I don't think so.
First, like a lot of apocryphal NT stuff, the book is HIGHLY fantastic! Magic Palm branches and people's arms withering and Peter like some wonder-worker far beyond anything in Acts!
There's another fine and fantastic book called the Acts of Pilate. It makes a fine theological point, that Jesus "harrowed" hell. But it makes it with entirely incredible details. It is also rightly excluded from the canon, but few think IHS did not harrow hell or cite the exclusion of the Acts of the Apostles as evidence for that claim.
In general, though, while all along there were adversaries both within and without the Church, the Church does not view the establishment of Dogma as a prosecutorial proceeding in a United States courtroom. So the arguments which pick at the case won't necessarily strike us as conclusive or dispositive.
It's as if we were playing two different games. You're asking for a proof beyond reasonable doubt. And I think that approach may lead to errors. For example, you say:
Now, if in that era there were already an established doctrine in place that rather counterintuitive hypothesis might serve as a plausible explanation, but such is not the case.
What if it were not "an established doctrine" (don't see how it could have been, since it wasn't defined until the last century) but a proposition gradually gaining adherents and waiting for an 'account' which did not involved floating biers and withered arms, but careful thought.
To me, one of the interesting seams between Catholics and Protestants is how we think about God, time, and eternity. That difference leads me to think that the following assertion, though necessarily vague, is not at all counter-intuitive: The Dogma of the Assumption of Mary comes down to: Mary "now" or "currently" enjoys what all the saints will enjoy after the last judgment.
It's not all that dissimilar to the sort of "conceptual surround" of the Immaculate Conception,which is that the effects of Our Lord's atoning work reach throughout all time. They reached His mother in a unique way so that -- unlike us who are saved from sin after we fall in -- she was saved BEFORE she fell in.
(None of this is meant to be persuasive or argumentative. It's meant to give a taste of our thinking.)
So Mary is, among other things, as eschatological figure to us. She can be viewed as the "already having come true" of the promises made to all the saints who one day will be sinless and united with their resurrected and spiritual bodies.
To me, once my very calvinist seminary made clear the notion of proleptic eschatology and once I immersed my thought in that notion, what is said about Mary quickly became less and less "counter-intuitive" and much more of a "why not?" (I'm a great disappointment to my professors. heh heh heh.)
Another difference inn attitude is thaT SOME Protestants SEEM to me to have a view that the Church was at its spiritual and dogmatic best in the early days, and that the challenge of subsequent years is to cling to that archaic purity.
The view we have, I think, is that the promise that the Spirit will lead the Apostles into all truth, works against the sort of "inevitable decline of the Dharma: view which is, I think, more Buddhist than Christian. It's no shock to us that a strand of thought back then, would be contemplated, debated, worked over, refined, and then finally be fit for promulgation.
Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful post.
I am not asking for historical proof beyond a reasonable doubt, although that might not be such a bad thing to do, if such were even possible, with respect to adherence to dogmas with anathemas attached to them. I am asking for reliable, historical evidence for a dogma that entails historical claims about a putative event in history
I am not asking for theological reasons or justifications of the dogma. It seems to me reasonable that claims about actual historical events should be backed up with some sort of reliable account of individuals who were personally present, or else were in contact with the events through unimpeachable sources, as is the case with the New Testament. Instead the only known source (a theological redaction of earlier tales) by which the teaching is known to have entered the Church are spurious, pious forgeries and outright fabrication containing admitted absurdities written by heretics.
Development of doctrine is a related subject to this, but it's probably not worth going into at this point.
Cordially,