"Friedman carefully describes the history of textual criticism of the Bible" To understand the connections of the books of the Bible, including the links between historical source, this book explores "Who wrote the Bible?".

Q, the earliest Gospel : an introduction to the original stories and sayings of Jesus / by Kloppenborg, John S., 1951- Westminster John Knox Press, c2008. Edition: 1st ed. Description: x, 170 p. : Illustration Details: ill. ; Dimensions: 22 cm. ISBN: 9780664232221 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0664232221 (pbk. : alk. paper) Contents: What is Q? -- Reconstructing a lost Gospel -- What a difference difference makes -- Q, Thomas, and James -- Appendix: The sayings Gospel Q in English.

This book discusses the use of a Q source for the New Testament. Although this is a debated source, it is widely known.

This book discusses many of the topics that we are looking at, including source Criticism

Source Criticism is the tool used to identify the original document that a biblical author utilized when they wrote a book for the Bible. This process identifies 4 major sources (credited to Julius Wellhausen) that were believed to be used in the Old Testament: the Yahwish (J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly (P). By identifying the source of a text, one may draw on other information in that text to assist in the compression of the text that is being studied. Some of these references are explicit: Jesus referring back to an event or quoting the Hebrew Bible. Some are direct copying: Mathew appears to use the same words that are found in Mark. Some are implied. The activity of using criteria to find the presence of the main criteria that an author uses is called source criticism. This method appears to be most utilized when discussing the "Synoptic Problem". Some authors that utilize this tool include Jesuit Father Dennis J. McCarthy, Norman Perrin, and Richard Elliott Friedman.

The German researchers who pioneered in this work called this lost document "Quelle" which means "source". This is usually abbreviated as "Q." The Gospel of Q remains a hypothetical document. No intact copy has ever been found. No reference to the document in early Christian writings has survived. Its existence is inferred from an analysis of the text of Matthew and Luke. Much of the content of Matthew and Luke were derived from the Gospel of Mark. But there were also many passages which appear to have come from Q. Many theologians and religious historians believe that Q's text can be reconstructed by analyzing passages that Matthew and Luke have in common. If the Gospel of Q exists, it might best be regarded as a reconstructed Gospel. Many believe that it was written much earlier than the four canonical gospels in the Christian Scriptures (New Testament): Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. It may have been the first of the 40 or so Gospels that were written and used by the early Christian movements. The Gospel of Q is different from the canonical gospels in that it does not extensively describe events in the life of Jesus. Rather, it is largely a collection of sayings -- similar to the Gospel of Thomas.

Whereas historical study tended to be concerned with the prehistory of the text (oral traditions and written source materials) and with its development through successive redactions, literary study focused on the final form of the text.

The study of the potential sources, oral and written, used to compose a text. This approach is home to the Documentary Hypothesis and the Q source for the Gospels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_criticism_(Biblical_studies)

Source criticism, as the term is used in biblical criticism, refers to the attempt to establish the sources used by the author and/or redactor of the final text. The term "literary criticism" is occasionally used as a synonym. The ultimate aim of these scholars was to reconstruct the history of the biblical text, as well as the religious history of ancient Israel. In general, the closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened.