Terrific post. Thanks!
MArk, the earlies gospel, was written in 70 AD?
Oh pleeeeeassee... the German skeptics who asserted that were discredited decades ago.
An Aramaic version of Matthew existed in AD 50, and probably served as a source document for Luke. But this version was heavily altered, so we'll let it slide that this wasn't counted.
Acts ends abruptly, with no mention of very significant events which happened just after the actions described in Acts, about 64 AD. The natural inclination, then, is to suppose that those events hadn't happened yet. And since they quite possibly include the execution of the author, his failure to record them is for obvious reasons.
Acts is the sequel to the gospel of Luke, so Luke probably was written a few years before 64 AD. The reason the German Skeptics favored a later date is that Jesus knew of the destruction of the Temple, which took place in 64 AD. Not only is this a presumption that Jesus couldn't foretell a future event, given the goings-on at the time, Jesus' suggestion would hardly have been an outlandish guess.
Luke is based on Mark, so Mark was probably written shortly before Luke.
John attests that it was written by the beloved disciple. Linguistic reasons for doubting that were disproven by the discover of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which revealed that the Essene sect to which John belonged were in fact incredibly devoted to the preservation of scriptures and the literary art of Greek. Scholars had said that John, being a mere fisherman, would have bene intellectually incapable of creating such a literary masterwork; turns out he probably was referred to Jesus by the Baptist because he was a literary master. But John was quite young at the time, and could very well have lived until AD 90. The gospel was apparently written by John himself. Perhaps it existed as several separate papyri which were collected together shortly after his death.