It was during this period of “modern thought” that a new interpretation of Pentateuch authorship began to emerge, resulting from the culmination of higher critical methodologies . These contemporary theories can be synthesized into what is called the documentary hypothesis. This hypothesis states that four distinct sources, Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D), and Priestly (P), combined documents over a period of five or six centuries in order to produce the Pentateuch. Julius Wellhausen pioneered this argument in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; he “denied all the supernaturalism of the Pentateuch and considered most of its history unreliable” and “by 1900 these views were generally accepted by biblical critics throughout the world” (Tenney 677). This era saw many rejections of traditional Church dogmas in an effort to restore Christianity with modernity.