As I said last time in a note, a minority of New Testament scholars like Tabor and Carrier think the earliest Christians believed Jesus left his old body of dust behind like shed clothes and received a new spiritual body. It would make sense resurrection wouldn’t mean a resuscitated corpse because what of bodies burnt, eaten, or lost at sea? If Jesus’ earthly body stayed in the grave, the empty tomb story would be a later apotheosis-type narrative invention.

The story of Joseph of Arimathea seems most related to the need to rescue the risen Jesus from being a mere ghost story to an empty tomb apotheosis narrative or becoming a god common in the ancient novels. Along this line, we have the stories of the crucified dead Jesus converting onlookers, which seems most like the story of the crucified dead Cleomenes III converting onlookers:

And a few days afterwards those who were keeping watch upon the body of Cleomenes where it hung, saw a serpent of great size coiling itself about the head and hiding away the face so that no ravening bird of prey could light upon it. In consequence of this, the king was seized with superstitious fear, and thus gave the women occasion for various rites of purification, since they felt that a man had been taken off who was of a superior nature and beloved of the gods. And the Alexandrians actually worshipped him, coming frequently to the spot and addressing Cleomenes as a hero and a child of the gods … (Plutarch, The Parallel life of Cleomenes)

Joseph of Arimathea’s faith in Jesus is likewise confirmed by Jesus dying quickly and amazing Pilate who assumed a long, drawn-out death, illustrating that God alone is sovereign over death, not Rome or the Jewish elite. Along these lines, Price says:

42. Joseph of Arimathea (15:42-47)
    Joseph is surely a combination of King Priam, who courageously comes to Achilles’ camp to beg the body of his son Hector (MacDonald, p. 159) and the Patriarch Joseph who asked Pharaoh’s permission to bury the body of Jacob in the cave-tomb Jacob had hewn for himself back beyond the Jordan (Genesis 50:4-5) (Miller, p. 373). Whence Joseph’s epithet “of Arimathea”? Richard C. Carrier has shown that the apparent place name is wholly a pun (no historical “Arimathea” has ever been identified), meaning “Best (ari[stoV]} Disciple (maqh[thV]) Town.” Thus “the Arimathean” is equivalent to “the Beloved Disciple.” He is, accordingly, an ideal, fictive figure.

Ehrman notes the crucifixion and resurrection were never on the radar of the historical Jesus, and it was only after he died and people started having visions that the disciples concluded the death must have had meaning and was in fact a sacrifice. We saw last time how in the ancient culture of ghost stories, that the wrongful death of God’s agapetos, sinless Jesus would have prompted those who passionately loved him to think they might see him again, which would explain the right psychological atmosphere for what Paul reported with appearances to Cephas, the 12, the 500, and James himself – which as I said could have been anything from a full on vision, to a glance in a crowd, to an unusual bird, etc.