Plagiarism in the NT

[Mister Agenda]

So, not sure if I'm missing a contextual clue, but this 'die for a lie' thing, does it imply that these people KNOW it's a lie and just keep on going anyway?

Yes, that is the context of the argument.  Not whether someone believed it was true, but knowing if it is or not and maintaining what you know is false under pressure to say otherwise.  So it only applies to those who say they saw the risen Christ.

That's a bit of a stretch. The writers of the gospels could easily have believed they were reporting the facts and just been wrong. The authors weren't the witnesses, and they don't seem to have gotten their information directly from supposed witnesses either. They wrote down the stories they were told, that they already believed. No one had to lie, events being exaggerated after the fact is selected for in retellings because it makes them more memorable.

I don't think people who think they've seen Elvis posthumously are lying (with probably some exceptions). That in no way implies that Elvis has been resurrected, does it? Isn't it more likely that they just saw someone who resembles Elvis? Imagine what it must have been like in the first century when no one even had a photo of Jesus to compare to, and a lot of people had only seen him from a distance?

Or what if Jesus just survived the crucifixion? He was taken down awfully fast, victims were usually left up until they were so rotten they fell off, and he gave up the ghost within hours when most victims would last days. Last ditch rescue attempt to get their messiah off the cross alive by drugging him into unconsciousness? He would certainly have left an empty tomb and had wounds to show after that, and a reason to hightail it off before the Romans caught on that their guy had gotten away.

The authors could have been completely sincere and just wrong about some of the facts, even things central to the religion. Have you seen what we can still get wrong in the age of information and fact-checking? People seriously believe Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a pizza joint and that she maintains a death squad to knock off anyone who might be politically dangerous to her. There's just no reason to think people were more immune to being taken in by fake news 2,000 years ago than they are now.