These accounts needn't be in conflict. If there were a historical Jesus, his immediate followers might well have been motivated as Wright says: they doubled down to avoid the embarrassment of having followed a failure or to avoid the fear of living in a world in which the strong dominate the weak because there's no God at all.

But as the Christian institutions grew, they would have competed by demonizing or by adapting rival conceptions of spiritual power. Egypt provided a rival account of similar themes of a hero's apparent defeat and ultimate victory, so Christians would have competed in that atmosphere by absorbing or one-upping their competitors.

In short, the psychological motives would have worked together with the sociological factors.