We must now go into the question of whether there really was naṣṣ jalī appointing the 12 ʾimāms. As has been mentioned already, Twelvers claim that the collection of the narrations of naṣṣ jalī attain tawātur in meaning for all of their ʾimāms, despite none of the individual wordings for any of them reaching tawātur. To investigate this claim, we should first investigate what exactly is being claimed, and precisely how it can be identified and discerned, especially according to the Twelver scholars themselves, while subjecting those criteria to scrutiny. Then, we should investigate the situation with these narrations to see how the claim being made regarding them truly fares. Finally, we will consult the statements of the Twelver scholars, including those with expertise in taħqīq (verification) of matters relating to ʾaħādīþ, who have had the capability to study these narrations thoroughly from all the preceding sources and derive a conclusion. 

In his books að-Ðaxīrah fī ʿIlm al-Kalām and að-Ðarīʿah ʾilā ʾUṣūl aš-Šarīʿah, aš-Šarīf al-Murtaλ̣ā explains the claim being made with regards to naṣṣ jalī, and also explains precisely the criteria by which it may be checked. It is also useful to note that aš-Šayx aṭ-Ṭūsī, in his book al-ʿUddah fī ʾUṣūl al-Fiqh, agrees with what al-Murtaλ̣ā said on this topic to the extent that in his own chapter on the topic, aṭ-Ṭūsī quotes what al-Murtaλ̣ā said word for word.¹ The first thing to note is that they essentially use the term tawātur for any narration for which certainty is attained on the truth of its attribution/occurrence. They then divide this into a category where this certainty is by necessity without need for reasoning or deliberation, as is the case for the transmission of the Qurʾān or the existence of Makkah, and a category where the certainty is attained through reasoning and deliberation, like the narrations of the non-Qurʾānic miracles of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. This latter category is what they claim to be achieved by the narrations of naṣṣ jalī. Although Sunnī scholars would not use the term tawātur for narrations known with certainty to be true through deliberation, and would instead say that it is a narration supported by external factors,² the classification used by the Twelver scholars is not objectionable in itself and can be used here. The next step is to look at the conditions they gave for this kind of certainty for narrations to be attained. 

For narrations that require deliberation to establish certainty on the truth of the occurrence of what they contain, al-Murtaλ̣ā gives the following conditions:³ 

1. The narrators must be too large in number to independently agree on the same lie. If the narrators are not sufficiently large in number, then it is nomically possible for them to have narrated the same thing without any conspiracy or external cause. 
2. The possibility of a shared cause making them all convene on such a lie must be ruled out. This means we must establish that they cannot have conspired or been pushed by external factors to all agree on this same lie. 
3. The possibility of them narrating something false due to confusion or illusion must be ruled out. For example, the Christians and Jews narrate the crucifixion, but Muslims say that what they witnessed was an illusion. 
4. He also adds that if there are intermediaries in the narration between us and the direct witnesses of the event, then these conditions must be present in all stages of it. 

Next, we must find out how we can know of the fulfillment of these conditions. 

The criteria he gives for the conditions to be satisfied are as follows:⁴ 

1. For the first condition, it is known directly through the size of the group that is narrating. It is impossible for a large group to all narrate the same lie without the occurrence of conspiracy or an external factor pushing this. An analogy would be a large group of poets all producing the same exact poetry; it is known that such a thing cannot occur without either agreement and conspiracy among them or an external factor causing it. 
2. For the second condition, al-Murtaλ̣ā says that we first must look at the size of the group, since if a group reaches a vast enough size, it becomes inherently impossible for them to conspire on a lie. As for smaller groups where this would be possible in principle, he says that if it were the case that conspiracy had occurred, then there would have to be evidence of their mutual contact that would become apparent upon investigation. Regarding external causes, such as force or incentives from a ruling power, then he says that such things do not occur without being apparent and well known, since the ruling power would have to make these things apparent to get a large group of people with differing goals to all narrate the same lie. 
3. For the third condition, al-Murtaλ̣ā says that this is established by the narration being of something directly perceived by the senses such that the possible ways of confusion or illusion can be ruled out, since these possible ways with regards to sensory observations are limited and can be ruled out in clear ways. 
4. Finally, to know that these conditions are present in all stages, al-Murtaλ̣ā says that for doctrines and claims that appear after not being apparent, become strong after being weak, and are found after not being there, then this fact is known and apparent from the situation to those present between the times of their non-appearance and appearance. For example, we know about the time and place of the appearance of sects like the Xawārij and Jahmiyyah, and every reasonable person who observes their history can differentiate between the time of their appearance and the time prior to it. 

Although al-Murtaλ̣ā’s methods are mostly acceptable, the adequacy of his way of determining that the conditions are present in all stages is highly questionable. Lack of apparent/clear knowledge of exactly when a false narration or doctrine came into existence or who brought it about is not necessarily sufficient to establish that it fulfilled the provided conditions in all stages. It is often the case that false stories may become widespread among people without anyone knowing exactly who or when or where they came from. There are also many examples of narrations the Twelvers reject for which this condition applies, like the ʾaħādīþ about Allāh being seen in the afterlife, or the ʾaħādīþ about Qaλ̣āʾ and Qadar, or the ʾaħādīþ of virtues of the Ṣaħābah, and the ones entailing affirming the Xilāfah of ʾAbū Bakr رضي الله عنه. For all of these ʾaħādīþ, nobody can claim that there is certain knowledge or even any widespread information on who supposedly began their fabrication, or on the precise time at which it began. Furthermore, the Twelvers believe that huge numbers of people collectively hid the narrations of naṣṣ jalī, so what prevents the possibility that people would hide the information of who invented certain narrations, like those of naṣṣ jalī, out of incentives they had? On top of these points, even if al-Murtaλ̣ā’s method had any validity, it could only establish that the narrations were always present in the past, and not that they were always narrated by large groups sufficient for tawātur. 

Next, al-Murtaλ̣ā explains how he believes his conditions apply to the narrations of naṣṣ jalī. 

Here, aš-Šarīf al-Murtaλ̣ā says that, not only have the previously mentioned conditions been fulfilled by the Muslim community as a whole, but even each individual sect of the Muslims has fulfilled them. Consequently, al-Murtaλ̣ā says that the narrations of the ʾImāmiyyah about naṣṣ jalī must be true, since the size and conditions of their sect are such that they fulfill the conditions for gaining certainty about the truth of  a narration, and it is not a situation in which confusion or illusion would be applicable.⁵

After having investigated and scrutinized these conditions, the next task is to rigorously test whether the narrations of naṣṣ jalī from the Twelvers are legitimately verified by them. The main point in dispute here is whether the conditions are fulfilled in all stages of the narrations. As shall soon be observed in more detail, those who actually transmitted the naṣṣ jalī among the Twelver scholars neither suffice in number nor fulfill the conditions required to achieve certainty here, and there is an abundance of evidence indicating that these narrations were not present among the Ṣaħābah, and that the narrations of naṣṣ jalī for each ʾImām only came about after the prior ʾImām’s death. Consequently, to the extent that al-Murtaλ̣ā’s conditions are even sound, they are not adequately satisfied by the narrations of naṣṣ jalī. 

First, to examine the group of Twelver scholars responsible for transmitting the narrations of naṣṣ jalī, it is most useful to look at those who transmit the narrations of naṣṣ on the Twelve ʾImāms as a whole.⁶ We find that these narrations appointing all Twelve come from a limited group not even reaching 10 people, who were all connected, and all studied in Qum or Bağdād. They start from ʿAlī ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī, and his student al-Kulaynī, and are then also narrated by al-Kulaynī’s student an-Nuʿmānī and ʿAlī ibn Bābawayh’s son aṣ-Ṣadūq. It then goes to the students of aṣ-Ṣadūq, al-Mufīd and al-Xazzāz al-Qummī, in addition to al-Xazzāz’s teacher Ibn ʿAyyāš, and then to aš-Šayx aṭ-Ṭūsī the student of al-Mufīd. There is no reason why such a relatively small group of closely connected people would be precluded from the possibility of all narrating similar lies. What makes this even more suspicious is the incredible disproportionality of how many of such narrations each author transmits, with the majority coming from al-Xazzāz, and nearly 90% coming from him together with aṣ-Ṣadūq and aṭ-Ṭūsī. As for the narrations of appointment from one ʾimām to the next, then for most of them these narrations are very few in number and do not come remotely close to tawātur, meaning they are of little help if any here. Even the narrations of naṣṣ jalī on ʿAlī رضي الله عنه himself, which are greater in number than any of the others, are not narrated by enough people to gain certainty of their truth, and are still only narrated by the relatively small upper echelon of ʾImāmī scholars of ħadīþ. They do not even come close to the numbers of narrators for things like the ʾaħādīþ about Allāh being seen in the afterlife, or the ʾaħādīþ about Qaλ̣āʾ and Qadar, or the ʾaħādīþ of virtues of the Ṣaħābah, or even the ones entailing affirming the Xilāfah of ʾAbū Bakr رضي الله عنه.

