You probably have too much on your plate to read this summary of Richard Bauckham's "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses," but I am forwarding it to you so you may look it over at your leisure.

I did a good job of summarizing his 500+ page book in about 95 pages. The first few pages include a simple overview of the main types of critical scholarship of the Gospels in order to set up the main issue Bauckham addresses, which is to criticize the theories of the form critics and to offer an alternative that the Gospels are not the product of a long and anonymous process of "oral tradition" but written versions of eyewitness testimony. 

One of my favorite sections are the three chapters on the authorship of the Gospel of John. Bauckham makes a very strong case, in my opinion, that the author is John the Elder whom he believes is also the author of the three epistles. I have always believed that John the Elder is the author, but, in a tip of the hat to tradition, I assumed that John the Elder was a disciple of John the Apostle who was the Beloved Disciple. Bauckham has convinced me that John the Elder was a personal disciple of Jesus who was not part of the Twelve, but a disciple who moved in circles of disciples centered in Jerusalem as well as with some of the Twelve, Andrew and Philip. I agree with him that the tradition that associates the Gospel with John the apostle is the result of the church seeking apostolic authorship of the Gospel and misreading the local tradition in the province of Asia (Turkey) which identified the author as "John, the disciple of the Lord," meaning John the Elder, not John the apostle. Bauckham makes the case that the entire fourth Gospel is complete as John the Elder wrote it, including the 21st chapter, and that John the Elder is the Beloved Disciple who actually wrote the Gospel. He does not discuss the three epistles except to say that he thinks they were also written by John the Elder. The speculations of scholars that another author wrote the epistles is very flimsy in my opinion, for the differences in style and doctrinal content are easily explained by the different purposes of the Gospel and the epistles. Kuemmel's introduction to the NT also makes the case for the same authorship of the Gospel and the epistles, and this is significant since Kuemmel usually follows conventional wisdom in 20th century critical scholarship.

Of course, the main thrust of the book is to make the case that all the Gospels are not remote from eyewitness testimony and that the "forms" of the pericopes are explained by the way eyewitnesses perceive, narrate, and transmit their accounts in predominantly oral cultures.

It may seem odd that I have taken so much time and care to write this summary, but I did it because I have found so much joy in this work--a book I am glad I have lived long enough to read. I was educated in form criticism in college. I have never accepted the skepticism of the form critics, but I did not have a constructive alternative to the form critics' history of the Synoptic tradition until discovering Bauckham's work. Bauckham has a homepage on the web that contains some of his unpublished lectures and articles.