The Christian myth was created by and grown by the largest empire of the time, the Roman Empire. After that it hung onto the other great Empires we have known since, the British Empire, the EU, North America. It fits into a western work ethic and allows those in power to keep it, so it is very useful to those in power, as it was originally conceived to do in containing the Jews. It is a brilliant construct that will continue to fool some for the rest of time.

Like silvereyes said; Christianity has the best pitch. Most religions prior were polytheistic, which diffuses power and authority amongst multiple gods and their clergies. Along came Judeism with its one god, but the Jews hoarded it as their own. Then some enterprising Jews create an offshoot cult, worshipping the archangel Jesus as the prophesied messiah, but this version of god is inclusive of everyone. They pick their favorite myths from surrounding cultures and religions to fabricate a comforting lie to ease the grief of the suffering, and the shame of the guilty. All you have to do is whisper sweet nothings into the ether and you will receive eternal salvation. They argue over whose visions and interpretations of their celestial savior are true until one group concocts the claim that they met Jesus personally, in the flesh, and therefore they had greater authority than those other hallucinating apostles.

I’ve been convinced by the arguments presented by Richard Carrier, so I don’t think a historical Jesus ever existed. Even if he did, none of the supernatural tales are remotely true. But they paint a pretty picture that everyone can buy into if they’ll just sacrifice their critical faculties and toe the party line.

Rearrangement of the New Testament completely changes the story. Put the epistles of Paul who wrote shortly after when Jesus was said to be crucified first. No childhood, no empty tomb no sermon on the mount almost no account of an earthly Jesus at all. Now read Mark, written around 70 CE. No birth or childhood story. Now Matthew and Luke and Acts around 80-90 CE. The story grows greatly with a miraculous birth and childhood and different stories of his death. With Acts even Paul’s story grows significantly. Now John about 100 CE. This guy was smoking something because now Jesus is God. I personally can’t see much difference between this evident creation of events than John Henry, Paul Bunyan, King Arthur or other myths. I see no need of an actual person other than maybe Paul who seemed to have created the whole thing This was 2,000 years ago when people believed in demigods coming down to earth and if you get enough people believing anything it is accepted. My goodness, look at what L. Ron Hubbard did!

many indoctrinated people ! plus islam is more prevalent now due to demographics

Christianity, with its emphasis on obedience, was the perfect state religion for authoritarian regimes. THAT's why it predominates in Western societies: because kings and emperors used it to keep their boots on the necks of their people.

Imperialism

I think the story of a jesus was a progression of frustration of the israelites as they tried to create a god in their own image. He was the result of the empty feeling left over from the earlier versions of a god....The earliest versions ... the world was a scary place, a god was a god of anger, revenge, thunder..... as the israelite identity formed.... their god mutated to a god of the israelites
.... when they were held in captivity in Egypt ... they were gods sinning flock... when they escaped captivity and built up to a raiding horde of a few hundred thousand upon the villages and successes mounted.... they were god's 'chosen people'.......when the 12 tribes divided the land spoils of war... their forces thinned out and they were overthrown.... the were the abandoned people.... and god became a god of works.....700 years later... no amount of animal sacrifice, tabernacle cleaning , or circumsician.. could free them... from first Assyrians, Greeks, Romans.... they needed a more humane , god... enter a human god.... even if he was written about decades later after he allegedly lived.... his story was so important , it wasn't mentioned in his time....

I believe the entire story of christ is a compilation character for which there is no proof at all. I find it odd that we find peoples shopping lists from his life time and so much more, never a mention of jesus christ at all, until these fables were written by people born after his death. So to discuss the life of a fictional character seems rather absurd. The fairy tales of my childhood were also lessons in life and a much clearer, strait forward form, than that ancient collection of biblical text. With that said, it seems to me most religions attract people with low self esteem. Religion promises to heal your self esteem by imploring magical beings to protect them for a price of wealth, obedience and worship with a promise of paradise. Christianity was so successful because of it's historic violence. Who would not say they love jesus, if their loved one were stretching on the rack?

