Consider this possibility. What if Jesus' contemporaries, hanger's on, entourage, posse, disciples and apostles never gave a single thought at all
to his having been raised from the dead? Now hold on.....don't get ahead of me......
What if the idea that Jesus overcame death did not get injected into the Jesus Story until much later?
At the point where this happened the entire life of Jesus would instantly require being reframed in context and meaning.
A series of Q&A dialogues between hearers and tellers would work out the refinements.
The story would then take on a supernatural impetus beyond the ordinary idea of who Messiah had to be.
This is when the deity question would most likely arise.
Think of Elvis, for a moment.
We have photographs of him dead on the toilet and on the slab in the morgue. But, still----there have been Elvis "sightings" beyond the grave which immediately caused radical fans of his to leap to the conclusion Elvis faked his own death. The "logic" could be fashioned according to conspiracy theory style "reasoning."
No photographs of dead Jesus exist, I might remind you.
My point?
If we do away with the idea that the Jesus story was the same from start to finish we may be missing the point historically and radically.
I point to the investigative "journalist" Papias who interviewed all the still-living followers of Jesus. If you read the outrageous exaggerations those people were making you can see the reality factor had been distorted almost beyond reckoning. Papias was doing his best to sort things out and yet later church fathers discarded his writings as poppycock easily.
Something is fishy.
Many changes were wrought over time. That is for certain. What came when is a matter of speculation.