Did the AD 30 Jerusalem church fall for a “Jesus' body is missing” lie?

• They'd see no reason to believe it

  They would have had no persuasive reason to accept a lie that Jesus's body was gone/missing.¹

  1. This should be granted for two reasons:
     • They would see/have-seen with their own eyes that it was not gone.
     • They knew bodies normally did not go missing and the lie would be unacceptably late (For example, “Oh, come on. this is our city; if that were true we'd have heard about it long ago! Also, who are you and/or your source to teach us?”)

• No plausible liar existed

  No plausible candidate liar(s) existed. After all…

  • In general, no early Christian would even try to spin such a lie to other Christians.
  • The liar would have rightly expected his lie to fail, insofar as the liar would be aware of the information articulated in the point above.¹

  1. Note: It is even more obvious that no plausible non-Christian candidate existed, insofar as the proliferation of such a lie would be even more useless to a non-Christian, and the Jerusalem church would be more wary of the liar.

• They got it from Mary herself

  The Jerusalem church's belief was actually grounded in Mary's testimony.¹ This is relevant because Mary's autobiographical report that she discovered Jesus's tomb empty was not a lie.

  1. We know it was grounded in Mary's testimony, because • The Mk 16:1-8 report that “Mary saw Jesus's tomb empty” already was originated/formed from within the Jerusalem church, and t was formed by c. AD 30. This helps us because we know Mary was a member of the Jerusalem church and no one could have formed it independently of her. • Mk 16 cites her as its accessible eyewitness source.
     • Likely no one other than Mary could convince the Jerusalem church.
     • And in virtue of the above fact, it is even unlikely that anyone would even try.