The situation only becomes worse upon further examination of the situations of these transmitters. Not only is it the case that the ʾImāmiyyah as a sect have a notorious reputation among all other sects for unreliability and having false narrations, but we also find that the available evidence seems to strongly indicate the unreliability of the people responsible for the transmission of these narrations of naṣṣ jalī. One thing to note is that they have many narrations and statements of their scholars attesting to the fact that the followers of their ʾImāms would very often distort their words or narrate from what they found in writings without verified transmission.⁷ Furthermore, Twelver scholars and narrations have permitted changing the wordings of narrations as long as the intended meaning is the same,⁸ while they are also known for having very permissive views on dissimulation and misleading speech, and many Twelver scholars have even permitted blatantly lying against opposing sects for the benefit of their own sect,⁹ based on the apparent text of a narration they have. The permission of changing wordings and of lying for the sake of beliefs together provide a shared incentive for transmitting inaccurate narrations and for hiding the true origin of these narrations, in addition to the incentives opponents of ʾIslām would have to hide this, due to the import of the narrations calling into question the transmission of the legislation and texts of ʾIslām as a whole. There is even direct attestation of distortions coming from the major transmitters of these narrations, which is investigated in sources such as the following, and has even been noticed by Twelver scholars themselves.¹⁰ 

The Distortions of aṣ-Ṣadūq 
The Distortions of al-Kulaynī 

Next, on the absence of the narrations of naṣṣ jalī among the Ṣaħābah, we can know with certainty from consideration of historical factors that ʿAlī رضي الله عنه and the rest of the Ṣaħābah must have accepted the rule of the prior Xulafāʾ willingly out of belief in its validity, and from mass transmitted narrations that the Ṣaħābah were entirely unaware of any naṣṣ jalī from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. These two points will be investigated in depth later on, but here it suffices to mention them as background information. It turns out that, even under their own beliefs, it is not possible for Twelvers to uphold the claim that narrations of naṣṣ jalī were mass transmitted among the Ṣaħābah. According to Twelver belief, the vast majority of the Ṣaħābah apostatized by neglecting the supposed right of ʿAlī رضي الله عنه to Xilāfah, excluding a small few who even supposedly had to hide their beliefs in taqiyyah, so how could it be true that the Twelvers received mass transmission of naṣṣ jalī from these same Ṣaħābah, not to mention while the entire rest of the Muslim community did not receive it? On top of this, we find that many Twelver scholars themselves even explicitly admitted the lack of any mass transmission of naṣṣ jalī during the time period of the Ṣaħābah.

In aš-Šāfī, aš-Šarīf al-Murtaλ̣ā quotes Ibn Qiba ar-Razī saying,¹¹ “The naṣṣ is split into 2 categories, naṣṣ that occurred in the presence of a small number of Ṣaħābah, and the other naṣṣ that occurred in the presence of many people. So as for the naṣṣ that occurred in the presence of a small group then it is possible for it to be hidden, and it can be forgotten. And as for the naṣṣ that occurred in the presence of a large group, then it was only on the day of al-Ğadīr, …” 

