This paper presents the first quantitative structural measurement of how authority is encoded in language across the three Abrahamic religious traditions — the Hebrew Torah, the Hebrew Prophets, the Greek New Testament, and the Quran — using positional analysis applied to live scholarly corpora (morphhb Westminster Leningrad Codex, n=23,213 verses; SBLGNT, n=7,957 verses; quran-json v3.1.2, n=6,236 verses, Meccan and Medinan typed). The paper introduces and confirms the Legitimation Compensation Law: formal authority markers in religious speech increase inversely with actual institutional authority. This relationship is monotonic, measurable, and holds across four independent datasets and three independent religious traditions with zero exceptions in the tested data. Confirmation spans 15 Hebrew prophetic books (800–400 BCE), the New Testament (Paul's early letters vs. the Pastoral Epistles), and the Quran (Meccan vs. Medinan surahs). A second finding characterizes the speech attributed to Jesus of Nazareth as occupying a structurally unique position on the cross-tradition authority spectrum: his authority formula ("Truly I say to you") has zero precursors in 23,213 Old Testament verses, appears 34 times across the four Gospels, and was never used by any New Testament author in their own voice. It encodes a first-person direct authority claim — structurally inverted relative to the 300-year prophetic tradition it replaced. Additional findings include the first quantitative measurement of the Meccan-to-Medinan structural shift as evidence of the Legitimation Compensation Law in Islamic scripture, and the confirmation of the Torah as the inverse case: maximum institutional authority produces near-zero authority marker rates. The paper distinguishes this framework from Weber's tripartite authority typology: Weber classifies authority from the outside (why followers obey — a sociology of reception); this framework classifies authority from the inside (how the speaker's language encodes the claim — a linguistics of production). Full methodology is maintained separately and is available under peer review. This deposit contains the public findings document only.
Juan Gabriel Molina (Mon,) studied this question.