Do we really know who wrote the New Testament documents? Do we really know when they were written? Scholars have long debated these fundamental questions. This volume identifies and investigates literary traditions and their implications for the authorship and dating of the gospels and the letters of the New Testament. Departing from past scholarship, E. Earle Ellis argues that the gospels and letters are products of the corporate authorship of four allied apostolic missions and not just the creation of individual authors. The analysis of literary traditions also has implications for the dating of New Testament documents. Providing a critique of the critical orthodoxy with respect to the dating of New Testament documents, Ellis seeks to weigh the patristic traditions more heavily and more critically than has been done in the past. Ellis provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the process by which the gospel message became the gospel books.