Comparer des méthodes

	Source Criticism (Documentary Hypothesis)	Form Criticism
Domaine	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1885	1921
Auteur d'origine	Julius Wellhausen (classic synthesis); popularized by Richard Elliott Friedman	Hermann Gunkel (Old Testament); Rudolf Bultmann & Martin Dibelius (New Testament)
Type	Document-separation pipeline reconstructing the written sources of a text	Genre-classification and tradition-history pipeline for oral pre-literary units
Source fondatrice	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	Bultmann, R. (1963). The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. J. Marsh). New York: Harper & Row. [German original 1921]. ISBN: 9780060611729
Alias	Literarkritik, Documentary Hypothesis, JEDP Analysis, Pentateuchal Source Criticism	Formgeschichte, Form-Critical Analysis, Genre Criticism of Scripture, Tradition History
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	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.	Form criticism (Formgeschichte) studies the small, originally oral units that make up the biblical text, asking what genre each unit belongs to, what social setting gave rise to it, and how it developed before reaching written form. Hermann Gunkel pioneered the approach for the Hebrew Bible, treating the narratives of Genesis and the Psalms as folk forms shaped by communal use, while Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius applied it to the Gospels, analyzing the sayings and stories about Jesus as units that circulated and were shaped by the early church before the evangelists wrote. Bultmann's 1921 History of the Synoptic Tradition is the method's most systematic statement. The core conviction is that form and function are linked: a unit's genre points to the recurring life-setting, the Sitz im Leben, in which the community used it.