Question mark
The rhetorical question mark or percontation point was invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question; however, its use died out in the 17th century. It was later revived in modern-day society by Matt DiRoberto. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it. This character can be represented using the reversed question mark (⸮) found in Unicode as U+2E2E. The percontation point is analogous to the irony mark, but those are even more rarely seen.
Source criticism (biblical studies)
Source criticism is the search for the original sources which lie behind a given biblical text. It can be traced back to the 17th-century French priest Richard Simon, and its most influential product is Julius Wellhausen's "Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels" (1878), whose "insight and clarity of expression have left their mark indelibly on modern biblical studies". An example of source criticism is the study of the Synoptic problem. Critics noticed that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were very similar, indeed, at times identical. The dominant theory to account for the duplication is called the two-source hypothesis. This suggests that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and that it was probably based on a combination of early oral and written material. Matthew and Luke were written at a later time, and relied primarily on two different sources: Mark and a written collection of Jesus's sayings, which has been given the name Q by scholars. This latter document has now been lost, but at least some of its material can be deduced indirectly, namely through the material that is common in Matthew and Luke but absent in Mark. In addition to Mark and Q, the writers of Matthew and Luke made some use of additional sources, which would account for the material that is unique to each of them.