The Documentary Hypothesis, popularly known by the shorthand JEDP, proposes that the first five books of the Bible reached their present form through the combination of several originally distinct sources: a Yahwist source (J, using the divine name YHWH from the outset), an Elohist source (E, preferring Elohim), a Deuteronomic source (D, largely identified with the law-book of Deuteronomy), and a Priestly source (P, concerned with genealogy, ritual, and cultic law). In its classical form the theory is most closely associated with Julius Wellhausen's nineteenth-century synthesis, though the component observations — the doubled creation and flood narratives, shifts in divine names, and differences of vocabulary and theological emphasis between passages — had been noted by earlier scholars including Jean Astruc.
The clergyman preparing to teach or preach from the Pentateuch does not need to adjudicate the theory to use it well. What is useful, whatever one's final judgment, is Wellhausen's underlying observation: the text as we have it shows real seams — doublets, shifts of vocabulary and viewpoint, and juxtaposed law codes that do not always agree in detail. Any account of the Pentateuch's origin, traditional or critical, has to reckon with those features.
The classical Wellhausen synthesis, treated as near-consensus through most of the twentieth century, has itself been extensively revised and challenged from within critical scholarship — by Rolf Rendtorff, Erhard Blum, and others proposing that the Pentateuch grew through the gradual expansion of smaller traditions rather than the redaction of four continuous documents. Conservative scholars, meanwhile, have long argued for substantial Mosaic authorship, either treating the source-critical observations as evidence of Moses's own use of earlier written material and later editorial supplementation, or contesting the source-critical method's criteria more directly. A reader should come away from this study understanding the shape of the argument on both sides rather than a single settled verdict, since none currently exists among scholars who have written on the question.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke share so much material, often in near-identical wording and sequence, that some literary relationship between them is all but certain; John, by contrast, stands largely apart in structure and content. The question of exactly how the first three Gospels relate to one another is the Synoptic Problem, and the dominant twentieth-century answer was B. H. Streeter's four-document hypothesis, set out in The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (1924): Mark was written first and used independently by both Matthew and Luke; a further body of sayings-material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark is conventionally labeled Q (from the German Quelle, "source"); and each of Matthew and Luke additionally drew on material unique to himself, labeled M and L respectively.
Streeter's hypothesis has never gone unchallenged. The Augustinian view (Matthew first, Mark an abbreviation of Matthew, Luke drawing on both) commanded the field before the nineteenth century and still has defenders. The Farrer hypothesis dispenses with Q altogether, proposing that Luke used both Mark and Matthew directly. What all these proposals share is the same starting evidence: the verbal agreements, the order of pericopes, and the places where two Gospels agree against the third. The value of working through the problem is less in memorizing any one solution than in learning to read the Synoptics side by side and notice these patterns for oneself.
Recognizing that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are literarily related, and seeing where and how they diverge in retelling the same episode, sharpens attention to each Evangelist's particular emphasis — what a given Gospel adds, omits, or reorders relative to its parallels is very often the point the Evangelist most wants made.
The line from the first attempts at putting Scripture into English to the Authorized Version of 1611 runs through several distinct stages, each shaped by the technology, politics, and theology of its moment. John Wycliffe's followers produced the first complete English Bible around 1382–1395, translated from the Latin Vulgate rather than the original languages and circulated only in manuscript, since printing did not yet exist in England. William Tyndale, working from the Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament rather than the Vulgate, produced the first printed English New Testament in 1526; he was executed for heresy in 1536 before completing the Old Testament, but his translation work supplied the base text, directly or indirectly, for nearly every English version that followed — including, by most estimates, a substantial majority of the wording eventually retained in the King James Version.
Between Tyndale and 1611 came a rapid succession of versions, each addressing the gaps or controversies of its predecessor: Coverdale's Bible (1535, the first complete printed English Bible), the Matthew Bible (1537, largely Tyndale under a pseudonym, since his name could not yet be used), the Great Bible (1539, the first authorized for public use in churches), the Geneva Bible (1560, produced by English Protestant exiles and the household Bible of choice for a generation, including Shakespeare's), and the Bishops' Bible (1568, the Church of England's own answer to Geneva). The 1611 Authorized Version was commissioned in large part to resolve the rivalry between the Geneva and Bishops' traditions, and its committee of translators drew on all of the preceding versions rather than starting fresh.
The Coverdale Psalter, not the King James Psalter, is what the 1928 Book of Common Prayer retains for the Daily Office — one of the clearest points at which the Prayer Book's own textual history and the Bible's textual history intersect directly, and worth returning to when the two studies are read together.
Certain sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels have long struck readers as cryptic, harsh, or difficult to reconcile with the rest of his teaching: the instruction to "let the dead bury their own dead" (Matthew 8:22 / Luke 9:60); the statement that he came "not to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34); the cursing of the fig tree out of season (Mark 11:12–14); the saying about "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake" (Matthew 19:12); and the parable of the unjust steward, commended for his very dishonesty (Luke 16:1–9), among others. These passages have generated a substantial body of exegetical literature precisely because a plain, uncontextualized reading tends to mislead.
A working method for approaching such sayings, and the one most patristic and Reformation-era commentators in fact use, is to press on three questions before settling on a reading: what genre is this (parable, hyperbolic aphorism, prophetic sign-act, plain instruction)? what was the saying's force for its first Jewish, first-century hearers, before later theological categories are read back into it? and how does the saying function within its immediate narrative context, rather than as an isolated proof-text? Sayings that seem harshest in isolation are very often rhetorical intensifications — a common feature of first-century Jewish teaching — rather than literal commands, though determining which is which in a given case is exactly the exegetical work required.
This guide was prepared for New Every Morning Anglican Fellowship as a companion to the reading-guide's study of the Prayer Book, covering questions of biblical criticism proper. It presents contested scholarly questions — the Documentary Hypothesis and the Synoptic Problem in particular — by outlining the major positions rather than adjudicating between them; readers are encouraged to consult the sources listed and reach their own judgment. No text of any copyrighted source is reproduced.