How did the myth of Jesus' resurrection originate?

[xpastor]

You don't have one story. You have four separate stories which you have stitched together to appear as one narrative.

So? That's the same thing as is done to reconstruct any narrative.

Nooo, it's not the way we deal with two conflicting narratives. If I tell the police that the bank robber was 5'6" and you tell them he was 6'1", the police do not conclude that the robber was a shape shifter or that he slipped on elevator shoes, so that both our stories will be true. They assume that one or both of us were mistaken

Besides which, you cannot by any means reconcile the time of day in the different accounts. Mark says that Jesus was crucified at the third hour (about 9 am) and John says it was at the sixth hour (about 12 noon).

That's a pretty weak argument. The daylight portion of the Hebrew day was split into the early morning/3rd hour/6th hour/9th hour. They also used the expression the 11th hour to mean the last hour of daylight - an expression we've carried over today. And these are the phrases that you hear in the NT - and the only writer that breaks with this format is John. John uses "4th hour" once and "10th hour" once. Besides that, no only the 3rd/6th/9th/11th house are mentioned throughout the whole of the NT. I guess they didn't have words for morning evening, etc the way we do. Their use of the word evening referred to the first part of night as you know. You could also use these phrases to describe night, see Acts 23:23.

John knew what he was writing, but he wasn't trying to be as precise as others and "about the 6th hour" refers to about the period of time covering the ~ 3-hour timeframe following the 3rd hour timeframe.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is that if biblical harmonization required us to understand a time reference precisely, you would assuredly insist upon it, but when it suits you it's just a very sloppy approximation. About the sixth hour is not by any stretch of the apologist's imagination the same time as the third hour.

I have moved the following to the end because my response is fairly lengthy.

There is only one way in which the order of events fits - and this is because, xpastor, there is only one order of events. There do not need to be any other possibilities to be contrived, because there is only one possibility. If Jesus was crucified on the Sabbath (Nisan 15), then it would mean that he could not have been crucified on a Friday - for if he was, it would mean that there would be three Sabbaths and the women could not return to embalm his body until the second day of the week - Monday.

There is in fact another way in which the order of events fits very well, but it once more involves a discrepancy between the two accounts. John (19:14) and the non-canonical Gospel of Peter (2:5) both place the crucifixion on the day before Passover, so clearly Jesus in that version could not have eaten the Passover Seder meal. John describes a last supper, but it is very different from the synoptics, not so far as we can tell, a Passover Seder, and there is no institution of the Lord's Supper (communion). Possibly Paul also understood Jesus' death to precede the Passover. In 1 Cor 5:7 he writes , "for our paschal lamb Christ has been sacrificed. The synoptics of course represent Jesus as sharing a Passover Seder with his disciples and using the occasion to institute the commemoration of the Lord's Supper (this is my body, etc). Now here is how the two timelines can be reconciled:

Instead of the day of the week (e.g. Monday through Friday) that the crucifixion occurred on being moved by one day in one of these traditions, the day of the week that the Passover meal occurred on may have been moved by one day in one of these traditions (the day of the week that the Passover meal falls on varies year to year based on when the new moon is spotted). This is argued powerfully by John A. T. Robinson and Raymond E. Brown, who conclude that John and the Gospel of Peter (and Paul) preserve the historically correct tradition of a Friday night Passover meal and the Synoptists or their tradition have simply moved the Passover meal to a Thursday night. If correct, every Christian narrative has a consistent Friday afternoon crucifixion with a Sunday morning discovered empty tomb, a timeline of resurrection that is on the third day. Doubting Jesus' Resurrection, p. 106

Needless to say, while this reconciles the two different narratives fairly well, it does not imply that either Komarnitsky or I accept the resurrection as historical fact. There is still the discrepancy of the day that Passover falls on. It comes down to this: John's theology chose to present Jesus in his crucifixion as the paschal lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; the synoptic tradition chose to emphasize the central rite of the church: eucharist, holy communion, the Lord's Supper, whatever you want to call it.