> Prepare yourself: the entire canon was equally made up from whole cloth, right from the beginning.

The fainting hypothesis seems much more likely than an intentional fraud.

Given the original leaders initially successfully scattered to the wind, then later returned to Jerusalem, and continued to travel the empire despite being slowly hunted down, tortured and executed by the Roman government over the next few decades, it seems they genuinely believed they were serving some grand purpose beyond themselves. They were clearly mobile, and word clearly got around they were being hunted. It would have been a much easier life for any of them to settle and hide in any one of scattered corners of the empire they visited rather than attempting to start churches there.

Especially after word got 'round that the first few had been tortured and executed, I'd expect any intentional fraudsters to just melt away into the backwater corners of the empire.

If they were going to make things up, you'd think they'd have made at least one of the disciples brave and smart. (To a man, they all come across as more than a bit dense and cowardly.) At a minimum, you'd think they would have made the first pope (Cephas/Peter) much less foolishly impulsive, and removed the several incidents where he tried to correct Jesus.

If you were making it up from whole cloth, you'd also have at least one of the disciples faithfully hang out at the tomb waiting for the resurrection, rather than having a group of women (considered hysterical unreliable witnesses) be the ones to discover the resurrection. Failing that, you'd expect at least one of the disciples to say "ah, of course" to the women, rather than (to a man) accuse them of hallucination.

Instead, with the official story, the one good leader is gone from the earth just as the story is getting going, and the remaining leaders are all poor choices.

A more plausible explanation is that one of the many charismatic anti-establishment nomadic preachers of the day assembled a ragtag bunch of illiterate fishermen, outcast Roman collaborators, etc. He starts to get some fame, it goes to his head and he gets a bit too anti-establishment, especially anti-priest. The priests convince the occupying Romans that they better execute him for sedition before he raises a rebel army. After his arrest and execution, his ragtag bunch flee Jerusalem and scatter. It turns out that against one-in-a-million odds, this one guy faints and survives crucifixion, wakes up a few days later, and wanders off to find his followers. The women left behind to do the grunge work discover the empty tomb, word gets 'round the small community, and the disciples trickle back into Jerusalem. The illiterate former cowards set out spreading the message. The leader eventually succumbs to his wounds a few weeks or months later, but his followers rationalize this just as his way of going back to heaven after making his point by coming back from crucifixion. They hide away the body to protect it from the Romans as they patiently await his second resurrection. (Or maybe the leader counted his blessings having survived execution and himself melted away into the backwaters of the empire without telling anyone.) As it was taking longer than they expected for Jesus to come back a second time, they later started a collection of sayings in the original Aramaic (the Q document hypothesis). At some point, a scribe marginally literate in Koine Greek tooks down Mark's version of events. Later on, other scribes working from these sources, passed oral history, and perhaps direct access to the disciples, wrote down a few more histories in Koine Greek. At some point, a physician (perhaps a freed slave, formerly belonging to a relative of Paul's) traveling with Paul tried to collect a proper history of events, citing names and locations of eyewitnesses.

Paul makes note of the portions of his letters that he's writing out with his own hand rather than dictating to a Greek-literate scribe. So, it seems his audience expected even most of his writings to be through a scribe rather than directly written by him, despite him being literate in Greek. Presumably early Christians would have similarly been un-surprised that scribes were involved in writing Greek accounts for illiterate Aramaic-speaking fishermen.

In any case, a mildly competent fraudster would have set himself or a collaborator up as the wise and brave hero, and would have vanished when it became clear that at best the leaders were going to spend decades on the run with only the clothes on their backs.

Being mistaken about what they witnessed seems much more likely than an intentional fraud.