If Jesus was hanged……they’d pray to rope and perhaps make a cross out of it.
Or if he had just been left in peace to share his views and people either took to it or not, ignored or followed and others came along to improve upon his ideas and there would have been a natural progression of ideas evolving through to today, we could just wear flowers around our necks.
It's the martyrdom and "savior" status that stopped the movement in its tracks so this line of ideas had to stop and be recorded as is, never to be improved upon, no corrections and amendments made.
And that's just assuming there was a historical Jesus. Who knows.
Lenny Bruce once said, "If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."