What this page is
This page records quotations that circulate in the debate over legendary development and that this article does not print as their authors' words. It is written for the next researcher. Status words: REFUTED (the named source was opened and the words are not in it); NOT FOUND (a single quoted word or phrase is not in the source as far as a stated search reaches, while the surrounding claim is a fair paraphrase); ALTERED (the source has a sentence like it, but the quoted form changes words); UNVERIFIABLE (no route to the source yet). Nothing here was checked with a summarising web tool; every reading below is from downloaded or searched bytes.
1. "Unbelievable" (NOT FOUND as a word of Sherwin-White 1963; Craig's surrounding paraphrase is fair)
Wording as it circulates. William Lane Craig, The Son Rises (Chicago: Moody, 1981), p. 101: "When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he comments that for these stories to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be 'unbelievable'; more generations are needed." The endnote (p. 125) cites "A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), pp. 188-91." Richard Carrier, The Empty Tomb (2005), p. 168, repeats a Craig text with the same wording ("the tempo is 'unbelievable' for the accrual of legend; more generations are needed").
What is and is not a quotation. Only the single word "unbelievable" is inside Craig's quotation marks. "More generations are needed" is his own paraphrase and is not presented as Sherwin-White's words.
What was tried. (a) Every paragraph of pp. 186-193 was read by search-inside sweeps of archive.org item romansocietyroma0000sher (leaf = printed + 16, by the public page map and the running heads). (b) Whole-book searches of three separate scans of the 1963 book (romansocietyroma0000sher, romansocietyroma0000sher_h8b5, romansocietyroma0000ansh) for unbelievable, unbelievably, unbeliev, believable, incredible and incredibly returned nothing in any of them. credible returned one sentence, on p. 189. Calibration: the same route returns the known p. 190 sentence "even two generations are too short a span" and the footnotes on pp. 187, 188 and 192.
What was found. The sentence Craig is paraphrasing is almost certainly p. 189: "The agnostic type of form-criticism would be much more credible if the compilation of the Gospels were much later in time, much more remote from the events themselves, than can be the case." With p. 190's "even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition," it supports the substance of Craig's sentence. The word "unbelievable," presented as Sherwin-White's, is not in the book as far as the search indexes of three scans reach, footnotes included. The article therefore quotes Sherwin-White's own words and treats Craig's sentence as a fair paraphrase with one wrongly marked word.
What would change the verdict. A different Sherwin-White publication containing the word, or a printing of Roman Society and Roman Law that differs from the 1963 Clarendon text. An OCR split of the word in an unusual form could escape the search; all three scans would have to fail the same way.
2. "The confirmation of historicity in Acts is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd." (ALTERED)
Wording as it circulates. Craig, On Guard (2010), p. 194, quoting Sherwin-White p. 189 (note 5).
What the source says. Sherwin-White p. 189: "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Yet Acts is, in simple terms and judged externally, no less of a propaganda narrative than the Gospels, liable to similar distortions. But any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd." The circulating form rewords the first sentence, omits the intervening sentence about propaganda and distortion without an ellipsis, and drops "basic." The article quotes Sherwin-White's own wording.
3. "the hard historic core of the tradition" (ALTERED, minor)
Wording as it circulates. Dale Allison, The Resurrection of Jesus (2021), p. 181 n. 80, quoting Sherwin-White p. 190.
What the source says. "the hard historic core of the oral tradition." The omission of "oral" does not change Allison's point, which the article reports. The article quotes Sherwin-White from his own page.
4. Craig's statement about the Alexander legends (not a quotation; recorded because it misreports a source)
Craig, On Guard p. 190, presents as part of Sherwin-White's case that "The fabulous legends about Alexander the Great did not develop until the centuries after these two writers" (Arrian and Plutarch). Sherwin-White's only discussion of Alexander is footnote 2 of his last lecture (pp. 192-193), reporting a point P. A. Brunt made to him privately: "a study of the Alexander sources is less encouraging for my thesis. There was a remarkable growth of myth around his person and deeds within the life-time of contemporaries, and the historical embroidery was often deliberate. But the hard core still remains ... This seems to me encouraging rather than the reverse." So Sherwin-White says the reverse of Craig's sentence on the facts, while agreeing with Craig that the case supports a surviving core. Diodorus 17.77, written in the first century BC, already tells the Amazon-queen story. The article quotes the whole footnote, including that judgment.