Aš-Šayx aṭ-Ṭūsī also gave the same judgment as Ibn Qiba, saying,¹² “The naṣṣ jalī did not occur in the presence of the majority, rather it was in the presence of a group such that if they transmitted it we would not gain definitive proof by their transmission.” He also states the same judgement in at-Tamhīd.¹³ 

Though it may not be known with absolute certainty exactly who originated this claim or exactly when it happened, it is nonetheless definitively provable that the narrations of naṣṣ jalī were absent during certain time periods, and some reasonable judgements can be made about who might have originated them, and when it may have happened. The doctrine of naṣṣ jalī, alongside the rest of the main doctrines of the ʾImāmiyyah with regards to ʾImāmah, did not become codified or well known until the time period of Jaʿfar aṣ-Ṣādiq, during which Hišām ibn al-Ħakam was the main individual responsible for this. For this reason, he is often attributed by Muslim historians as being the first one to proclaim this doctrine. The contemporary Šīʿī scholar ʿAbdullāh Niʿmah reaffirms the statement of Ibn an-Nadīm, who said that Hišām was the first one who “organized the doctrine and opened up the discussion of ʾImāmah.”¹⁴ The belief itself most likely preceded this codification and spread, being present among extreme (Ğulāh) sects of the Šīʿah and among those who rejected Zayd ibn ʿAlī during the time period of the Tābiʿīn and their followers. Many historians among both Sunnīs and Šīʿah have stated that the very first person to proclaim the doctrine of naṣṣ on ʿAlī رضي الله عنه was ʿAbdullāh ibn Sabaʾ.¹⁵

Moving onto the later ʾImāms, the situation is not any better. The origin of the ʾImāmīyyah is usually narrated to be from those who rejected Zayd ibn ʿAlī in his uprising against the ʾUmawī ruler, and chose to take Muħammad al-Bāqir and Jaʿfar aṣ-Ṣādiq as their ʾimāms instead,¹⁶ and there seems to be no record of their doctrine or narrations on ʾImāmah being present before then. For each of the later ʾImāms of the Twelvers after Jaʿfar aṣ-Ṣādiq, we find that the narrations of the previous ʾImām or of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم appointing them only come about after the death of that previous ʾImām. This is made clear by the fact that after each ʾImām’s death, the ʾImāmīyyah split into many new sects over who the next ʾImām would be, and the Twelvers themselves have narrations approaching mass transmission explicitly indicating that even their most major figures among the companions of the ʾImāms were significantly uncertain about the succession in ʾImāmah upon the death of each ʾImām.¹⁷ This culminates in the situation after the death of the 11th ʾImām al-Ħasan al-ʿAskarī, where we not only find that a split happened as in the other cases, but we even find that the earliest Twelver scholars themselves clearly had no knowledge of any naṣṣ appointing the 12 ʾImāms, as seen in the works of Ibn Qiba ar-Rāzī, al-Ħasan ibn Mūsā an-Nawbaxtī, Saʿd ibn ʿAbdillāh al-Qummī, and others who came before Ibn Bābawayh and al-Kulaynī.¹⁸ 

A Twelver contemporary scholar, Hossein Modarressi, confirms in his book Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shi’ite Islam that the narrations of naṣṣ appointing the 12 ʾImāms were completely absent in the earliest period of the appearance of the Twelvers, until the arrival of Ibn Bābawayh and al-Kulaynī.¹⁹

Now that we have given a detailed examination and observed that the conditions of aš-Šarīf al-Murtaλ̣ā are not fulfilled for the claim of naṣṣ jalī, we will also look at the statements of some of the most eminent Twelver scholars in the relevant fields confirming the conclusions that have been reached here. 

Aš-Šayx al-Mufīd said in al-Masāʾil al-Jārūdiyyah:²⁰ “So if a person from ʾahl al-xilāf [a differing sect] said that: The narrations of naṣṣ which the Twelvers narrate are fabricated and these reports are ʾāħād, and that otherwise they should provide their chains or prove their authenticity such that the doubt and uncertainty is removed. 
It is said to him: The lack of tawātur of the reports of naṣṣ on the ʾImāms does not harm the ʾImāmiyyah in its doctrine that we have described, and the fact that they are ʾāħād does not prevent from them being used as proofs due to what has come alongside them in terms of ʿaqlī [rational] proofs that we have stated and explained with regards to the necessity of ʾImāmah and the traits [conditions] of the ʾimāms because if it [the naṣṣ] were false the way the opponents imagine then these proofs of the ʿaql [intellect] that necessitate the existence of naṣṣ on the ʾimāms would also have to be false, and the lack of that [tawātur of the the naṣṣ] for other than the ʾimāms we have mentioned is by agreement and by the apparent that has no dispute in it, and this is clear – praise and thanks be to Allāh – to anyone who has an intellect to perceive things.”

