The claim
Islam simply borrowed the idea of resurrection from earlier religions, so it isn’t a real revelation.
The kernel of concern
It is true — and worth saying plainly — that belief in resurrection is not unique to Islam. It is shared with Judaism, Christianity, and older traditions, and it predates the Qur'an. A fair answer begins by granting that shared ground rather than denying it.
What the verse actually says
But the objection rests on a hidden assumption: that "earlier religions" are separate, human-made systems Islam could copy from. Islam's own claim dissolves that assumption. There is one religion in God's sight — submission to Him (islām) — taught by every prophet He sent. God says He "ordained for you of religion what He enjoined upon Noah… and Abraham and Moses and Jesus" (42:13); that Abraham "was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but one inclining to truth, a Muslim" (3:67); and the believer affirms of all the prophets, "we make no distinction between any of them" (2:136, 3:84). On these terms the resurrection taught to earlier prophets is not another faith's idea that Islam absorbed — it is the same God's message, carried by His earlier messengers. An-Naba itself calls it "the great news" the people already disputed (78:1–3); it never claims to invent it. You cannot borrow a message that was always your own.
The honest position
So the shared belief in resurrection is exactly what Islam would predict — not an embarrassment to it. If the Hereafter is real, and God sent warner after warner to remind humanity of it, then of course its trace turns up wherever the prophets went. That recurrence is the fingerprint of one continuous revelation, not evidence of human copying. (This concerns the original message given to those prophets; Muslims hold the earlier scriptures were later altered, so the point is about the revelation, not today's texts.) And notice where the deepest evidence sits: not in old manuscripts, but in you. The human heart, in every age and culture, refuses to accept that it was made for nothing and that the wronged are never set right. That longing is not an accident of evolution to be explained away — Islam calls it the fitra — the nature God set in every soul when He created it (30:30) — the heart's memory of its Maker. The real question was never "who recorded it first?" It is the one this whole surah presses on you: it is true — so how will you meet it?
Strongest counter-arguments
A skeptic may press the history: belief in resurrection becomes prominent in Judaism around the Babylonian exile, perhaps under Persian influence — doesn't that show ordinary human transmission? The reply does not deny that ideas travel between peoples. It denies that the chronology of human records settles the question of origin. Tracing when a community wrote a truth down maps the trail of its custodianship, not its source. From the Qur'an's standpoint the truth was disclosed by God to His prophets across history; that later peoples preserved it, lost it, or recovered it — even through contact with their neighbours — is a fact about human memory, not about the One who revealed it. "First attested in" answers a question about us; it cannot answer the question about Him.