Making of the New Testament Documents

The Making of the New Testament Documents investigates literary tradition and their 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.A comparison of the traditions, and of the common opposition they sometimes have in view, supports a synchronic relationship of the various New Testament documents, all of which with the exception of John's Gospel and letters reflect the pre-AD 70 period. It thus challenges the tradition of F.C. Baur, still widely followed, that apart from a few Pauline letters, dates New Testament writings from the last decades of the first century to the first half of the second.The author contends that the New Testament is the product of four contemporaneous and cooperating apostolic missions, each of which produced a Gospel and a number of letters and each of which faced the same judaizing-gnosticizing countermission. These four allied missions shared both Gospel and epistolary traditions even as they pursued their discrete tasks in the service of the church. The arguments of this book, if persuasive, will require a reassessment of the history of early Christianity.This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.