In what way is the Resurrection the best explanation?

[GrandizerII]

Non-Christians Jews would disagree, and many interpret the suffering servant passage to be referring to a nation, not a particular person.

It's both the nation and an individual. What's going on here is termed 'sociological representation', in which a person or group represents a group. The England rugby team will represent the nation in the final; David represented Israel in the stand-off with Goliath; and Jesus represented the nation of Israel on the cross. The identification made by the Early Church, although strikingly new, was a more than possible reading within conventional Judaism.

I'm not convinced. IMO, a better explanation is this: The disciples came to believe that the Messiah did not come to provide physical/earthly salvation but a spiritual one, then through confirmation bias, went back through the Old Testament to find passages they could locate that could be reinterpreted in light of their new beliefs. They were able to find select passages like Isaiah 53 that could be reinterpreted in that light, but the fact that there are no passages in the Old Testament clearly prophesying that the Messiah would become the ultimate lamb to be sacrificed for all our sins is telling. There's not even a passage in the OT that specifically says the Messiah would die and then be resurrected.

Again, the non-Christian Jews (from what I've read) don't accept that Isaiah 53 is about a person, let alone a Messiah.

If I understand you correctly, we're getting somewhere now. There are those who try to explain the rise of Xianity, with the belief set it has, in a way that requires that the Early Church actually didn't believe in the Resurrection. For reasons I've outlined they would be better looking elsewhere for an explanation, as the evidence here is overwhelming. So given the belief, what caused it?

We don't know. That's the point I'm trying to get people to understand. Incredibly biased sources, and scant/undocumented relevant details in contemporary "neutral" records, means we can't really convincingly speculate what exactly happened. At the same time, we can still offer potential accounts of what might have happened, in spite of the lack of evidence and relevant details, but we can't really confirm any of them because the sources are lacking, and we only have very biased sources that aren't convincingly accurate historically and were clearly written with a theological agenda.

So arguing it must be the Resurrection is jumping the gun big time.

Except these are pretty much vague terms that don't make for good prophecies, and  <snip> These are Christian beliefs that we do not hold.

The question I'm asking is not 'have these occurred?', but 'What caused the Early Church to believe they had occurred?'. They are very different questions.

What caused the early Church to adopt these beliefs is the framework that allowed them to hold to these beliefs and that gave them good theological reasons to hold to them.

Whether the sources are evangelistically biased or not, they do tell us very reliably what the Early Church believed.

Vicki, come on, you're intelligent enough to know what's wrong with this statement.

The vanishing of the body (explanation mentioned in the OP) is necessary but not sufficient to explain the rise of Xianity with the actual belief set it had. They, like you, would have been aware of numerous possible alternative explanations.

I'm sure they were aware of numerous possible alternatives, and they came up with good apologetics as a result. But this doesn't mean the Resurrection happened.

Feel free to summarise the book, and we'll see how it all goes.

I already sort of did earlier. According to Bart and other NT scholars, Jesus was an apocalyptic figure who preached the imminent coming of an earthly kingdom. This didn't happen, so eventually it got spiritualized instead, and we see hints of this in the Gospels.

That said, if I remember correctly (since it's been ages ago) Bart Ehrman doesn't directly address how the Resurrection belief came to be (in the book I'm referring to), but Bart (and other scholars) nevertheless do provide clear C1 contexts in which such a belief could have been possible without the Resurrection actually happening.

But if you want something more concrete, here's Tim O'Neil addressing the Resurrection specifically:

https://www.quora.com/What-evidence-is-t...m-ONeill-1

The alternatives just don't make sense.

I don't think that's the issue. They do make sense. The question is where's the overwhelming evidence favoring the Resurrection over every other naturalistic explanation? I just don't happen to see it.