Documentary Hypothesis

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1 Documentary Hypothesis Notes from: 1. JOHN BARTON, "Source Criticism," The Anchor Bible Dictionary [ ~eslinger/ ] 2. 3. http:// "SOURCE CRITICISM. [VI, 162] Formerly called literary criticism or higher criticism, source criticism is a method of biblical study, which analyzes texts that are not the work of a single author but result from the combination of originally separate documents. This method has been applied to texts of the Old Testament (especially but not exclusively the Pentateuch) and New Testament (especially but not exclusively the gospels). This entry surveys the application of this method to those texts. A. Definitions Modern literary conventions forbid plagiarism, and require authors to identify and acknowledge any material they have borrowed from another writer.

to flatten out such differences by using a uniform “biblical English,” but in the Hebrew they are easily detected. D. Stages of Source-Critical Analysis 1. Breaking Up the Text. Source-critical analysis begins not with a quest for continuous sources, but with an analysis, into fragments, of each section of the biblical book under consideration.

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