Jesus rising is the keystone to Christianity. It is the only thing that matters.
If that’s true, it relegates Christianity to the status of any other cult founded on impossible fables.
So, what in particular vaulted it to the World’s Largest (other than by aggregating the numbers of incompatible sub-sects)? Mere riches? The opulence, pomp and ceremony of The Vatican?
It mystifies me.
Authoritarianism is the one-word answer.
Once Christianity became the official religion of an empire—specifically, the Roman Empire under Constantine in the 4th century—it spread through imperial mechanisms. This expansion didn’t rely solely on the spiritual appeal of the message but was backed by power structures. Christianity was then transmitted to successor states and colonial powers that continued the pattern of spread through conquest, colonization, and forced conversion. In this way, imperialism became a vehicle of authoritarian expansion.
A notable example is
the Spanish colonization of the Americas, where Catholicism was used as both a spiritual and political tool to subjugate indigenous populations. Another example is
Charlemagne's forced conversions of the Saxons in the 8th and 9th centuries, where refusal to convert to Christianity was punishable by death. And of course,
the Inquisition—a series of institutions within the Catholic Church—exemplifies how internal control was maintained through coercion, persecution, and suppression of dissent.
But even before Christianity became the religion of an empire, a key shift had already occurred: it moved beyond the bounds of tribal or ethnic religions. Unlike Judaism, which was closely tied to a specific people and cultural identity, Christianity opened itself up to anyone willing to convert. This universality gave it a structural advantage—greater scalability, if you will—in terms of membership.
Going back further, in the earliest stages of the faith, there was a spectrum of belief about who Jesus was. Some early Christian groups saw him as a human teacher or prophet, while others promoted his divine nature. Texts like the
Gospel of Thomas present a very different picture of Jesus, one that emphasizes divine immanence—God within all people—rather than exclusive divinity in a single figure. These alternate views existed before being officially declared heretical, such as in
the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, which formalized the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and laid the groundwork for what would become Christian orthodoxy.
It’s likely that, assuming Jesus did exist, his death by crucifixion created a crisis of belief for his followers. The cognitive dissonance between a miracle-working messiah and a humiliating public execution demanded explanation. As often happens in movements with charismatic leaders, the narrative adapted: instead of a failure, the crucifixion became part of a divine plan. Resurrection became a central tenet, and dissenting views were increasingly sidelined.
Over time, theological diversity was systematically narrowed. Councils, creeds, and ecclesiastical hierarchies selected certain texts as canonical and rejected others. The resulting Bible and the doctrines that grew from it were the products of deliberation and exclusion. These decisions were often made not purely for spiritual reasons, but also for the sake of cohesion, control, and institutional continuity.
So yes, the divinity of Christ became central, not purely because it was the most compelling spiritual idea, but because it was the one that survived and was enforced within a power structure. What we now call “Christianity” is the result of those historical, political, and authoritarian processes, not merely a spontaneous worldwide embrace of an original message.
