Compare methods

	Stemmatic Textual Criticism	Source Criticism (Documentary Hypothesis)
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1958	1885
Originator	Karl Lachmann (codified by Paul Maas; refined by M. L. West)	Julius Wellhausen (classic synthesis); popularized by Richard Elliott Friedman
Type	Genealogical pipeline for reconstructing a lost archetype from manuscript witnesses	Document-separation pipeline reconstructing the written sources of a text
Seminal source	Maas, P. (1958). Textual Criticism (trans. B. Flower). Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN: 9780198143185	Wellhausen, J. (1885). Prolegomena to the History of Israel (trans. J. S. Black & A. Menzies). Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black. [Cambridge Library Collection reprint]. ISBN: 9781108053822
Aliases	Lachmannian Method, Recensionism, Genealogical Textual Criticism, Stemmatics	Literarkritik, Documentary Hypothesis, JEDP Analysis, Pentateuchal Source Criticism
Related	4	4
Summary	Stemmatic textual criticism, the method codified by Karl Lachmann and given its classic formulation by Paul Maas in 1958, reconstructs the lost original of a work transmitted in many handwritten copies. Because every act of copying introduces errors, manuscripts that descend from a common defective ancestor share those errors. Maas's insight is that shared errors, not shared correct readings, reveal genealogy: by grouping witnesses according to the significant errors they hold in common, the critic builds a stemma codicum, a family tree of manuscripts rooted in the archetype. M. L. West's 1973 handbook turned these principles into working editorial practice for Greek and Latin texts, including the scriptures transmitted in those languages. The pipeline runs from collation through error analysis to a reconstructed archetype that can be defended reading by reading.	Source criticism (Literarkritik) seeks the written documents that lie behind a composite biblical text. Its most famous result is the Documentary Hypothesis, the claim that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was woven together from four originally independent sources, conventionally labeled J, E, D, and P. The hypothesis grew over the nineteenth century and received its classic synthesis from Julius Wellhausen, whose 1878 Prolegomena to the History of Israel argued that the sources reflect successive stages in the development of Israelite religion. Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 Who Wrote the Bible? presented the theory to a wide audience with vivid arguments for who wrote each source and when. Source criticism separates the strands by criteria such as the divine name used, doublets, vocabulary, style, and theology, then reconstructs how a redactor combined them.