[The_Reader_David]

“Don’t forget that those who wrote the gospels were doing so from a distance of 200 years."

Bloody silly assertion. It's obvious that St. Luke interviewed the Virgin Mary--Holy Tradition says that he even "wrote" several icons of her from life, one, a small icon carved in mastic overlaid on wood, is preserved in the Monastery of Simonas Petras on Mount Athos.

Now it is true that the oldest extant manuscript of the Gospels date to about 200 A.D.

[Mrs. Don-o]

RD, I read that a papyrologist named Thiede has found fragments of Greek texts in the caves at Qumran from the New Testament – specifically 7Q5 [from "Mark"] and P46 [from "Matthew"] – and datable to before the 60s AD. People who date these things post-70 AD do so by imposing their unsupported assumption that the prophecies about the first Jewish War, thr destruction of the Temple, and persecution in its wake mentioned in the Gospels must have been written after those events, i.e. they insisted a priori that prophecies could not have been prophecies.

The critical date is 49 AD, since Claudius expelled all Jews from Rome (Christian and non-Christian Jews) at that date. John Mark was a Jew so he hardly stayed behind if Peter was expelled at this time. The earliest time for their return was after Claudius died in 54 AD. Apparently the Gospel of Mark is from this period and very likely written in Rome, or at least for Jewish-diaspora Latin speakers since it has so many Latinisms in the text; and was very probably sourced from Pater, for whom Mark acted as scribe.

I am by no means an expert on these details. It's just what I've read.