Well abe, just because something has not happened recently does not mean that it has never happened. Still, Christianity was founded by a rather small group.

If Jesus was real (the jury being permanently out on that matter), then he said that everyone who was hearing his words would see the end of the world. I would consider that to be a valid single source hypothesis.

If Paul was real (again no verdict is possible), then he was probably talking about something that had been written in the past. Again, you have a single man.

Really though, most of what I wrote had little to do with that idea. Most of what I was covering was things that certainly happened while the apostles could have been alive and what came from that.

Basically, by time that we have reliable records of church history, what we have is not the original cult but the consensus which emerged because that was what most people could buy into.

What comes from that brings in a whole plethora of other issues that we need not cover here. But yes, it started as a doomsday cult.

Potential interlocutors might wish for the sanitized version of history but that just is not what happened. Really though, it matters not whether the church was started by one, twelve or twenty people. What matters is the fact that whomever got the ball rolling, the political machinations that followed make it abundantly clear that the founder(s) expected the end of the word in their own life time(s)

Interesting. I'm more inclined to believe it got started by hundreds or thousands than by 1 or 20. I would expect its origins to be more memetically driven than consciously. Don't wish to derail the thread though. Just my musings in passing.

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OK since I think we have established that the early cult was a doomsday oriented one, can we call this a derailed thread?

@ natural: I think that we have covered the “historical jesus” deal before. There is insufficient evidence to make a clear conclusion one way or the other. In another thread a couple of weeks ago, you invoked Bayesian statistics and asked so really good question but still ones for which an answer is unlikely to obtain.

The only reason for that detour is based on the thread title which, as I read it, tacitly assumes that there was an historical jesus. Whatever.

As far as the historical cult goes, if it began with thousands of people, then it was probably an evolution from the mystery schools. In all honesty, I can't sat that that was not what happened.

What I can say with reasonable confidence is that at some point, leaders did turn up and those fairly few people drove the movement on to bigger and, well umm, better things.

Whatever actually happened, I am given to understand that roughly half of the Pauline Epistles are consistent enough to support a single or at worst a small group of men as the original source. So right there, you have one guy (or a very small number of guys) pushing for stuff.

Later on, we see the proto-orthodox founders such as Tertullian, Eusebius and that general crowd working to define the church as a monolithic entity. Again, there were leaders and followers.

Now, if one takes the apostles as a starting point, then it took less than 20 years for what they may have done to completely fall apart. Not that we should just assume that. Really, there is scant evidence for most of the people in the NT. There was an article in National Geographic a few years ago about Herod's grave, so apparently we have his bones. Pilate appears in Roman record external to the cult. The rest of the crowd, not so much. That and give the amount of out right forgery in the first few centuries is reason enough to cast doubt on much.

Still, for the first three centuries or so, I think that a good enough case can be made that there were a small number of people pushing a shifting and evolving agenda.

I think "strong cults" or "dangerous cults" (not to be conflated with violent or suicidal cults) follow patterns in common with each other, and they all have potential to become either doomsday or violent/suicidal, unless they happen to hold doctrines that are starkly contrary. Violence, suicide or doomsdayism are only potential secondary characteristics, not central to what makes them cults, though doomsdayism often helps some cults to succeed. Cults that are violent/suicidal are actually a very slim minority--peaceful cults exist in every city and most towns--but the violent/suicidal cults get the most attention.

The Cult Studies Journal published a "Checklist of Cult Characteristics," useful for identifying "dangerous cults." The most important criterion is the first item: "The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law." This almost defines a dangerous cult, though I would qualify it by saying that the leader should be either alive or recently alive. If the leader died more than 100 years ago and the cult has diversified, then it is an ideology, not a cult. The group no longer has such potential for abuse since the commands of the founder are loosely interpreted, competing and compromising with other social forces. So, the remainder of the checklist is also useful and important. If a group of people unambiguously satisfy most of the items on the checklist including item #1, then the group is a dangerous cult.

I have personally investigated two cults in my own life. One of them was a political cult--Lyndon LaRouche. That had all of the smacking of a stereotypical cult. The members were aggressive and creepy, and their doctrines were bizarre.

The other cult was the International Church of Christ. These people, on the other hand, seemed hardly different from normal churches, believing almost all of the same things that normal conservative Christians do--no bizarre doctrines--but their practices had key differences. They spent an immense amount of time together and they put exceptional investment into evangelism. They would "love bomb" all potential recruits with praise, gifts, friendship, and outings. And when they had critics, they were excommunicated--no member was allowed to speak with them.

It is the practices, not the beliefs, that are most useful for identifying cults.

OK, thanks for clarifying. The only thing that differentiates a "cult" (as described in the previous post) from a "doomsday cult" is the point that a "doomsday cult" predicts a severe global calamity, and a "cult" may or may not. Doomsday cults among themselves are generally equally diverse in all of the same respects as all other cults, and a "doomsday cult" still meets the same criteria of "cult" as I have previously described.

Sorry about that. I think you were more clear this time. So, my claim concerning "rough profile" was about the basic biographical information--name, age, family, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, hometown and associations. That is the "rough profile" that I was referring to. Cults may, however, develop myths about their founder after their founder has already died or gone away, in those few times when the cult persists after that, and these myths will follow the pattern of being in line with the wishful thinking of the cult, especially to elevate the status of the cult founder. They may attribute miracles to him or her, for example. This is a pattern followed by L. Ron Hubbard, Haile Selassie I, Joseph Smith, Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster and others.

This is off the subject but it's something that I thought was funny.  If I remember correctly, the apostles put all their resources together while they waited on the second coming.  Eventually, their supplies ran out.  Personally, I think that is funny.  I have been accused of having a weird sense of humor though.

I think every cult originated in small groups or individuals. No cult could start widespread without a big external stimulae of some kind, and it would pretty much need to be a divine influence to have enough people agree on the incident and its implications to form a religion around it in anything less than a generation.
Large groups of people don't tend to make something up to fool people not part of the group, simply because with a large enough group you will unavoidably have people who let slip the truth for one reason or another. Much to conspiracy theorists dismay.
This was long before you could sit in England chatting to someone in China. It would take years for an idea originating in one village to spread across a country when it takes days of travel to go a few dozen kilometres.
I don't think the origins to any cult for which we do not already know will ever be known. By the time the ideas spread enough to be recorded they were changed significantly and the originators were centuries dead.