a professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously published book, played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis of works of scripture. Astruc was the first to try to demonstrate — using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics — the theory that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach that is called the documentary hypothesis.
