation by Manifestation, suited to the capacity of the age that receives it, rather than delivered once and for all or delivered separately by unrelated gods. Peter Smith's Concise Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith documents both the doctrine's scriptural basis and how it has been understood by Baha'i communities since the faith's nineteenth-century origin in Iran under the Bab and Baha'u'llah.

The Baha'i Faith's own account of its place among the world's religions, that it stands in continuity with Judaism, Christianity and Islam while also recognising Manifestations from outside that lineage such as Buddha and Krishna, is a self-description rather than a claim other traditions make about it, and it is recorded here as exactly that: how Baha'is themselves understand the God they worship and the succession of Manifestations through whom they hold that God has been revealed.