Raymond Brown's "Death of the Messiah"

I debate frequently with a guy called Joe Hinman, who used to post on CARM as Metacrock. He frequently cites Brown in Death of the Messiah, volume 2, to support his position. He gets it wrong, and it is useful for me to have easy access to some quotes.

Brown on the Gospel of Peter

Brown made his reputation of the Gospel of Peter, so is pretty much THE authority. The relevant part of the book is the section "Overall Proposal About Composition Based on Sequence and Content", which is from page 1332 to 1336, where Brown first looks at alternatives, and why they fail, before, at the bottom of page 1334, he presents his own hypothesis:

After working with the tables and lists above (and the massive vocabulary difference), I am convinced  that one explanation makes better sense of the relationship between GPet and the canonicals than any other. I doubt that the author of GPet had written any gospel before him, although he was familiar with Matt because he read it carefully in the past and/or heard it read several times in community worship on the Lord's Day so that it gave the dominant shaping to his thought. Most likely he had heard people speak who were familiar with the gospels of Luke and John - perhaps travelling speakers who rephrased salient stories - so that he knew some of their contents but had little idea of their structure.

Brown on the guard on the tomb

This is related to the Gospel of Peter because the guard on the tomb is only mentioned in that gospel and, of course, in Matthew.

With regards to the story in Peter, Brown says (p1305-6):

I have argued that Matt broke up a consecutive guard-at-the-sepulcher story to interweave it with the women-at-the-tomb story, while GPet preserved the original consecutive form of the guard story. That does not mean, however, that the GPet is more original. It is quite possible that by the 2d cent. when GPet was written (and thus after the time when Matt had drawn on his source), the guard-at-the-sepulcher story had continued to develop in extraGospel narration and become a longer and more elaborate composition. While I  disagree firmly with Crossan's contention that much of the GPet passion account antedated the canonical passion accounts and was one of their main sources (see appendix I below), I agree with him that the relationship is not to be treated simply in terms of literary dependence of GPet on the canonical Gospels. In this particular instance, in my  judgment, what is found in GPet is best explained in terms of the author's knowing canonical Gospels (perhaps by distant memory of having heard them), especially Matt, as well as an independent form of the guard-at-the sepulcher story, and of his own activity in combining these two sources of material.

On whether it actually happened (p1311-2):

Yet there is a major argument against historicity that is impressive indeed. Not only do the other gospels not mention the guard at the sepulcher, but the presence of the guard there would make what they narrate about the tomb almost unintelligible. The three other canonical Gospels have women come to the tomb on Easter, and the only obstacle mentioned is the stone. Certainly the evangelists would have to explain how the women hoped to get into the tomb if there was a guard placed there precisely to prevent entry. In the other Gospels the stone is already removed or rolled back when the women get there. How can we reconcile that with Matt's account where, while the women are at the sepulcher, an angel comes down out of heaven and rolls back the stone? There are other internal implausibilities in Matt's account (e.g., that the Jewish authorities knew the words of Jesus about his resurrection and understood them, when his own disciples did not; that the guards could lie successfully about the astounding heavenly intervention); but they touch on the minor details of the story.The lack of harmony with the other Gospels touches on the heart of the story, i.e., the very existence of a guard.