Wright on the Resurrection

"If Jesus, having been buried in the ordinary way, had remained physically dead, decomposing inside the tomb, so that there never was an empty tomb, let alone 'meetings' between him and his disciples we must suppose that someone from among his followers or family, or perhaps from the family of Joseph, would sooner or later have returned to perform this final act of respect.  And (unless we declare, a priori that every single scrap of our evidence about early Christianity is a late fiction) we must suppose that this would have happened at precisely the same time that the early church was busily proclaiming him as Messiah and lord ont he grounds that he had been raised from the dead--specifically, according to Acts, that his body had not decomposed.  And we must suppose that this happened around the same time that the zealous Saul of Tarsus, persecuting the church, was confronted by one whom he took to be Jesus, and forthwith declared that he had been raised from the dead.  IT is because of the impossibility of putting together ths story on this basis that scholars have been driven to the desperate expedient of denying everything about Joseph, discounting almost everything about Paul, and offering us instead a narrative of their own, without primary evidence."
NT Wright The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) 708.