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

[DeistPaladin]

and more extensive examination has made me more convinced that it's not possible to date Matthew later than 45 AD.

Wow. I've never heard any apologist, even of the most fringy variety, ever try to push the dates of any of the Gospels back sooner than 50 CE. I guess your research is more extensive than any scholar.

I provide references, and you don't. That's the difference between you and me.

How about my reference to Oxford's published Bible?

Do you know why they date Mark later than 70AD?

Yes. It's because of the "little apocalypse" in Mark chapter 13.

Mark 13:2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

The temple was destroyed in 70 CE, so the reference to the temple destruction indicates the passage was written after this point. It's an old trick with "prophecy": wait for an event to happen and then "predict" it.

Thankyou, I agree, and this only strengthens my argument that the gospel could not have been written later than c. 45 AD.

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OK, let me see if I got this.

The authorship of the Gospels is dubious at best. You agree. And that proves to your mind that they must have been written very early on.

Did I black out for a few minutes while you offered all the other evidence that allows you to draw this conclusion?

Nice straw man.

No, that seems to be your reasoning. You assert that the attributed authors wrote the Gospels, present the folklore about when they died and work backward from there. If I'm wrong, feel free to elaborate.

Luke can be reliably dated.

Do tell.

Just like "Q"...

The "Q" document is purely hypothetical.

Josephus and Luke had to have a "common written source" (maybe it was "Q"), or one was based on the other.

Or Josephus wrote his own works. Why would Josephus copy Luke, a historian so clearly inept that he confused the dates of Herod the Great and the administration of Quirinius so badly that Mary wound up with a 10 year pregnancy.

According to Luke, Mary conceived during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE (Luke chapter 1). Luke then says Mary gave birth during the census taken while Quirinus was governor of Syria (see Luke chapter 2). Quirinius didn't become governor until 6 CE. So either Luke screwed his dates up or those Sons of God take longer to bake in the oven.

But if Luke was written in c. 90 AD then: why doesn't he include the siege of Jerusalem, why doesn't he include the deaths of Peter Paul and others who have been martyred by then, and why does he end Acts c. 61 AD?

Perhaps because "Luke" (or whoever) was writing a Gospel about the life of Jesus, not a siege of Jerusalem that would happen four decades later. The "martyrdom" of Peter and Paul are also separate topics and might not yet have been fabricated (this is part of what I regard as Christian folklore). And my contention is that a different author wrote the ridiculously fanciful and woo-drenched (even by the Bible's standards) tale of Acts.

Why do I mention this? Because of the two accounts that have the same version, and they are Luke and (shock-horror) 1 Corinthians.

Have I proved my point yet?

No, you committed the logical fallacy of Red Herring (changing the subject). Try answering my question.