What the bible says Hell is like

[Pat Mustard]

What is utterly astonishing is that you continue to plead that the Jesus movement was somehow different, more prone to failure than modern examples of cults, just so you can turn around and declare how astonishing it is that it survived.  You're playing both ends off against the middle.

Firstly, it's a pity that you seem unable to grasp that different religions have very different characteristics. The clue is in the different names.

You may not believe any of them, but that doesn't make them all the same.

Here's the thing.

Like many movements before and after, Xianity was for a couple of days declared to be a fraud.

Whether you like it or not, ancient historians, the C1 Jewish narrative and the Gospels all triangulate in saying that there was no coming back from yer Messiah being dead. Make no mistake about it; no Kingdom = game over.

But they came back. And unlike the other examples we've discussed, it wasn't a reaction to something that didn't happen where failure needed explaining. It was a reaction something that did happen, to a complete and utterly unexpected success that no-one saw coming.

Your first problem, you're extrapolating from a single source which is a conflation of third hand acoounts and outright mythology, which was massively altered on numerous occasions over the intervening centuries to conform with then current theology. There is no way you can realiably assign a truth value to the bible.

On the supposed resurrection, you have absolutely no evidence, and most critical scholarship agrees that it is a later addition to the Markan gospel, ie when orthodoxy was decided on the ressurectiin narrative was retrofitted back into the parts of the bible where it was missing.

And many religions have gained massive followings on the foot of an obvious lie. If you think that numbers of believers is a truth signifier then you have to accept that the book of mormon is a valid historical document with an accurate history of North America, including all the bits which are demonstrably false.