Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?

[Aractus]

You cannot reformulate the Sermon on the Mount from James, it is substantially different and includes other areas of Jesus's teachings that are consistent with but not included in that sermon. What's most important of all is that almost nothing in James is found in the gospel of Mark at all.

Wait, you went from Matthew to Mark here.

No I didn't, I merely made the point that James's theology & teachings is not based on the gospel of Mark , the gospel of Mark being the earliest gospel.

And now to Luke?

You shouldn't have any problem with following what I'm saying. The Sermon on the Mount is found exclusively in the gospel of Matthew. James's epistle is based more on that one sermon than anything else. The Gospel of Luke contains the Sermon on the Plain which is similar to, but different from, the Sermon on the Mount.

That's kinda my point. It's not like they had tape recorders back then, and it's not like any putative authors had recordings to work from. So the idea that they could work with notes from one, or several, iterations of the same essential speech, seems pretty understandable to me.

Well yes, but they didn't have to have notes at all (it could have been transmitted orally to James), and nothing suggests that Jesus himself used written notes in his preachings - he simply remembered his sermons and delivered them to his audiences.

So what? He could simply be promulgating ideas he found nice enough without crediting the speaker, and even so Matthew, from other sources, could have found verbiage similar enough to regard James as useful, too -- corroboration in his own mind.

You are missing the point. James has knowledge about one specific sermon, or so it seems, and he is ignorant of anything Jesus taught that is recorded in Mark, and most of the rest of the stuff that is in Matthew/Luke as well. In fact, if we didn't have the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain in Matthew and Luke respectively then it would like like James came up with his teachings from Judaism and not from Jesus.

Your underlying assumption seems to be perfect knowledge on the part of the authors of the Gospels, and that seems pretty questionable, to me.

I'm not sure where you get that from, which is why I put "Mark" and "Matthew" in inverted commas...