Sure, but my feeling is that we downplay the importance of those first couple of decades after Jesus, just because history can say so little about them. It's an era that can't get much space in any book, because there's almost nothing to write besides speculation, but the fact that we're missing this story doesn't mean that there was nothing to see. How did all those sayings get collated and preserved? Why was there even anything for the Roman populace to hear?Manetho wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 8:58 pmSo the success of Christianity was possible because its message — i.e., the sayings attributed to Jesus plus the beliefs formulated in the wake of his death — clicked with a small but significant subset of the Roman populace. Whatever events inspired the resurrection stories were only important insofar as they caused those beliefs to be formulated.
I figure it's kind of like a multinational company that grew from a storefront. To outsiders the company looked pretty ordinary until that remarkable boom from regional chain to global enterprise, but the founders will tell you that it was the early years that were remarkable, and that by the time anyone else was starting to notice them, they knew what they had and it was only a matter of time.
Accounts like that can be biased by nostalgia, and the later growth probably wasn't really inevitable, but the fact that it was a company with those particular early years that went on to make that big expansion probably wasn't just a coincidence, either.