John Wesley liked to describe himself as ‘a man of one book’, meaning that his doctrines were drawn solely from the Bible. Yet, as Donald Bullen shows by means of a historical survey, Wesley's claim has attracted relatively little critical attention from Methodist scholars who have tended to take for granted the biblical basis of his teaching. American scholars, anxious to develop a ‘Wesleyan’ theology, have indeed postulated a ‘Wesleyan quadrilateral’ to define Wesley's authority for doctrine. This claims that Wesley added a distinctive emphasis on experience to his inherited Anglican appeal to Scripture, tradition and reason, while stressing that for him the other ‘authorities’ are merely subordinate aids for interpreting Scripture. As Bullen points out, Wesleyan doctrinal studies have failed to take account of critical biblical scholarship. He appeals especially to the application of reader-response literary criticism to biblical studies in support of his argument that Wesley was interpreting the Bible with a set of theological presuppositions. These were essentially those of ‘an eighteenth century high church Arminian Anglican’. Hence the strained Arminian interpretations of predestinarian passages in the Bible and in article 17 of the Thirty-Six Articles. An analysis of examples from Wesley's Explanatory notes on the New Testament and sermons shows how he imposed his doctrine of Christian perfection on his exegesis of the first Epistle of John. The identification given to Wesley's brand of Anglican presuppositions, though broadly convincing, is somewhat over-simplified. The Arminian bias is clear enough even without reader response criticism, but the persistent influence of Wesley's High Church prejudices was nevertheless complicated by other factors. Bullen acknowledges that Wesley's lay preachers and ordinations conflicted with his Anglican loyalties. In later years he played down his debt to the Moravians, yet his continuing belief in the possibility of instant conversion and his extension of that notion to the achievement of perfection were hardly typical of Anglican opinion, nor was ‘perfection’ as he understood it. Many Anglicans disagreed with his claim that the extraordinary spiritual gifts of apostolic times were still available. It is also curious that of the half-dozen sources acknowledged for his Explanatory notes only one is Anglican. In other words, Wesley's version of ‘High Church Arminian Anglicanism’ was in important respects idiosyncratic, influenced by his eclecticism and openness to change in response to evangelistic imperatives. Further study of English biblical scholarship before and during Wesley's lifetime seems to be needed to show the precise influences affecting him. Despite reading some of the deistic writers he did not grapple with their disturbing, if crude and derivative, attacks on the Bible. Yet he was not a simple literalist for he used Bengel's textual criticism to correct the Authorised Version, and, like Isaac Watts, he thought some Psalms unfit for Christian use. Bullen nevertheless supplies a valuable first stage towards reassessing Wesley's claim to be a biblical theologian, and, as he is clearly aware, his findings challenge uncritical assumptions about the biblical basis for ‘Wesleyan’ theology.