This is just a quick idea out of left field. The root of this idea is in part based on a prior blog post I wrote about how there's no resurrection in the Biblical resurrection story. Briefly, Jesus dies and goes to the afterlife, then goes to a different part of the afterlife, then appears occasionally as a ghost. It's a missing body story, but at no point is it a resurrection story.

What I'd like to do is throw out one more conspiratorial influence behind some of this story. In the Bible, baby Jesus goes to Egypt. Now I've read the pilgrimage to Bethlehem was contrived to get Jesus to fit some prophecy narrative. So why did he have to go to Egypt? I'm sure there are a bunch of interpretations beyond the Herod story, but I've got a hypothesis that it was to tie him to another, contemporary deified missing body.

Around the time the various books of the Bible were being assembled into one approved-of set, the body of Alexander the Great went missing from its tomb in Alexandria in Egypt. What's more, Alexander's body wasn't merely venerated. Roman emperor Caracalla believed himself to be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great (which could be viewed as a form of resurrection). Just as having him born in Bethlehem might've made Jesus fit certain prophecies, having him originate out of Alexandria could also be used to make certain divine claims. What we might be left with is the compromise reconciliation between multiple origin stories.