Interesting post. Here's my 2 Zlotys (apologies in advance for excessive length)...

I think today's Christian religion is a historical accident (Islam too, but that's a whole other series of catastrophes).

As I understand it, Christ was very much a figure of his time. Judea in the first century AD was riven by immense culture clashes - the monotheistic, conservative and theocratic Jewish natives, the Greeks who had arrived as liberators three hundred years earlier under Alexander the Great, and the new superpower, Rome.

While Alexander's army had ejected - and then destroyed - the occupying Acheminid Persian Empire, they had brought with them a culture that did not sit well with Judaism. The Greeks considered things like male homosexuality and public nudity to be normal, the Jews, er, didn't.

After Alexander's death, Judea changed hands between dynasties founded by his generals in Egypt (the Ptolemies) and what we today call Syria (the Seleucids), and rose in revolt when a Seleucid king ordered that he be worshipped as a god (note that the rest of his polytheist subjects had no issue with this).

That revolt (Google "Judas Maccabeus" ) lasted over sixty years and ended with the Seleucid army withdrawing, leaving Judea briefly independent...

...until a Roman "peacekeeping" force arrived a generation later under Pompey (80BC).

This sets the scene for the events of the New Testament - Christ in his own eyes was a devout Jew, trying to forment a rebellion to eject the Romans and return Judea to a theocracy under, well, himself.

(Spoiler alert) He failed.

But a cult sprang up and spread after his death, largely due to the activities of the man we know as St Paul, with a message of endurance and redemption largely aimed at the non-Jewish population of the Empire.

Although initially dismissed as a "religion for women and slaves", the Empire contained large numbers of both, and the cult expanded despite official disapproval.

It was not alone, though. The old Pagan religions were basically collections of fables - many of them earthy and not terribly uplifting (but fun. In the New Testament, Christ never once laughs), and people were looking for something more coherent.

Alongside Christianity, there was also Zoroastrianism (the state religion of Rome's great rival and enemy, Sassanid Persia), Neo-Platonism (a philosophical take on Paganism, favoured by the fourth century Emperor Julian) and the cult of Mithras (not much is known about it, but it seems to have been popular in the Army).

Any or none of these might have prevailed, but the pivotal moment for Christianity seems to have come early in the fourth century with the death of a Roman general in the city of York.

This piece is too long already, and there are better accounts than I can give. But that general's son - named Constantine - was acclaimed as Emperor by his troops. Awkwardly, there were already two legitimate Emperors (Licinius in the East and Maxentius in the West), and Constantine was therefore a usurper.

To cut a very long story short, over the next twenty years, Constantine eliminated both the legitimate Emperors and became sole ruler. But the Roman Senate and aristocracy still regarded him as illegitimate; he needed a power base.

So, he legalised Christianity. It was widespread, had survived a brutal attempt to suppress it a few years earlier by the Emperor Diocletian, and the Church had amassed a huge amount of money.

Needless to say, once the Christians were given an inch, they took the whole nine miles, and by the 390s Pagan scholars were fleeing to Persia for their lives and Emperor Theodosius was making Christianity compulsory throughout the Empire - at swordpoint.

It was a long and brutal process, the Word of the Lord being spread by such means as the burning down of the great library of Alexandria and the murder of the mathematician Hypatia in 415AD. One of the final acts was the forcible closure of the Egyptian temples of Isis at Phliae by the sixth-century Emperor Justinian, which provoked a brief war with Meroitic Sudan.

The Western Empire was gone by that time, of course. But the Church outlived it, and only strengthened its grip in what we are no longer supposed to call "The Dark Ages".

Fear of going to Hell is reason enough for a person to accept an ideology that promises foriveness of one's sins.

Probably because it's been far and away the most profitable.

Emperor Constantine.

