1. There are other motives for an empty tomb besides some desire to emulate paganism, like the natural question of what would happen to the body, since Jews believed in bodily resurrection (eg. the Elijah and Lazarus stories).
In that case, if you could prove your premise (''natural question of what would happen to the body'' etc) the problem would be reduced to the more general question of historicity of Jesus. For example:
Gaius Flaminius
Source: Plutarch, Fab. 3.
fable: During the second Punic War, the former consul to the Roman senate, Gaius Flaminus Nepoos (a novus homo), commanded legions in Tuscany, defending against Hannibal's invasion. He himself fought heroically, it is written, but was slain in battle at Lake Trasimene. The famed Carthaginian commander and his men were unable to find the body of Flaminius, according to Plutarch; it had vanished.
Subthemes: Vanished /missing body.
(
Resurrection and Reception, p. 53, my emphasis)
This would be, in my view, an independent evidence of an example of a ''natural question of what would happen to the body''. Until now, you don't have that kind of
strong evidence for Jesus.
2. Just because there is a similarity to paganism does not necessarily mean Christianity will adopt that similarity. eg. In the apostolic era there was not worship of statues. (It's an interesting, but separate question whether Roman Catholicism in the West accepted the same practice viz a viz statues of saints and Jesus.)
but that similarity is confirmed by Justin himself as a fact that he did not even bother to questioning, if not by resorting to its absurd reference to demons inspiring the pagans. Miller puts his thesis in the field of ''probable'', not of merely ''possible''.
3. Even if it was adopted from paganism, it was still part of the apostles' story, because the empty tomb story was around in the gospels from 60-80 AD, and the apostles and their audiences were still alive then. In other words, even if this was not the very first story of the apostles, the empty tomb was still part of the apostles' teaching, albeit at a later moment. The empty tomb story is in all the gospels, even in the truncated version of Mark and in apocryphal ones like Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of the Hebrews.
Miller concedes even that that story was added by Christians well before Paul (see my above post). It was 100% expected, if you want very soon to apply on Jesus the conventional tropos of an
exaltatio (especially if you want prove that Jesus is more strong than Caesar).
Your answer is that I haven't PROVEN that these "other motives" in 1. "prove" the empty tomb story was original, nor does it "prove a negative" that paganism was NOT the source of the empty tomb story. But that misplaces the burden of proof. If one's thesis is that the empty tomb story came from paganism, the burden is on the proponent of that thesis to prove that this is "the" explanation, and not more obvious reasons, like the desire to prove that his body rose in accordance with Judaism's teaching on the bodily resurrection.
Ok that the burden is on me etc, but Miller thinks that Justin,
First Apology 21 is
evidence of the sincere admission, by a Christian, of recognition that those stories were literary conventional embellishments common to
all Mediterranean cultures. An admission that is corroborated by 77 examples of body translation episodes confirming Mark as the example number 78.
Further, if you look at Isaiah 53, it says that the Servant's body was assigned a grave with sinners and then with the rich. If he had only been laid with common criminals and not buried by Joseph, the verse wouldn't be fulfilled. And the apostles claimed that Jesus fulfilled Isaiah 53. So there is another Jewish nonpagan motive for the gospels' own version of burial and resurrection.
Even more so, the first Christian that did mention a tomb for Jesus had more reason to show that
''the resurrection tale ... did not operate as a defensible historical event in early Christian leterature, but as an etiological subject, symbol or metonym of this negotiation. Jesus, as [Greek words] (Rev 1.5, ''the first-bordn of the dead'), served as the principal literary vehicle registring the inchoate movement within the standing Jewish and broadly Mediterranean socio-philosophical fray. In this sense, the so-called orthodox narratives rendering Jesus' resurrection as physical were just as creative and deliberate as the so-called unorthodox treatments that rendered his raised state as psychical or pneumatic.
...
The works of the apologists and proponents of early Christian kerygma, such as Athenagoras's De resurrectione mortuorum and Tertullian's De resurrectione carnis, even when most vigorously addressing the subject of resurrection, did not attempt a case for historicity of their resurrection of their founding figure. Instead, the early Christian records spent a seemingly limitless supply of argumentation, waging a philosophical campaign over the nature of raised bodies.
(
ibid., p.158)
Judaism taught that the body decays on the fourth day, as per the Lazarus story.
Psalm 16 says that the body would not decay. This is where the third day resurrection comes in. The resurrection was on the third day so that the body wouldnt decay in accordance with Psalm 16.
That's what Paul is saying in 1 Cor. 15: Bodily death, bodily burial, then on Day 3 before the decay sets in, he "arose", which in Judaism and in the gospels means a bodily resurrection like Elijah and Lazarus, respectively.
Very suggestive, thanks for this, but this is not independent evidence of a
tomb for Jesus. This is only to instantiate a Mediterranean tropos in a Jewish culture by using Jewish ways to represent it. If you believe that Jesus is risen, then you add later a tomb, a resurrection ''after 3 days'', fulfillment prophecies more or less fit, etc. And you will see (and sell) it as dogmatically true only when you want at the same time
denying that the same things happened to other pagan figures (that is what Justin did).