The modern scholar ʿAlī ʾAbul-Ħasan also provides the same view and reasoning as al-Mufīd. 
هل الروايات التي نصت على إمامة كل إمامٍ بعينه قطعية الصدور؟ – السيد علي أبو الحسن

Abul-Qāsim al-Xōyī said in Ṣirāṭ an-Najāh:²¹ “The mutawātir narrations that have reached us from both the ʾĀmmah [ʾAhl as-Sunnah] and the Xāṣṣah [Twelvers] have specified that the ʾImāms are twelve in number and did not specify their names one after another such that no doubt could be present regarding who the next ʾimām is after the death of the previous one, rather the benefit dictates in that time that it should be hidden and not spread among the people, even among the companions of the ʾImāms except for their closest companions, and this matter has coincided in other areas, and Allāh knows best.”

Al-Xōyī also said in Muʿjam Rijāl al-Ħadīþ:²² “The companions of the ʾImāms, despite the fact that they put their highest effort and attention into the matter of ħadīþ and its preservation from being lost and disappearing just as the ʾImāms commanded them, they were living in the situation of taqiyyah, and they were not able to openly spread the ʾaħādīþ, so how could these ʾaħādīþ [of the four main books of the Twelvers] have reached the point of tawātur or anything close to it!” 
Although this passage from al-Xōyī is about the question of whether to accept the ʾaħādīþ of the 4 main books of the Twelvers as definitive in attribution, the same point mentioned here applies equally to the narrations of naṣṣ on the twelve ʾimāms as a whole, and to the Twelver ħadīþ corpus in general. 

ʾĀṣif Muħsinī said in Mašraʿat Biħār al-ʾAnwār:²³ “As for using the specific narrations of naṣṣ on the ʾImāmah of each ʾimām from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم or from the previous ʾimām then it is insufficient due to their lack of reaching the point of being satisfactory, let alone providing definitive knowledge of their attribution.” 

Muħammad Bāqir Behbūdī said in Maʿrifat al-Ħadīþ:²⁴ “You have known from the research on the suspicion on the system of ʾImāmah that the ʾaħādīþ that are narrated for naṣṣ on all the ʾImāms together such as the report of the lawħ and others, all of them are produced during the time of the Ğaybah and the confusion or prior to it by a short time, and if these many narrations of naṣṣ were present among the ʾImāmī Šīʿah then they would not have differed with such extreme dispute on the identities of the pure ʾimāms, and the confusion among the prominent figures of the sect and the pillars of ħadīþ for many years would not have occurred, and they would have been free from the need for racing to produce books to prove the Ğaybah and clarify the confusion from the hearts of the ʾUmmah with this great amount.”
Although Behbūdī is not trusted by most Twelvers, his conclusion agrees with the evidence and supports the statements of higher Twelver authorities, and he is a person who has studied these matters in depth, so his comments here should not be dismissed.

Furthermore, the eminent Twelver scholar of ħadīþ, al-Majlisī, states in his book Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl:²⁵ “and it is not hidden that this narration and many of the authentic narrations are explicitly clear on the Qurʾān being incomplete and changed, and according to me the narrations in this matter are mutawātir in meaning, and abandoning all of them leads to removal of reliance upon narrations at all, rather, my supposition is that the narrations in this matter are not less than the narrations of ʾImāmah, so how can they establish it by narrations?”
Despite the fact that the narrations on the Qurʾān being corrupted in Twelver sources are comparable in quantity and spread as the narrations of ʾImāmah (and have probably even been around for longer than most of them), the vast majority of Twelvers reject these narrations. This shows that in reality, to have a consistent standard, it must be concluded that none of these narrations provide certainty of attribution. 

