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There’s something like 26 volumes of the writings of the anteNicene fathers. An example being Polycarp, companion and student of John. Polycarp learned directly from the Apostles. Irenaeus learned from Polycarp and others who had known the Apostles. And so on. There’s a chain of church fathers going all the way back to the Apostles.

Somehow I think that these people had an idea of who wrote the NT documents, and oddly enough they failed to express a lot of doubt about their authorship. In some cases they even knew the reputed authors. Probably they had a better idea of the provenance of the writings than someone 20 centuries later play acting at being a junior David Hume, claiming that you just can’t know much of anything. It’s really just a simple case of the rules of evidence that courts use every day.

I understand the high regard in which you hold the early church fathers. But do not overstate what can be established as history rather than merely tradition. For example you assert that Polycarp was a "companion and student of John." But you do not ask the obvious question.... which John? John the Presbyter? John the Evangelist? John the Apostle? Or another John of whom we have no surviving knowledge? Polycarp himself certainly did not give us the information to answer that question. In fact, the sole surviving work of his never even mentions John once.

These traditions come down to us through a several hundred year game of "telephone," and there is no real way of discerning what changes were made before they were finally recorded in documents that have survived. This is like the Muslim "science of Hadith." Muslims insist they are reliable because they know the chain of transmission. But heck, if someone can make up a hadith, they can make up a chain of transmission to make it look reliable. The argument for authenticity is completely circular.

So again, we are confronted with the difference between history and tradition. It is Roman tradition that Romulus and Remus were suckled by she wolves. It is Muslim tradition that Muhammad rose to paradise from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is Buddhist tradition that the Buddha attained enlightenment sitting under the branches of the Bo-tree. It is Christian tradition that Polycarp was a disciple of the Apostle John. Traditions can tell us a lot. But they do not bear automatic confidence that they are actually true.

More importantly though, it is only a selective filtering of relevant documents that enables anyone to assemble evidence that the "orthodox" foundation myths of Christianity are true. Certainly, the vast diversity of early Christian thought was almost unknown until the Nag Hammadi find introduced us to texts that had been suppressed and destroyed by the Pauline Christians; victors of the earliest Christian v. Christian conflicts. The Pauline belief in Apostolic Succession gave them something their competing Christian sects lacked; an existing martial hierarchy of command and control. So this version of Christianity (along with its corresponding NT canon) achieved orthodoxy because they were better prepared to fight, not because they were necessarily true.

I have no doubt that, as you wrote, "these people had an idea of who wrote the NT documents." Need I point out, though, that the authorship of the Gospels is hardly among the least likely to be true things that they believed?