Of bears (and others) of "very little brain"

Reconstructing the Pooh Community - Justin Taylor

But few know of [Richard Bauckham's] years spent in the Winnie-the-Pooh books, reconstructing the community behind the texts [by using methods similar to those used to reconstruct the "Johannine community"]. In this unpublished paper he summarizes the "major methodological breakthrough which virtually all Pooh scholarship now takes for granted." Here is a snippet:

I couldn't do justice to the humor of what follows, you'll just have to read it yourself.  Instead, I'll just skip to my response

So what he's saying is that both Winnie the Pooh and the Gospel of John must have been the works of redactors working with multiple sources?  Because we all know there's no way that the Gospel of John could have been the work of a single author.

For a parody of the "documentary hypothesis" (a.k.a., JEDP), there's New Directions in Pooh Studies: Überlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch, for which I've provided the following excerpt:

There is little need, at the present stage of scholarship, to attempt a justiÞcation of the principle that the dogma of unitary authorship for works of literature must be totally abandoned. In all conÞdence we may say that a priori we may expect the Pooh corpus (viz. Winnie-the-Pooh, hereafter abbreviated W, containing traditions of higher antiquity than the Deutero-Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner, hereafter abbreviated H) to be of composite origin; even if there were such a person as A.A. Milne, traditionally the 'author', we may be sure that he did not write the Pooh books. His name does not occur once within the narratives themselves, and we can hardly be expected to take a title-page, manifestly a later addition, seriously.

 See also "More fun deconstructing children's literature"