Wellhausen was born at Hamelin in the Kingdom of Hanover. The son of a Protestant pastor, he later studied theology at the University of Göttingen under Georg Heinrich August Ewald and became Privatdozent for Old Testament history there in 1870. In 1872, he was appointed professor ordinarius of theology at the University of Greifswald. However, he resigned from the faculty in 1882 for reasons of conscience, stating in his letter of resignation: He became professor extraordinarius of oriental languages in the faculty of philology at Halle, was elected professor ordinarius at Marburg in 1885 and was transferred to Göttingen in 1892, where he stayed until his death. Among theologians and biblical scholars, he is best known for his book, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. After a detailed synthesis of existing views on the origins of the first five books of the Old Testament, Wellhausen's contribution was to place the development of these books into a historical and social context. The resulting argument, called the documentary hypothesis, became the dominant model for many biblical scholars and remained so for most of the 20th century. In the realm of Arabic studies, Wellhausen's greatest achievement remains The Arab Kingdom And Its Fall.
''Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels'' and documentary hypothesis
Wellhausen was famous for his critical investigations into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch. He is perhaps best known for his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels in which he advanced a definitive formulation of the documentary hypothesis. It argues that the Torah had its origins in a redaction of four originally-independent texts dating from several centuries after the time of Moses, their traditional author. Wellhausen's hypothesis remained the dominant model for Pentateuchal studies until the last quarter of the 20th century, when it began to be advanced by other biblical scholars who saw more and more hands at work in the Torah and ascribed them to periods even later than Wellhausen had proposed.
Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments
Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte
Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz, in its time the standard modern account of Umayyad history, English translation The Arab Kingdom and its Fall
*Urdu Translation: "Saltanat e Arab Aur Uska Suqoot".
Skizzen und Vorarbeiten
Medina vor dem Islam
New and revised editions of Friedrich Bleek's Einleitung in das Alte Testament.
Die kleinen Propheten, a critical brochure
“The Book of Psalms” in Sacred Books of the Old Testament
In 1906 Die christliche Religion, mit Einschluss der israelitisch-jüdischen Religion appeared, in collaboration with Adolf Jülicher, Adolf Harnack and others. He also produced less influential work as a New Testament commentator, publishingDas Evangelium Marci, übersetzt und erklärt in 1903, Das Evangelium Matthäi and Das Evangelium Lucae in 1904, and Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien in 1905.
