Let's pretend Jesus is real

[Donovan]

Last on topic post we had come to the point some 300 years after the death of the original man Jeshua, at a point when Christians had been roundly persecuted and driven underground by a succession of Roman emperors: Nero, Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian. Incidentally this is where the fish symbol is invented, for christians to identify each other without telling the roman overlords. Jews in general take a beating from Rome, and Christians especially. The earliest documents I mentioned earlier, those gnostic gospels, the ones that later became canon, and possibly hundreds of other gospels, all have equal footing in the hidden sects of christianity. There are stories of Jesus' youth, stories of his sorcery tricks, a gospel of Judas, one of James Jesus' brother, a gospel of Barnabas, one of Mary Magdalene who is presented literally as Jesus second in command. These gospels can be found in the online references

Dead Sea Scrolls
Nag Hammadi scrolls
and other sources of apocrypha

But the roman emperor Constantine changed all of that, when after a lifetime as a pagan he gradually converted to a belief in Christianity and was officially converted on his deathbed, beginning a centuries long tradition of old heathen assholes finding god at the moment when they might actually be meeting him soon.

IN addition to that storied tradition of hypocrisy, Constantine was also responsible for the legitimizing of Christianity as a legal religion and for stabilizing the tenets of the religion through his council at Nicea. While the council did a number of things regarding the rules for church and religious leaders to follow, and attempted to pin down a date for easter unsuccessfully (that's right, there was no set easter date before this) the big development was the deification of Jesus through the Nicene creed. This was the exact moment Jesus was given spiritual equality to God, and turned into a created being.