Given I live in a society ostensibly based on Judeo-Christian values, I found myself putting a bit of time in to try and get a handle on the historical events behind the accepted narrative that has come down to us. And wow, is it a ball of wax. I can see now why academics can spend their entire professional lives on this topic.
Having said that, I've constructed what I think may have happened, at least to my personal satisfaction. Fair warning, it won't please traditional Christians but then, everyone has their own Jesus. This is mine;
My take (as a non-scholar), is that there likely was a historical person; a peasant rabbi proclaiming an imminent world changing event. This kind of guy (and it's almost always a guy for some reason), still pops up ever so often today, usually when they've led their followers into trouble and the Daily Mail has taken an interest. It seems to be a facet of human behavior and not one that began exclusively with Jesus (although I haven't heard of similar in Islam? Possibly because they're a bit more unforgiving about that sort of thing?)
So Jesus proclaimed a soon-to-arrive apocalypse after which a Kingdom Of God would be established in Judea. The mighty would be brought low, the Romans would be swept away and Jesus's followers would be God's favored people. It would be a new world and one that was likely very attractive to the poor who rather than receiving a say in how their taxes were applied, were more likely to get a nasty punch in the mouth from the elites of their time.
But it didn't happen; the problem with religious apocalyptic prophesy is that it's inherently unreliable. At this point the leader either has to go on a tear and institute a purge of anyone questioning their predictions (which doesn't solve the core issue), or find the next big thing with which to distract the doubters. And this may be why Jesus took his little roadshow to Jerusalem. It wasn't the promised apocalypse per se, but it was an opportunity to gain new followers and show his apostles that progress was being made. To Jesus's way of thinking, it might even be the event that triggered the apocalypse.
So, in an attempt to 'go viral', Jesus made an entrance in the style of the expected Jewish messiah. Then he pulled a stunt up at the Temple designed to gain public interest and some sympathy. Unfortunately, it also ticked off the wrong people. Perhaps he was already known in Jerusalem as a troublemaker and heretic, perhaps it was just that with the city packed with pilgrims, the Jewish leadership was in strong accord with the Romans in wanting to avoid unrest. Regardless, Jesus was promptly arrested, questioned in something a quick 'trial', if it could have been called that, and handed over to the Governor.
Now there may have been a public reading of the charges, but given what we know of Pilate, he probably didn't give the affair much thought. It was just before Passover, the city was packed and Pilate likely had other things on his mind, such as everyone going home and reporting Jerusalem was peaceful and well run and that they should continue to pay their taxes. Then Pilate could go back to his wine and grapes villa lifestyle up the coast at Caesarea. It's also highly unlikely he had a private chat with Jesus, a chat that we somehow know the contents of. Or that he offered to pardon Jesus if the crowd so wished. Instead Pilate condemned Jesus to death, as had happened in one way or the other to all the previous would-be messiahs the Romans had dealt with. And I doubt Pilate gave it much thought after that.
But it was a catastrophe for the apostles. Afraid of being arrested and also crucified, they holed up somewhere in Jerusalem or possibly Galilee, and at least one of them (possibly Peter), realized that unless a way forward could be found, it would be the end of the movement.
And so with fasting, lack of sleep and heavy grieving, this small band of oddballs (and I say that advisedly because they were so even for the time), worked themselves into an emotional catharsis. At some stage (but possibly even a while later), the idea was arrived at that Jesus hadn't died, that he had been saved from spiritual destruction by God and he was now at God's side.
Yet Jesus's promises had to be fulfilled. And so it followed he surely must be returning soon to address the situation and assuage his follower's deep despair? Given this, it was their duty then to hold true and be faithful to his divinity, though it was in a new form. A classic rationalization when a cult is confronted with unyielding reality which in this case, was the death of their leader and the failure of his prophecy.
They probably lost some members. It's interesting that the church is somewhat hazy on what happened to the bulk of the apostles apart from lurid legends of execution, often arising much later. Likely a number returned to their old lives and disappeared from history. After all, if you didn't believe, you wouldn't be in the group for very long. But enough stayed such that the sect survived. Each individual's acceptance of this new concept of Jesus being mythologized decades later by the gospels as appearances of Jesus to them in the flesh (although some doubted because wouldn't you?).
So the resurrection was spiritual in nature to begin with, not corporeal. But in the following decades, the story changed. Because stories change over time in the retelling and a physical resurrection was less abstract and easier to comprehend. The religion was moving into the cosmopolitan Roman population, actively trying to distance itself from it's Jewish origins and coming into contact with established gods and legends. There were existing tales of resurrection that the Jesus story needed to compete with - a world in which a physical rising would be more accepted and understood.
When it came to the gospel of Mark (the earliest gospel we know of), the author had a problem though; in writing a corporeal resurrection narrative for Jesus, what had happened to the body had to be addressed. Likely the corpse had been unceremoniously disposed of by the Romans, as was usual it seems. But in following through with this, the gospel of Mark would have seen Jesus potentially rising from the charnel pit; a very unclean spot and possibly a rich source of pagan criticism. Hence the invention of the empty tomb narrative and that suspiciously convenient benefactor; Joseph of Arimathea.
Oddly, the author of Mark didn't finish his narrative. Perhaps he ran out of creative puff, ran out of papyrus or was an old man who knew his time was short. We'll never know. It may have been that he realized that to continue would see him venturing far beyond any existing tale he knew of and he got cold feet. It's interesting that he breaks off at an inflection point where to go forward he would have had to address what happened after. I posit that the stories from which the author worked, likely gave a good amount of detail about Jesus's exploits whilst he was alive, but were vague and quite brief about the resurrection - being as it was originally a spiritual concept.
But regardless, the author of Matthew had no such qualms; he had dead saints rise from their tombs and walk around Jerusalem during the crucifixion. And the resurrected Jesus hangs around for forty days, eating fish and doing all sorts of things.
What were those things? We don't really know, even though it might be expected that in reality everything a messiah did or said after being miraculously brought back from the dead would be hugely important. Wouldn't it at least be worthy of its own volume? Instead the gospels wave it away and move to wrap it all up with Jesus returning to heaven. Because what Jesus did when he returned is only secondary to the climax of the story, the death and resurrection. And it is a story, not history.
So with these texts agreed upon as dogma, the early church purged alternative accounts and we end up where we are today; debates about the historical Jesus being heavily dependent on a small set of church approved texts and letters, that are deeply embedded in western history and culture. As such, biblical apologists enjoy a home town advantage every time.
