If Jesus was just a man, why all the stories?

[Minimalist]

Meet Constantine.



Sleazebag politician and murdering thug. He made two serious mistakes.

One was demolishing the Roman military machine which had kept the empire for 3 centuries and the other was legitimizing a bunch of nutty old fucks with a silly superstition and thinking he could use them to "unify" the empire.

It appears that christianity already had grown earlier than that:

"The imperial support that Constantine gave to Christianity had a great impact. Obviously Constantine legalized Christianity in all areas of his empire. In the eastern half of the empire, a stronger population of Christians always had existed."

Why?

Define "grown?"

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Roman_Cultu...ristianity

While many people tend to exaggerate the growth of Christianity before the 4th century, ninety percent of the empire was not Christian, and there is no evidence that Christianity could have continued to grow. It was the support of the emperor Constantine that transformed Christianity into a driving force in the Roman Empire. “Most authorities agree that by 300 A.D., between seven and ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire were Christian.”

Understand the phrase, "to the victor go the spoils." A bunch of xtians, (and not even all xtians! just one faction) supported Constantine in his struggle with Maxentius for control of the Western Roman Empire. Because Constantine won, these xtians were rewarded for their support. [ Damn you Maxentius...why couldn't you have killed the motherfucker!!! ]

As a result of that we have been stuck with 1500 years of xtian barbarism in the west.