So I stopped off at the local bookstore yesterday to follow up on Tom’s suggestion.
They didn’t have the Harper’s commentary, but they did have the Oxford commentary, which, I’m guessing is comparable. Very lengthy single volume commentary, apparently all written by academics, with plenty of academic cites and such.
(I didn’t end up buying it, so I don’t have it at hand as I write this, and I apologize in advance if my summary below mangles anything)
Summary:
There was a lengthy article on the New Testament in general, tying in it’s writing, adoption/formation with the history and issues of the 1st century church. Pretty interesting read, though it only dealt with issues of authorship somewhat tangentially.
There were also individual articles on each of the four gospels, including some bits on authorship and dating. BTW, both the overall summary and the individual gospel author articles, were, I believe, mostly/all written by different academics - so there were somewhat different viewpoints and tones throughout.
As for what they said about the authorships: It was not as Tom described - universal rejection of traditional authorships. In fact, things were rather a mixed bag. Most/all of the articles laid out several possible theories for the development of their respective gospel, each theory advocated to greater or lesser degree by specific academics and/or the academic community as a whole. In each case, the author had a favored theory, but IIRC all the authors were rather hesitant to stamp their theory as ‘gospel’ (yeah, yeah, the puns been made too many times in this thread already).
In each case, the ‘traditional’ authorship was one of the theories. IIRC, only the Mark article came out relatively strongly against ‘tradition’. For Matthew, IIRC, the author’s personal opinion was that while it’s unlikely that Matthew wrote the final form of the gospel, that it was possible/likely that Matthew wrote more of a ‘sayings’ gospel, which a later editor combined with narrative bits from Mark into the final form of Matthew as we have today.
The Luke article author said that the older theory that Luke had to have been written by a doctor wasn’t correct, and mentioned that the Luke/Acts author was not in complete agreement with Paul’s epistles on certain chronology and theology, but also stated that this might simply reflect different viewpoints between Luke and Paul (i.e. just because they were companions doesn’t mean Luke saw everything exactly the same way Paul did). Overall, IIRC, the Luke article author neither particularly affirmed nor disagreed with the traditional authorship
The John article author believed that John was not written all at one time, but probably a sort of first draft, edited/revised one or more later times, written by somebody in the Johanine community - either John himself or a disciple of John recording/recounting John’s version of things.
Again, my summaries are, IIRC, the article favored theories, but all articles recounted multiple theories. Hopefully I’ve captured these theories, as written by the article authors, correctly, but there were a lot of dense theories, and I was reading this yesterday and not taking notes, so I may have mangled something(s) above. In general, most of these authors seemed rather reluctant to say anything definite - there’s not a lot of direct evidence on these issues - there’s a lot of reliance on inferences, and it’s rather possible to read the same thing and draw rather different inferences from it.
Finally, I would return to my original statement - if you’re interested, do your own research from multiple sources, and draw your own conclusions.
And in particular, I don’t think, for the most part, this is a topic where you have to take anybody’s word for it. Most of the arguments and theories are rather accessible to the lay reader, with the exception of those dealing with nuances of Greek grammar and such (and even there, there’s disagreement amongst various authors and scholars).
