Let's pretend Jesus is real

[Donovan]

Back on topic. Having established that the real Jeshua was more a political activist than anything else, we come to the point of the narrative where he dies for his crimes against the Roman empire and Jewish Heirarchy, specifically the trumped-up charge that he was going around blaspheming about being the son of God. Now from here on we end up with conflicting accounts and conjecture, mainly because most of the earliest traditions of Christianity were not only fractured and splintered, but also strictly oral legend passed down through families. The absolute oldest known copies or fragments of the New testament date back to around 400 AD:

https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scri...ripts.html

so anything from the years immediately following the death of the man is based on conjecture and study of various documents, language styles and writing patterns.

What's generally agreed is that pretty much all of what became the Catholic church, and later a great many other versions of the Christian church, was created by Peter and Paul. Peter is called the first Pope, Paul was widely known as the most self-promoting and controversial of the early figures and instituted many practices Jeshua was not known for, such as preaching to non-jews. Other competing records indicated a rivalry and jealousy between Peter and Mary, who was either a lowly whore or Jeshua's most favored and trusted second in command and probable wife.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mary

Although Peter's version became official canon for the church, the versions supporting Mary the favored apostle and even Judas as Jesus' most trusted friend, were written in the same time period and therefore were equally important to the earliest Christian sects.

Of further interest: none of the acknowledged earliest versions of the testaments of Jeshua's life include anything about resurrection. Mark, the canonical oldest gospel, ends at his death in the earliest known complete codex ever found.

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/...cance.aspx

Paul's writings never mention the resurrection either, nor any of the fairy tale portions of the myth we have come to know so well, like the passion, the crucifixion, the empty tombs, the meetings on the road etc. None of it.

http://www.answering-christianity.com/ab...n_hoax.htm

So essentially, what they had was a fringe movement of a couple hundred disenfranchised jews and assorted peasant gentiles, following a dead rabbi and the folk tales of his followers, folk tales which slowly incorporated existing pagan rituals and religious practices and parables into itself by way of natural osmosis. There was by no means a cohesive version of events, nor was there any one unified vision of what the religion ought to be. Those caught practicing the religion were often persecuted as heretics and killed, like many other subgroups of the period.

So how do we get from this lowly state of imminent destruction and historical obscurity to the wealthy world power that was used to control the masses and prevent peasant uprisings? One word.

Constantine.