I needn’t remind you that the gospel of John abounds with references to overcoming death i.e. eternal life through JC. Why do you want to prevaricate on this?
The first thing to realize when dealing with handwritten texts is that the human impulse to edit at each re-writing was almost irresistible. To imagine a divinely guided and protected sacred scripture is a religious fantasy.
You can see the process at work in the Gospels to which Doug Mason refers. As he said, Mark’s writings are the earliest and over time and with geographical distance between them, they were elaborated on. Note how the story of three wise men with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh were added to the later gospels. This colourful and clearly exotic tale was part of the Mithraic cult which came from Persia and more significantly applied to the virgin birth of the saviour Mithra (or Mithras as the Romans called him) about three or four centuries before the Gospels were written.
The saviour story had been knocking around for millennia before the first century CE. Variations on the same theme of a miracle god-man saviour with twelve disciples curing the sick and raising the dead and dying at Easter was a religious trope from ancient Egypt and dispersed throughout the near east including India.
It was expedient for the Christ cults of Judea and other Roman territories to capitalize on the myth and put a name on the hero which matched people’s expectations. Iasus was a name taken by initiates in the Dionysian cult who also believed their saviour was born of a virgin and died sacrificially on a cross at Easter (spring equinox). Iesus was also (I believe) a name of a messianic rabbi from Hellenised Judaism about a hundred years BCE.
I must contradict your assumption that Jesus actually lived and died. Outside of the highly biased gospels there is no incontrovertible secular corroboration that the saviour god-man Jesus ever breathed.
Such ignorant stories as a theatrical persona coming to life; a man from a story taking on a human body. . . exasperated the Roman authorities and as the Bible (this time accurately) records, “there are many Christs and many Lords”. Nevertheless, the poor peasants believed the rumour and became followers of the cult leaders, especially those with good food supplied foc.
Any man in the civilized Roman world who really could resurrect the dead would be an international celebrity overnight and would surely have been noted by the commentators of the day. Instead there is a deafening silence in the copious records of first century Rome.
Set these things in this context that virtually all forms of Christianity doctrinally speaking, have passed through the bottleneck of Roman Imperial sanctioning. That means that Emperor Constantine used the traditional Roman ‘piety’ or reverence for the gods to assimilate all prevailing significant beliefs and fused them into one imperial ‘catholic’, all embracing church as a means of political control. There is little mention of this 'catholicisation' of Christianity because it would have been counter- productive to show what trick was being played on the populace. The bishops were being paid handsomely to compromise. All pagan source material texts were destroyed as well by Imperial decree. All religions other than the Catholic faith were eventually banned and as Rome declined, Church authority rose under the papacy controlling doctrine with an iron fist.
No wonder the belief in the Bible as God’s holy word and the story of Jesus; the hero saviour of mankind took root in people’s imagination. Sixteen hundred years of indoctrination is a powerful persuader.