The Christian religion was created by the Roman Flavian emperors, according to Joseph Atwill and a growing number of experts examining his thesis.
This means the Christ myth was invented lock, stock and barrel, including his disciples, the political figures (Pontius Pilate, the Herods, etc.), and all the events depicted, and are pure fiction.
Atwill's seminal book, Caesar's Messiah, has been variously laughed at, mocked, villified, and/or dismissed as "crackpot," depending on the source of the criticism. But the closer the hypothesis is examined, by the scholars most familiar with the Biblical narrative, the more the realization grows that Titus, the second Flavian emperor after Vespasian, was the real-life "Jesus Christ," whose "ministry" was his military campaign which utterly destroyed the Jewish revolt against Rome. It's extremely hard for modern-day thinkers to wrap their heads around it, especially those who regard "Jesus Christ" as a historical, even more so divine, figure, but the Roman Catholic Church was an enormously successful vehicle by which the powers-that-be in ancient Rome extended their influence to every facet of people's lives within the political boundaries of Roman Empire and, later, far beyond.
Given the myriad crimes committed by the Church in the Dark Ages and during the Colonial Period (North and South America, Africa and Asia), the enormity of the consequences of this deception simply cannot be overstated, particularly because Islam is also what amounts to another offshoot of Judaism.