How did the myth of Jesus' resurrection originate?

[Mudhammam]

One argument that always annoys the shit out of me with jesus freaks is the "we have thousands of manuscripts" routine. But we only have one original story. "Mark" (or whoever) that wrote the original tale. Everything else is a derivative or expansion of it, basically fan-fics in the modern parlance. It is possible that some of the Nag Hammadi texts are more ancient (Gospel of Thomas, perhaps, which is just a collection of sayinghubs with no narrative) but here we find ourselves facing the problem that Ehrman has identified. No original manuscripts, merely copies of copies of copies and this one seems to have been translated from Greek into Coptic to boot.

Most of the early, fragmentary, manuscripts we have date to the 2d century. Ehrman assumes that these are copies because in spite of all his work casting aspersions on this stuff he is still firmly in the camp of there having been a "historical jesus" although his views on that are of no comfort to fundies. But what if he is wrong. What if there are no first century "originals" because this shit started in the 2d century?

To play devil's advocate (or rather Jesus's advocate), Christians will likely reply that most of important facts (death, resurrection, high Christology) can be derived from the works of Paul, many of which can be shown to date from the mid-first century and contain creeds that date to perhaps only a few years after Jesus' death.