[Mendacious]

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That is an interesting explanation, but I think it suffers somewhat because the disciples entire course of action seems to flow from actually witnessing a resurrected Christ, rather than just some rationalizing paradigm shift. It was the resurrection itself and not Jesus's teachings which seemed to spur them on. Secondly, it is not clear at all that they had any agenda prior to the death of Jesus other than that they were followers of Jesus. Something about his death (or ressurection) seemed to inspire them and set them on a new level. Moreover-- and admittedly I think this is a lot less "historically" established, but I do not believe that either Jesus or his disciples went around proclaiming he was the son of God for any length of time prior to his execution. I think this largely came after. I don't think being the son of God was at all essential to Jesus ministry during his life.

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You speculate about the motivations and actions of the followers of Jesus. On what basis? That of the Bible? If we accept that as evidence then why are we rejecting the part where Jesus claims to be the son of God and where that claim is an important part of his position?

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I'm sorry to cop out like this, but I am not a bible scholar and I am going by memory, but my recollection was that Jesus predominantly claims he is the "son of man". It is only at the very end that he starts to say differently.

I don't consider the bible to necessarily be an accurate historical record of Jesus life. Far from it. I don't mean to presume too much about the motivations of the disciples, if anything, I am trying to understand their actions after Jesus cruxifiction. Obviously this is a puzzle with very incomplete information. I'm mostly interested in plausible explanations for what we do know historically. Phil made a nice stab at in in the post he linked to. But I don't think any of his scenarios really explain the metamorphisis of the disciples.

I guess the bottom line is I can't really dismiss as implausible the hypothesis that the Disciples genuinely believed that Jesus was resurrected and spoke to them after his death.