Over the years of looking into the origins of religions the most salient observation on Christianity was to the effect, 'something very interesting happened in the Roman empire in the first century AD unfortunately we have no idea what it was.'

After Pompey annexed the eastern Greek empire to Rome the natural osmosis of religious ideas became a direct injection via legions of administrators as well as the legions themselves. Additionally the administrators and well off members of the legion acquired slaves directly from where they were stationed and brought them back to the Rome and to other assignments within the empire. There was later even an emperor, Gabulous I believe it is spelled, who brought his sacred rock (see the stone in the Qaba at Mecca) and performed the worship dances for the upper class Romans.

Mithra is perhaps the most commonly known of these imports. Very little is known about the cult or its extent but it does appear to have been limited to the legions. Other "magical" figures of wisdom such as Apollonius of Tyana appear to have gained a following although what little is known of him is from a "biography" written after his death that does not pass muster on what we would call a biography. As a result we know little of him. Some have suggested Paul the apostle was Apollonius although nothing supports this but the name similarity.

The beginnings of the Sol Invictus cult were also in this time period which eventually became the dominant cult of the upper class. And here we can jump ahead to a lot of unsupported speculation about Constantine inventing Christianity via Esubius.

What is clear is that there was a trend towards a single deity. It is further clear that until the mid 2nd c. AD there is no identifiable cult of Jesus. Yet by the early 3rd c. a modestly codified Christianity is approved by Constantine. The rare earlier mentions of the Crestus and similar names are not described as performing any identifiable christian rituals nor do they behave as Christians. For example, a local administrator tells the Crestus to stop their rituals and they do.

The stories of Apostles traveling and baptizing and founding churches cannot be distinguished from later invented myth. The details do not match what secular history is known nor arkie digging and other things.

The first mention of a gospel, singular, is early in the 2nd c. AD and the first (implied) plural mention of them is in the late 2nd c. There is no historical basis for a claim they were written by contemporaries of a Jesus character. Factually no one knows where the gospels came from. We do know after they appeared they became extremely popular. And for the first time details of Jesus which should have been mentioned by Paul but which were not become things everyone has to know.

The situation is not much different for the epistles. There is a claim of an original letter by Paul is in some church or other. I looked into it. The letter is described as a postage stamp sized fragment.

Dealing back to a Jesus the absense of evidence is the most striking. His cures were common at the time and some of the same methods were used by Emperors when they cured people. In other words either common attributions to important people or standard stage fair as on the god network and revival tents. Perhaps incorrectly one assumes emperors did not indulge in theatrics leaving us with attributions to indicate importance.

If there was a person who was considered important enough to attribute these cures to at the time he escaped all contemporary mention. This is not to suggest anyone was chronicaling events in Palestine or that we should expect same rather we simply observe the absense of evidence.

The rest of the story has 12 apostles and several hundred near-apostles spreading out to announce the good news. Again there is no mention in the historical record.

At this point believers start rationalizing the silence based on the assumption the gospels are largely true. That is the same error old testament believers make. Identifiable Christianity does not appear until the mid to late 2nd c. AD. There is nothing prior to that to reconcile.

What we have in the empire in the mid to late 2nd c. is an emerging monotheism. This idea had been banging around among Greek philosophers for centuries. There was an unspoken rule, the philosophers could be atheists as long as they kept it to themselves, a rule Socrates broke. The idea that the gods were the shadows on the cave wall of a single something or other was familiar to the educated in the empire.

By the time of Constantine there were several monotheist cults which got along among themselves and with each other which I have mentioned above and others except Apollonius never got much of a following. There was one cult which did not get along with the others cults or with each other. It was the Christians.

There is a long mythology of warring churches and civil strife because of them. This is largely the imagination of the "Constantine invented Christianity" school. Whatever this warring cult was all about it had some populist interest for Constantine as he used it to loot the temples of some gods. Christians converted the shells of the temples to their saints while the emperor kept the gold.

What little we know of the events of the council he called are not endearing to Christian tradition. Some day I may find a collection of all the material but at the moment it appears that is limited to a few scholars who give out little bits and pieces of it. Essentially they were a pack of uneducated loonies. Many showed signs of mutilation from their run ins with authorities. Where we think of this as a deliberative body it was not. One presented his case in pantomime. If he was in white-face it is not mentioned.

This is the sort of thing that leads some to claim a same mind took over and invented the religion. It is the only "story" that fits these characters in and a religion as a consequence. The problem with this is they assume a fixed religion out when the very few things in the Nicean creed are the only ones we can safely assume were agreed. They are a trivial number of theological points and not a single procedural point such as are there sacraments? saints? angels?

With all of this, what we have in evidence is very little. Pompey got involved with a religion that hated competing religions and their members. Two centuries later a religion claiming roots in that antisocial religion appears in a form we can recognize as Christian which hates competing religions and other Christians who disgree on trivia. Half century after that it is the recognized religion of the empire with a codification of some of the trivia sponsored by the emperor.

That is all the solid information we have. Everything else is story telling based upon the slimest of evidenciary material.