Plagiarism in the NT

[Amarok]

Sorry Kam Carrier disagrees with you on this one

At one point William Lane Craig phones Strobel from Jerusalem (nice touch!) and tries to sell him on the empty tomb. This is prompted by Strobel asking how do we know Jesus was really buried—repeating J.D. Crossan’s argument that Jesus must actually have been left to rot on the cross and thrown into a mass pit as a grubby gross corpse, because that was so commonly done everywhere else. This question is already a straw man, because J.D. Crossan’s argument is among the stupidest in counter-apologetics, completely ignorant of the political and legal situation in Judea at the time, which made it specifically unlike everywhere else in exactly this one detail. (See my chapter on the burial in .)

But of course the points out

So Craig gets to bat that down easily. For some reason Strobel never asks what a real journalist would ask: which is why Paul shows no knowledge of anyone ever finding a tomb empty, why Mark says the only people who ever saw one never told anyone, and none of the authorities in the entire history of the church in Acts ever notices one (see “The Legend of the Empty Tomb” in TET, pp. 155-97; and , Chapter 9.2). It sure looks like a later invented legend: the first source to ever mention it, says no one knew of it; and every source after that, just copies that source, and adds ridiculous things to it (like rock-shattering earthquakes and flying death monsters from outer space). Once again, we are kept from knowing all the facts, facts that call the very thing into question.

http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12263