I'm with SteveB here. I think Christianity offered, and still does, something unique in the world of religions; something that touched hearts and opened doors to liberation from age-old human psychological "demons". But of course once a system shows itself to be powerful it attracts all kinds of corruptors. Now this system has been corrupt for a long time, but I don't think the problem is religion. The problem is corruption, not only in religion, but politics, and every other human institution. Several bible scholars claim that the early church did not encourage a belief in superstition, but was understood as metaphor. As another poster mentioned on another thread, Sam Harris says the supernatural interpretation didn't appear until the 13th century. It's not hard to see how the belief in literal disembodied agents could be manipulated by the power elite, and why they would want to keep them in place.

First death is a very good career move.eg. James Dean Second, most celebrities would die for an agent like Paul .. ....oh yes... Jesus did die for him.

According to the PEW survey I posted earlier it is Islam that is increasingly the most popular myth.

Also, I strongly feel it is people like us that are able to question the Christian nonsense that is actually leading to it's decline. In Moslem countries one is not allowed to question and the Evangelicals are trying to make that happen here.

From what I have thus far been able to determine, Christianity was created by and for the Roman Empire by combining elements of religious mythology from all of the various parts of the conquered world for the purpose of uniting the empire under a theocracy.
The Book of Revelations is viewed in this say and time to be a "prophecy," but may well have been a document of historical events using the metaphors contained within the zodiac signs as they did in the ancient writings to explain the events thar had happened.
As the years went by the religion became more refined by adding and taking away different element of the powers that be was able to perfect the elements of fear needed to control the population

The Christmas image of Jesus as an innocent babe has a lot to do with it.

I have read quite a bit about early Christian history. The NT scriptures were written by different communities who all followed the teachings of Jesus. These were quite different from the prevailing Jewish practices but it is likely that he was an educated individual who was a senior rabbi,his knowledge of scripture must have been extensive. You do find clues about this in the NT 4 synoptic gospels eg Jesus teaching at the Temple as a boy ,Jesus consatntly challenging the authority of the Pharisees(ruling clerics).
When Jesus was executed for this challenge his followers, as you say, wanted to keep his teachings alive.There were many diffrent groups following him each with their own traditions and scripture. But what we get in the actual gospels that ended up in the NT is a mythology that actually tries to claim that Jesus was the chosen messiah,by using OT prophesies to build a case. Much of the NT gospel stories about Jesus are based on OT storeis about god's chosen one. In particular the use of the story of the falsey accused man in the book of Wisdom,where such a man is wrongly accused of a crime ,put on trail ,condemned ,executed ,hung on a tree,but later redeemed by god as his chosen appointment...sound familiar.?

The story of Jesus is already there in the OT ,the writers of the NT just went back and found as many refernces to the chosen one they could and wrote a story of Jesus setting him in that role.The rest is history.

The gospel of Mark was the first to be written out of the 4 ,and the oldest copies of that gospel do not include the resurrection,you will see thus annotated in all Bibles in fact. So the last 12 versus of Mark were added to at a later date,this is the entire resurrection and commissioning of the disciples to spread his word...this was an very important addition...most likely a redacted combination of this story from Matthew and Luke which were written after Mark. This trick actually gives the disciples authority and they of course would be seen to then hand that authority over to the early church fathers who were disciples of the Apostles,who these peopl were is unkown as all the gospels were by unamed authors and only actually allocated their names in the 2nd century

As a lot have said already, it had the best marketing plan, so it took hold. To me, what KEEPS it going is how it plays on our wishes and fears. We have very deep psychological archetypes that religion leverages for its own good... the need for a father figure, the fear of death, the need for "fences" (think moral absolutism). There's more, but I think those are the major ones.

Brainwashing and ignorance..people will follow if in fear..

There is a reason why I don't own pets.

the inquisition

An extention of the Crusades (fear).

Shut up and listen or go to hell even if it doesn't exist you will be outcasted from everyone that we were able to possess.

I think its because its easy. All people have to do is live their life on their knees, with their heads empty from any logical thought and its an eternity of sunshine and rainbows. But if you think, and question then its hellfire and brimstone. Short and sweet. And as fake as all the others.