Publisher's Synopsis
This text investigates literary tradition and its implications for the authorship, origin and dating of the New Testament Gospels and letters. Building upon earlier research, it identifies and compares preformed pieces that, in the letters, call into question the traditional view that the letters were the sole product of an individual whose authorship could be vetted by internal criteria of vocabulary, style and theological expression. The numerous and diverse epistolary traditions, many non-authorial, argue for a kind of corporate authorship, that until now has been unappreciated and apparently unknown to critical scholarship.;The author contends that the New Testament is the product of four contemporaneous and co-operating apostolic missions, each of which produced a Gospel and a number of letters and each of which faced the same judaizing-gnosticizing countermission.
