From NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope. After talking about various alternative secular theories about Jesus, he writes:

[W]e must at least note that the main alternative accounts, the revisionist proposals, lack explanatory power…

But at this moment in the argument all the signposts are pointing in one direction. I and others have studied quite extensively all the alternative explanations, ancient and modern, for the rise of the early church and the shape of its belief. Far and away the best historical explanation is that Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead and buried, really was raised to life on the third day with a renewed body (not a “resuscitated corpse,” as people sometimes dismissively say), a new kind of physical body, which left an empty tomb behind because it had used up the material of Jesus’s original body and which possessed new properties that nobody had expected or imagined but that generated significant mutations in the thinking of those who encountered it. If something like this happened, it would perfectly explain why Christiainity began and why it took the shape it did…

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding.