There is probably a general assumption that those who prefer earlier dates for biblical books tend to do so for apologetic reasons. That is to say, they want biblical books to be early because then they are more likely to be historically accurate. There are empirical difficulties with this assumption. In New Testament studies for instance, some of the most prominent names (such as John Robinson, Maurice Casey, and James Crossley) who have in the last fifty or so years advocated for earlier dates for some or all of the corpus have had little to no doctrinal commitment to the historical accuracy of the biblical text. But aside from that, it is interesting to note how few Christian doctrines are directly affected by the question of when the biblical texts were written. Indeed, perhaps the only doctrine really challenged by later dates is that of verbal plenary inerrancy (the doctrine that all words in scripture are historically and otherwise wholly accurate in all matters), and this in the limited case of New Testament epistles which are judged to be pseudonymous. And this challenge is only derivatively related to the question of the epistle's date; the real issue is that if a text is pseudonymous then we must judge it to be errant in its own claims to authorship. Late dates for the epistles are thus only an issue insofar as they might exclude the possibility that (for instance) Paul wrote 2 Timothy or Peter wrote 2 Peter. And relate to a doctrine held in its most rigourous form only by a minority of Christians globally.
Those who hold to verbal plenary inerrancy of course want the biblical texts to be fully accurate historically. But even this has only an indirect relationship to the date of biblical texts. It is probably true that all things being equal something written shortly after an event has a greater chance of depicting it accurately than something written much later. Nonetheless, proximity hardly guarantees inerrancy. My go-to example of this reality is Albert Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich. Speer not only wrote his memoir in the two decades following the fall of the Third Reich but he was also a high-ranking member of the Nazi hierarchy. As such, his account of the Nazi regime is of great interest to the historian. But Speer also was convicted of criminal activity due to his participation in the regime, and indeed wrote Inside the Third Reich while he serving out his sentence in Spandau prison. He had compelling reason to distort his presentation of the Nazi regime. To borrow a term from literature, he is an unreliable narrator. His proximity to the events of the regime and the war surely means that he had the knowledge necessary to present a very accurate picture of what was happening in the inner circles of the Third Reich, but his self-interest also means that he had reason to misrepresent certain aspects of that same matter. Conversely, historians working today are often in a better position to correct for the misrepresentations of someone like Speer. (Witness also the reevaluation of Adolf Eichmann in recent years, from unreflective bureaucrat with a tragic tunnel focus upon his job to a committed anti-Semite who greatly believed that the "Final Solution" was necessary and important). Sometimes temporal distance creates a greater capacity for historical accuracy, as the passions and self-interest of the day give way to more detached reflection.
Returning to the biblical text, most biblical scholars think that the Gospel of Mark predates the Gospel of Luke by a decade or two. But also according to tradition, the Gospel of Mark is based primarily upon the testimony of one person—Peter—whereas the Gospel of Luke claims to be based upon the testimony of multiple eyewitnesses "to the word." Now, setting aside questions about the legitimacy of such claims to eyewitness sources, this reinforces the possibility that Mark's Gospel could be distorted by reliance upon a single self-interested participant in the events under discussion, whereas Luke's Gospel potentially corrects for such distortion through a multiplicity of witnesses. (I must emphasize that I do not argue that this is the case. I'm simply outlining a possibility raised by our data). And this possibility would remain whether Mark was written c. 70 and Luke c. 85–90 (as the majority of scholars would argue) or whether Mark was written c. 40 and Luke c. 60 (as I would argue). Any implications for the doctrine of verbal plenary inerrancy would stand, regardless of the exact dates given for these texts.
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