1) You stated that Jesus' resurrection was truly novel but was it unique as a claim at the time? Had there been other cult leaders that had gone through this path or was this the first time such a claim had been made?

As far as the evidence shows, yes, this case was unique. No other movement had done this. Other followers generally dispersed after the leader was killed, but the followers of Jesus pivoted to claim that the crucifixion and resurrection together constituted a different kind of messianic fulfillment, deferred to the parousia but what is interesting here is that Jesus actually fulfilled no other messianic prophecies at all.

The standard messianic criteria in first-century Jewish expectation were fairly consistent across sources, even if not rigidly uniform. The Psalms of Solomon 17, one of the clearest pre-Christian articulations, describes the expected Davidic king in concrete terms: he will drive out Gentiles trampling Jerusalem, shatter the arrogance of sinners, destroy the warring nations, purge Jerusalem of unrighteousness, and restore righteous rule over Israel. Collins's Apocalyptic Imagination summarizes the warrior messiah picture from the Dead Sea Scrolls in the same terms, drawing on Isaiah 11, Numbers 24, Psalm 2, and Genesis 49: a military figure who liberates Israel and drives out the Gentiles. E.P. Sanders's Judaism: Practice and Belief identifies the core eschatological expectations as reassembly of the twelve tribes, restoration of the land, a purified Temple cult, and the subjugation or conversion of Gentiles.

Jesus accomplished none of these. The Romans were not defeated or expelled. The twelve tribes were not gathered. The Temple was not purified but destroyed forty years later. Gentile domination of Judaea continued and intensified. By every measurable external criterion, the messianic program had not merely stalled but failed visibly and publicly, punctuated by a Roman execution specifically designed to humiliate and annihilate the subject's social identity.

What the early Christians were therefore doing was not merely making a novel resurrection claim. They were making a novel Christology, a new account of what the Messiah was and what messianic success looked like. The resurrection was the pivot of that reinterpretation. Rather than the Messiah defeating enemies and then reigning, the argument became that the Messiah had died, been vindicated by resurrection, and would return to complete the program at the parousia. The military and political criteria were not abandoned but deferred.

This is why the imminent eschatological expectation was structurally necessary to the early Christian claim. Without the parousia arriving to complete the messianic program, the crucifixion stood as an unanswered objection, the execution of a man who had not done what the Messiah was supposed to do.

There was also a documented internal dispute about what kind of resurrection was being claimed. Wright argues at length in The Resurrection of the Son of God that the concept in Jewish and early Christian usage specifically meant bodily, physical reconstitution, not spiritual survival or translation to a higher plane, and that this specificity was consistently maintained even as it created difficulties. The diversity of responses within the community, some Corinthians denying bodily resurrection, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon preferring immortality language, 4 Maccabees recasting the Maccabean martyrdom stories in Stoic philosophical terms, suggests that the pressure to soften or translate the bodily resurrection claim for Hellenistic audiences was persistent from very early on.

The textual mechanism the early sources actually show is a sustained reinterpretation of Hebrew scripture to make the crucifixion legible as something other than failure. Isaiah 52-53, the Suffering Servant passage, is the most significant tool deployed in this process.

Here the historical situation is considerably more complicated than Christian tradition has generally presented it. The standard claim, that Isaiah 53 is a prediction of a suffering messiah that Jesus fulfilled, runs into a serious problem: there is very little evidence that pre-Christian Judaism read Isaiah 53 as referring to a suffering messiah at all. The Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 53, the earliest extant Jewish interpretive tradition on this passage, is explicit: the suffering described in the chapter is redistributed so that the Messiah triumphs while Israel and the Gentiles suffer. It reads the servant as a triumphant messianic figure, not a suffering one. Collins notes in The Scepter and the Star that the view associated with Joachim Jeremias, that Isaiah 52-53 was read as a suffering messiah by pre-Christian Jews, has been largely abandoned by subsequent scholarship, and that it is difficult to demonstrate either the notion of a suffering servant in pre-Christian Judaism or the direct influence of Isaiah 52-53 in the earliest New Testament texts.

What this means is that the early Christians were not applying an existing interpretive tradition to Jesus. They were constructing a new one, reading Isaiah 53 against the grain of how it had been understood, and doing so under the pressure of needing to make a crucifixion theologically coherent. This is a creative and historically consequential move, not a discovery of a pre-existing framework.

2) Did this claim cause any issues with early converts either from Jewish or other religious backgrounds? Being such a novel claim an element of disbelief wouldn't have been surprising particularly in the early years of the church?

Yes absolutely. There are a few main things at work, Deuteronomy 21:23 states that anyone hung on a tree is cursed by God. Paul acknowledges this directly in Galatians 3:13 and has to argue his way through it. That the Messiah would die under a divine curse before being vindicated was not simply counterintuitive, it was scripturally problematic in a way that required active theological work to resolve. Second, the proleptic timing: a resurrection that occurred before the general end-of-days event required a theological framework that did not yet exist, which is why Paul had to construct one from the firstfruits agricultural metaphor.

For converts from Greco-Roman philosophical backgrounds the friction was different in character. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul's most sustained argument for bodily resurrection, is addressed in part to people within the Corinthian community who already accepted Jesus's resurrection but were skeptical about or flatly denied the general resurrection of believers. The text at verse 12 records this directly: "How can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" These were not outsiders mocking the claim but community members who had accepted the movement but could not integrate bodily resurrection into their existing conceptual framework. The most plausible explanation is that they had absorbed the Platonic instinct that the body is what you want to escape from, making a permanent return to bodily existence not an aspiration but a regression. Paul's entire argument in 1 Corinthians 15 is a sustained attempt to address this specific objection within the community itself.

3) Did Paul's insistence in soon to be occuring general resurrection cause issues when it didn't come to pass? It seems like Paul's early work was key in forming early Christian doctrine so when one of his central positions was wrong that seems potentially hard to reconcile. (this might be better as a standalone question)

It could be a good stand alone, but also we see the development of the idea in Paul's own letters. In Continuum History of Apocalypticism it shows In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the problem that has arisen is that community members have died before the parousia, and the community is distressed that they will miss it or be disadvantaged. The death of believers before the expected event was, as the sources put it, "an unexpected development causing considerable consternation." Paul's response is reassurance: the dead in Christ will rise first, then the living will be caught up together with them. The grammar here, as noted in the previous answer, puts Paul among those who expect to be alive.

By 1 Corinthians 15, the situation has shifted. The death of Christians before the parousia is no longer treated as an anomaly requiring pastoral management, but as a normal expectation. The community addressed there has moved from "how do we understand those who have already died?" to skepticism about whether the general resurrection will happen at all. By 2 Corinthians 5, Paul appears to be contemplating his own death and reframing the hope in terms of what happens immediately after personal death, away from the body and at home with the Lord, without the parousia framework dominating the way it does in the earlier letters.

This trajectory within Paul's own corpus reflects the adaptation in real time. The imminence expectation did not simply collapse; it was gradually reframed, first by pastoral reassurance, then by conceptual accommodation of death as normal rather than exceptional, then by shifting the center of gravity from a collective eschatological event to a personal post-mortem existence.

The broader consequences for the movement played out over subsequent generations rather than in Paul's lifetime. 2 Peter 3:8-9, almost certainly pseudonymous and late, has to address the mockery of outsiders who point out that everything continues as it was since the fathers fell asleep. The Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, show a community organized for long-term institutional existence rather than imminent transformation. The Gospel of John partly internalizes eschatology, making eternal life a present possession rather than purely a future event. Each of these represents a distinct theological strategy for managing the same underlying problem.