After having established through the quantity of the narrators and the external contextual factors that there is no way these narrations of explicit appointment of the ʾImāms of the Twelvers could provide certainty, we are also led to conclude that there are multiple factors which provide us certainty that these narrations must in fact be false: 

1. These claimed narrations explicitly entail contradictions to matters that are established by much stronger certain evidence.²⁶ These include the ʾīmān and virtue of the first 3 Xulafāʾ, the general virtue and praise of the Ṣaħābah, the proofs for the Xilāfah of the first 3 Xulafāʾ, and others. These matters will be explained in detail later on, in the discussion on their Xilāfah. 
2. The matter being declared by these narrations is from the most important fundamentals of the religion which is obligatory upon every Muslim to affirm according to Twelvers, and much of the rest of the religion is dependent on it. Such a huge matter, if it were true, would have been narrated by tawātur. The fact that it is not mutawātir thus gives us certainty that it is false.²⁷ Take as an example if a small group of people had informed you that they had recently witnessed the population of New York City being killed, with this information not being narrated in the news, and being unknown to all those living in the nearby surrounding regions. If nobody else outside of this small group narrated this claim, then there would be no shadow of a doubt that their claim is a lie. This aspect will be further discussed in the coming section. 
3. We have certainty that these narrations were unknown among the Ṣaħābah, which will also be further discussed in the coming section. We have already mentioned that the companions of the 12 ʾImāms, and also the early post-occultation Twelver scholars, did not have knowledge of them. This further applies to the non-Twelvers who are claimed by Twelvers to have narrated this, as all of the followers of these individuals deny that they ever narrated any such thing. The fact that these narrations were completely unknown to the entirety of the ʾUmmah until late on gives a very strong indication that they were fabricated.²⁸ 

The Twelvers may argue that even if there is no tawātur on the explicit designation of the Twelve ʾImāms, we can still establish certainty of their ʾImāmah if we have already established the condition of infallibility for ʾImāmah. This is because the ʾUmmah has agreed on the fallibility of everyone other than those who the ʾImāmiyyah claim as ʾimāms, and as for the other sects of the ʾImāmiyyah, like the Wāqifīs, ʾIsmāʿīlīs, and others, then either their sects are extinct, or it can be easily established that their ʾimāms are not truly infallible. 

From Twelver foundations, this line of reasoning is extremely weak, as they believe it is possible for the true ʾimām and his followers to be in hiding and/or be in taqiyyah. Due to this, the apparent agreement of the ʾUmmah cannot be held onto by them as proof, since they do not consider it to be an inherent evidence as Sunnīs and Zaydīs do. Rather, they only consider it an evidence if it is known that it includes an infallible, and in this case, there is no way of knowing it for certain. As for the ʾIsmāʿīlīs, although for their predominant sect their ʾimāms are open in going against basic beliefs and principles of ʾIslām, this does not apply to smaller ʾIsmāʿīlī sects who affirm ʾIslām in the apparent. Furthermore, if the Twelvers were to accept that agreement of the ʾUmmah in the apparent situation is sufficient as a proof, then it would require them to accept conclusions that refute their fundamental beliefs, as will be explained later on. 

