I frequently pose questions to the Christian visitors of the blog. I’m going to mix it up a bit and ask a question to the various nonbelievers here.

There is little doubt in my head that Christianity, at least Literalist Christianity (some argue this is not the most popular form, but it is by far the loudsest), is false. However, despite this, there’s one thing that continually perplexes me: how did Christianity become so popular?

It’s generally accepted in the secular community that a lot of the stories in the bible are exaggerations (walking on water, loaves of bread, etc). This isn’t hard to understand when we look at exaggerations that persist in our society. Did George Washington really cut down the cherry tree? Did Paul Revere actually ride through town yelling that Redcoats were coming? We have a great deal of modern myth in our culture. Most of this is due to the perpetuation of embellished stories through generations, combined with an ignorance of actual historical events. Given how many generations have passed since the time of Jesus, it’s not at all surprising that the new testament accounts of him may be embellished.

This is particularly understandable when taking into account how the New Testament was written. The first generation of Jesus’s followers were told quite clearly that Jesus would return within their lifetimes, so they saw little reason to write down what had occured. Stories were passed orally, and eventually written down. The new testament books were written 50 years (or later) after Jesus died, so it is doubtful that the books attributed to Matthew, Mark, and the like, were physically written by them. What is more likely is that the stories written as the “account of Mark” or “according to Mark” but were written by a follower of Mark. Sort of like if George Washington’s son were to write George Washington’s biography.

However, the fact remains that The Bible (or at least a number of books from them), and Christianity in turn, became extremely popular only shortly after the death of Jesus. My question is: how did this develop? Why did the original followers of Christ latch on to him rather than any of the other people claiming to be the messiah? Why didn’t the accounts of followers of other “prophets” become more popular? The bible says that Jesus will be back within the lifetime of his disciples, but since that was obviously false by the time it was recorded, why was it kept?

I understand that Constantine was largely responsible for the proliferation of Christian thought, but it was already pretty popular before then (that’s why he decided to embrace it). How did it get to be that way?