Didn’t the spiritual experiences occur after the resurrection sightings? Before that, the disciples seemed to have given up, gone back to their former occupations - just one more failed messiah. The Emmaus road account falls into this category. It wasn’t as if they were developing some sort of religious mania, (or depressive psychosis) which erupted into claimed sightings. It was after the claimed sightings that some sort of regathering and expectation seems to have arisen.

The mention of the resurrection appearances to 500 people at the same time contains a crucial sub-clause: many of those to whom Jesus appeared, Paul says, were still alive at the time of writing. In other words, they could have been cross-questioned as witnesses. They must have been pretty rock solid witnesses to be relied on so confidently.

The sudden cessation of appearances is also noteworthy. Why didn’t the disciples go on claiming that they were having resurrection sightings and experiences? Why not perpetuate this to the present day? Make it into a test of spirituality - and qualification for climbing the hierarchy? A very good way of ensuring religious control, as well as attracting attention.

The idea of the church fabricating a resurrection mythology at a later stage (and I’m assuming Pluralist means that this mythology is not promoted as mythology, but dressed up as history) depends on sufficient distance in time from the events so described to make them less susceptible to investigation. But many would have been alive at the time the events occurred (death of Christ, resurrection, Pentecost etc) when the accounts started to circulate in the form we now have them. The charge of a mythologising conspiracy would have been the obvious and easiest one to make by Jews and Romans. Why was such a charge never made?

The issue of Jesus’s kingdom statements and prophecies is clearly very important - and has been the basis of discussion on this site. It’s also, as you probably are aware, the basis of Tom Wright’s redevelopment of the quest for the historical Jesus. But it’s not as if it poses issues on which the credibility of Jesus or the Christian faith stands or falls. It’s just that there is a lot of discussion as to what he meant in some of his statements.

If I were setting out to develop a resurrection mythology on the basis of disappointed expectations and suppressed religious mania, I could think of far better ways of doing it than we have in the gospels. It’s not that you don’t have a case to make, Pluralist, it’s just that I don’t think it stacks up very well.