How did the myth of Jesus' resurrection originate?

[rightcoaster]

... I don't think it diminishes my original hypothesis: temporary entombment to get past Yom Tov and Shabbat, then disentombment ASAP and interment. ...

I am agnostic on the subject of whether Jesus' body was placed in a rock cut tomb. ... However, to me the story of Joseph of Arimethea providing his own tomb has the air of a made-up story, and even more so the posting of a Roman guard at the tomb.
...

One alternative to the tomb story is that the Romans simply left the body up as they did with most crucifixion victims, and then buried it in the earth, in which case the tomb story was later worked up to support the resurrection claim.

I think your take on the ex-post evolution of the did-steal/did-not-steal is pretty good -- make it into a Houdini-escape situation, seal and guard and all.

The problem with leaving the corpse on the cross as food for scavengers is that this would have made it quite impossible for Jews, with the horror over the explicit curse associated with such a fate, to have remained followers, and for any new Jewish followers to have been recruited. I can't imagine that the corpse could have been thus left, Dom Crossan's view notwithstanding, and that the NT cover story could have been fabricated so quickly, completely, and effectively that the horrible truth would have been utterly suppressed. That implies a collective lie, a conspiracy of lies among the immediate followers, which is impossible to credit.

That's why I favor the notion that the Jewish authorities did ask for and were able to get the corpse for a proper, curse-free Jewish burial (the hurried temporary entombment a necessary pre-Shabbat expedient) ; and that therefore the crime for which Jesus was executed was not sedition or treason, in which cases the corpse would have been left up as part of the example-setting for which crucifixion was employed. This conclusion follows from the rest of my "passion" scenario, which is that the crimes were 100% the property crimes and batteries against the moneychangers/birdsellers and the gross insult to the Temple cultic practice. But that's another thread ....

---

I'm very disappointed, and have no more time for you.

Look, there's no love lost. You've ignored the meat of my argument - yet again - although i did do my best to address yours. You ignored everything I said about Mary's age, and you also ignored everything to do with Isaiah 7:14, you didn't even try to explain to me why I should disregard a well-regarded Hebrew dictionary.

I conceded that Mary must have been between 13-19, but 13-19 or 13-99, does not matter: nobody knew the state of her hymen, and if she was a betulah at 19 she was an unmitigated beast. But that is irrelevant, anyway.

As for Is 7, it is you who have failed to read and understand that the entire story makes utterly zero sense if the almah is not already pregnant. Isaiah is speaking to Ahaz, and he is predicting imminent doom. The imminence is utterly lost on Ahaz if the dolly is a virgin, merely of marriageable age. That is, the story is impossibly vague, stupid, not worth recording at all, if she is just a girl standing around. She must be already visibly pregnant for that story to make sense. However, once written five hundred years previously, it makes for a great source for text-mining, and that is how the gospel-author used it, as part of his larger fiction.