Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away at its foundations far more than most textbooks admit. I want to walk through what the hypothesis actually claims, what the Dead Sea Scrolls and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses at all, but were assembled centuries later from four originally separate, anonymous documents, labelled…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we identify them? Luke himself tells us plainly that many had undertaken to compile a narrative before he wrote his own Gospel, having followed all things…