Q about arguments for God's existence.

[Mudhammam]

By truncating the phrase, you've changed its meaning noticeably. The full phrase is “astonishing signs of God returning to Israel as He had promised”. These were not random occurrences done for effect, but occur within a specific context. The point is not 'Jesus can do great things', but 'The Kingdom of God looks like this, and its time is now'. The acts are not really there to create faith, but to signpost the fulfilment of God's promise.

Contrast for example the C2 infancy gospel of Thomas, where Jesus makes clay birds fly. A random 'miracle'.

The only difference between Jesus making clay birds fly and causing a fig tree to wither by cursing it or appearing and disappearing through walls post-mortem is that you've attached special significance to the latter instances. The Gospel writers make it painfully obvious that they're willing and able to manufacture signposts no matter how woefully they have to mutilate the meaning of Old Testament texts. Taken allegorically, I'm fine with all of this. Taken beyond that, my statement about mental hospitals stands. There's a whole lot of significance to be found in the "miraculous" everywhere it's reported if you have an idea of what you're looking for. To him who has an ear to hear, let him hear!

This is all part of a coherent and indivisible message, accepted and lived to death by all the 'Twelve' (the NT pulls no punches where divisions are concerned; none of them breaks ranks post resurrection). The early church was Jewish primarily, and any C1 Jew would have taken some persuading that C1 Judaism was heading in the wrong direction in terms of what their ultimate goal meant- the Kingdom of God.

Now there are common features with other religious movements, but rather than hand wave with 'They're all the same', I would argue strongly it's worth looking at individual arguments because one may be real. Think Russian Roulette.

On the final point. After the fall of Jerusalem, rabbinic Judaism took over, with Christianity gaining no extra traction in Israel because of the war. The Pharisees morphed into what we know today as rabbis.

I'd beg to differ that Christianity gained nothing by the fall of Jerusalem. After all, it's a central theme in at least one of the Gospels that future generations of Jews would suffer directly as a result of their betrayal of the Messiah, and the fate of Jerusalem is specifically mentioned in the Synoptics. If anything, it placed events post 70 A.D. in a context that allowed Gentiles to feel justified as Crusaders doing the work of the divine and impressed on Jews the idea that they were confronting God's wrath as a consequence of their father's sins. And of course, all of this became very useful for the Roman Church later on.