1.  العدة في أصول الفقه للشيخ الطوسي – ج1 ص82 
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2.   نزهة النظر لابن حجر العسقلاني – ص52 
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3.  الذريعة إلى أصول الشريعة للشريف المرتضى – ج2 ص498-501 , الذخيرة في علم الكلام للشريف المرتضى – ج2 ص58-61 
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4.   الذريعة إلى أصول الشريعة للشريف المرتضى – ج2 ص501-505 , الذخيرة في علم الكلام للشريف المرتضى – ج2 ص61-64 
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5.  الذخيرة في علم الكلام للشريف المرتضى – ج2 ص64-65 
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6.  بحث حول روايات النص على الأئمة الاثني عشر بأسمائهم المذكورة في كتاب تواتر النص على الأئمة لمحمد صنقور علي 
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7.  الكافي للكليني – جزء#8 كتاب#1 باب#293 حديث#1 , الغيبة للنعماني – كتاب#2 باب#1 حديث#8 , رجال الكشي – ج1 ص247 , معجم الأحاديث المعتبرة لآصف محسني – كتاب#3 باب#107 حديث#2 , معجم رجال الحديث للخوئي – ج19 ص300 , خلاصة الأقوال للعلامة الحلي – ص394 , الكافي للكليني – جزء#1 كتاب#2 باب#17 حديث15 , الكافي للكليني – جزء#8 كتاب#1 باب#362 حديث#1 , رجال الكشي – ج2 ص596 , رجال الكشي – ج2 ص596 , الكافي للكليني – جزء#8 كتاب#1 باب#290 حديث#1 
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8.   معجم الأحاديث المعتبرة لآصف محسني – كتاب#1 باب#10 , الكافي للكليني – جزء#1 كتاب#2 باب#17 حديث#2 
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9.  صراط النجاة للخوئي والميرزا جواد التبريزي – ج1 ص447 , رسالة الولاية لمحمد سعيد الطباطبائي الحكيم – ص94 , الدر المنضود للگلپایکانی – ج2 ص148 , شرح أصول الكافي للمازندرني – ج10 ص11 , المكاسب للأنصاري – ج5 ص10 
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10.  روضات الجنات للخوانساري – ج6 ص134 , الحدائق الناضرة للبحراني – ج18 ص230 , بحار الأنوار لمحمد باقر المجلسي – ج5 ص196 , روضة المتقين لمحمد تقي المجلسي – ج4 ص106 , ج11 ص233 , ج7 ص388 , ج3 ص180 , ج1 ص390 , ج3 ص191 , مستدرك الوسائل للنوري الطبرسي – ج11 ص170 
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11.  الشافي للشريف المرتضى – ج2 ص127-128 
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12.  الاقتصاد للشيخ الطوسي – ص209 
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13.  تمهيد الأصول للشيخ الطوسي – ص551 
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14.  هشام بن الحكم للشيخ عبد الله نعمة – ص210 
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15.  اختيار معرفة الرجال للشيخ الطوسي – ج1 ص324 , الملل والنحل للشهرستاني – ج1 ص174 
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16.  تاريخ الطبري – ج7 ص180-181 , المحيط بالإمامة لعلي بن الحسين الزيدي – 53/1 , مجموع كتب ورسائل يحيى بن الحسين – 105-106/1 , سير أعلام النبلاء – زيد بن علي , المقالات للأشعري – ج1 ص69 , الحور العين لنشوان الحميري – ص184 
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17.  الشامل في تاريخ ومدلول خبر الاثني عشر للكاظم الزيدي – الفصل الثالث – المبحث الرابع 
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18.   ابن قبة الرازي كما النوبختي لا يعلمان عن النص على الاثني عشر شيئا – الكاظم الزيدي , الباحث النبيه الحصيف تكفيه الكلمتان عن الكتاب – الكاظم الزيدي 
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19.  Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shi’ite Islam by Hossein Modarressi – Pages 100-103 
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20.  المسائل الجارودية للشيخ المفيد – ص46 
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21.  صراط النجاة للخوئي – ج2 ص453 
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22.  معجم رجال الحديث للخوئي – ج1 ص22 
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23.  مشرعة بحار الأنوار لآصف محسني – ج2 ص91 
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24.  معرفة الحديث لمحمد باقر بهبودي – ص172 
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25.  مرآة العقول للمجلسي – ج12 ص525 
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26.  البحر المحيط للزركشي – تقسيمات الأخبار – القسم الثاني فيما يقطع بكذبه – الخبر المعلوم خلافه  
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27.  البحر المحيط للزركشي – تقسيمات الأخبار – القسم الثاني فيما يقطع بكذبه – الخبر الذي لو كان صحيحا لتوفرت الدواعي على نقله متواترا 
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28.  البحر المحيط للزركشي – تقسيمات الأخبار – القسم الثاني فيما يقطع بكذبه – ما نقل عن النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم بعد استقرار الأخبار ثم فتش عنه فلم يوجد في بطون الكتب ، ولا في صدور الرواة 
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