In what way is the Resurrection the best explanation?

[GrandizerII]

Christianity revolves around christ, indeed.  Not some guy named jesus with a body to go missing.  "Paul" heard a voice and saw a vision on a road.  

You can take the time to do your own research on the various groups that survived or didn't into 400ad to become christians and define the movement as we know it.  The short version of the long story is that institutionally useful myths end up being selected for over personally important or "authentic" ones.  Christianity has about as much to do with the beliefs it formed out of as taco bell has to do with mexican food, lol.  It's own records of socially important heresies have been assiduously scrubbed, but their mere existence tells us more than the people who declared them heretical would have ever had us know about how christianity came together.

Some things we only know about because records survive of the orthodoxy arguing against them, and they're probably arguing against a straw version....but they're arguing...so.

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The better version of this question, btw, a natural explanation, is not for how the details of reality can be made to match the story..but in why the group of christians who succeeded in defining that article for the orthodoxy (and in some cases the heterodoxy) felt that they needed to believe in a body.  In a man.  In a sort of divine crucible where a human existence added the necessary currency of the redemptive sacrifice.

It's a story about sympathetic magic, not a missing body.  About beating the shit out of a doll so that it doesn't happen to us.  The better and more lifelike the doll the more effective the spell will be.  This was one of the first articles of christology formally decided.  That he had to be fully man in order for the crucifixion to be effective.  

That's how the universe works in the story, lol.  Thats why god doesn't just say "fuck it, mulligans for everybody"..or just let shit go without fanfare.  Think of how many times people ask -these- questions, as well, as though it were more than the narrative details of a fantasy world.  The natural explanation™ of the force..is midichlorians.  There's no beating around the bush here.  The details of christ in magic book are necessities of the myth, not a garbled report from the frontlines of some real world.  Not only aree they explicitly theological details..right down to ownership of a body and chasing people off a temple step..... they're just wrong.  The people who came up with that idea of how that world worked are just plain and simply wrong.  Their mistake is the basis of further mistakes in category, assumption, and question.

I somewhat agree with what you're saying here, but this still doesn't adequately explain why or how Christians as early as the synoptic Gospels and the earlier Epistles (i.e., in the first century AD) came to believe in a risen Christ. If you want to argue for mythicism, that's fine, but there needs to be some bridge between that and how the Resurrection belief came to be, even if you just come up with a speculative explanation that happens to fit well with the observations and that explains the observations better than a supernatural case. Obviously, it wouldn't be hard to do since we can appeal to common human psychology and the failures that come with that, with lots of examples to boot.

And sure, there were other brands of Christian thinking at the time, but it would still be good to know what led to the early first-century belief that later became the orthodoxy.

Also, about the empty tomb, even early Mark makes a big deal out of it.