Uncanon Editorial Standards

Who Writes This

Every article here carries one byline instead of a rotating cast of named contributors. How the work happens is worth saying plainly: we take the scholarship from the academic sources named below, draft with AI help, and then a human checks and edits every page before it publishes.

The AI is here to make dense material readable. It doesn't decide what's true. The evidence comes from the scholars, and a human checks it against them.

Uncanon is an independent project, built by Cavvera LLC. It isn't a ministry, and it has no statement of faith. You can read more about how the project works on the About page.

How We Read: History, Not Devotion

Every article follows the historical-critical method — the same evidence-based approach taught in university religious-studies departments. We ask historical questions: when was this text composed, by whom, for what audience, under what political and cultural pressures, and drawing on what earlier sources.

Those aren't the questions devotional reading asks. A devotional reading asks what a passage should mean for your life today. We ask what it meant when it was written, to the people who wrote it.

Most writing about the Bible either tells you what to believe or assumes you already know the field. We're trying to sit in the gap between the two: scholarly context, in plain language, with room for your own conclusions. We don't argue for these texts or against them. We tell you what scholars have found and let you decide what to make of it.

Where the Claims Come From

We attribute claims to named scholars and specific evidence, never to vague "experts." When a position has a documented origin, we say so: the Documentary Hypothesis was first systematized by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, and popularized for general readers by Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? (1987).

For New Testament authorship and textual criticism we cite the published work of Bart Ehrman, principally Forged (2011) and his textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. For historical context across both testaments we draw on the Yale Open Courses of Christine Hayes and Dale Martin.

The sources we come back to:

• Primary texts — the biblical passages themselves, read closely, in their historical and literary context.
• Yale Open Courses — Christine Hayes on the Hebrew Bible and Dale Martin on the New Testament, used as background scholarship.
• Bible Odyssey — the public-facing resource of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), the leading professional body for biblical scholars.
• Books by working scholars — academic and general-audience titles by specialists in the field, including Ehrman and Friedman, used for consensus positions rather than novel arguments.

We hedge the way the evidence hedges — "most scholars date," "scholars suggest," "the evidence indicates." Where scholars genuinely disagree, we give you the dominant view and tell you there's a debate, rather than flattening it into false certainty. Approximate dates keep their uncertainty markers ("~750 BCE") because that's how the scholarship holds them.

The scholars we name are cited, not affiliated with us. None of them has reviewed, endorsed, or contributed to anything here, and any error in how we've represented their work is ours — write to hello@uncanon.app and we'll correct it.

When Pages Change

Every article carries a "Last updated" date at the top. We move that date when we substantively revise a page — new scholarship folded in, a section deepened, a claim corrected. Cosmetic edits don't move it.

Scholarly consensus shifts slowly, but it does shift, and translations and dating debates evolve. We re-review a page when the scholarship moves, when a reader reports an error, or when we rewrite it — not on a fixed schedule. When we do, we check the dates, figures, and attributions, and bring anything out of step with the field back into line.

So the date means something. It tells you when we last measured the page against the state of the research.

Found an Error?

Please tell us. If you find a date, an attribution, or a claim that doesn't match the scholarship — or a passage that reads as devotional rather than historical — write to hello@uncanon.app with the page and the specifics.

If you're right, we'll fix the article and move the "Last updated" date. Getting the scholarship right matters more to us than having been right the first time.

To see how this reads in practice, start with who wrote the Bible or the history of the Bible. The full library of articles is in Learn.

These same standards govern the reading app, where every passage arrives with its historical context set before you read a verse. Get the iOS app.