Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!

[xpastor]

That's a pretty flimsy argument. We know that there were a number of pseudepigraphical works rejected by the early church. But what we do not have are proven examples of them being accepted in the New Testament. For instance, who do you think wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews? Paul, Luke, James, Barnabas, Clement, somebody else?

Many of the shorter epistles including 2 Peter were considered dubious by the Church Fathers—as usual, no opinion recorded from the Church Mothers. They were called antilegomena, i.e., spoken against. You are indulging in the usual fundamentalist cherry-picking: the Church Fathers are reliable near-contemporary witnesses when they support your position, and blithely ignored when they don't.

The language used by the author (who we presume is Peter) is talking about a contemporary, and not the way a 2nd century writer would write about the 1st century church fathers/apostles. His reference makes it clear that Paul is still alive, he doesn't use any language which would suggest that Paul was deceased at the time of writing.

To reject Petrine authorship means that you have to account for these, and the other, discrepancies. In other words, if somebody wrote it in the 2nd century, then why are they talking about Paul as a contemporary, etc?

That's easy enough to explain. There were forgeries, people writing under the name of a long-dead authority.

Well, again, 2 Peter 3:2 reads to me as if the apostles are contemporaries of the writer. There's nothing about it that suggests that the writer is referencing apostles from some unspecified time in the future.

The phrase "long ago" is repeatedly used, indicating that it has been a long wait for the second coming, ancestors are dead, etc.

That makes for an interesting theory, but the world's end is not a recurring theme in the New Testament the way in which would be expected if it was a core belief.

John 21:18-19: 'Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.”'

That passage has always read to me as if Peter would die later than AD 68. It also discredits the idea that he was crucified upside down since Jesus tells hime he will be dressed and lead to his death - not stripped down and lead to his death. So all these theories that rely solely upon church history from tradition are easily discredited.

The end of the world is indeed the central theme of the NT, both for Jesus and for Paul, who expected that Jesus would return while he was still living.

I wouldn't appeal to the Gospel of John for anything about Jesus' teaching. There is next to nothing authentic in it as compared to the 3 synoptics. It's a bunch of theologizing by some anonymous person at the end of the century.

Even if we accepted John, I don't know where you get the idea that it would put Peter's death later than 68 AD. First, you are assuming that Jesus can infallibly predict the future which no skeptic would accept without proof. Second, if Peter was about the same age as Jesus, that would make him 74 in 68 AD, which can surely be called old. Third, as above, you consider church traditions very valuable only when they agree with your pre-established opinions.

Similarly in an earlier post you said that the Jewish historian Josephus probably got the date wrong for the census under Quirinius. As far as I can see, you base that solely upon a belief that Luke cannot make mistakes since his writing was bound up in THE BIBLE™ centuries after his death. It was a credulous age. Herodotus tells miracle stories which I don't believe, so does Luke. They both contain some historical truth, but there is no reason to think that either of them is free of errors.

You never attempted to answer my earlier post about the birth narratives for Jesus. Specifically, Luke says that Mary, Joseph and Jesus headed back to Nazareth 41 days after the birth. No time there for the excursion to Egypt which Matthew tells us happened. Not unless God furnished them with a flying horse as Allah did several centuries later for Mohammed. You remember he flew from Mecca to Jerusalem in a single night, so the trip to Egypt and back would be no problem. After all, Bethlehem to Alexandria is a shorter trip as the Pegasus flies.