For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

What Minimalist might be suggested is that during the first 2-3 centuries, the Christian communities grew up as autonomous fifedomes.

It would only be with Constantine that all of this would change, a unification, and so someone who believed that Jesus was akin to Hercules would be hard pressed to relate to the Christianity that came after Constantine (which Emperor Julian, who came after him, tried to dismantle, but failed. All hail Zeus!).

Pagan Romans wouldn't have bothered to study the differences in beliefs that the various Christian sects had. They would have just called all followers of these sects Christians the same as we refer to all followers of today's 40,000 different denominations as Christians.

It's unlikely that there were a lot of different sects in Nero's day because Christianity hadn't been around for long. I don't think early Christianity being different from later Christianity is a good reason to suspect there were no Christians at all in Nero's Rome.

Eusebius was probably going on the assumption that all Christian martrys in the past followed his version of Christianity. Eusebius Doctrine

From a dogmatic point of view, Eusebius stands entirely upon the shoulders of Origen. Like Origen, he started from the fundamental thought of the absolute sovereignty (monarchia) of God.

Eusebius was intent upon emphasizing the difference of the persons of the Trinity and maintaining the subordination of the Son (Logos, or Word) to God

Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the official state religion in AD 380.

which affirmed the prevailing view that Jesus, the Son, was equal to the Father, one with the Father, and of the same substance (homoousios in Greek).

Eusebius (who died AD 339) would probably have had a fit if he'd discovered what some of his early Christian martyrs had really believed. He'd probably have had another fit if he'd heard that his version of Christianity wasn't going to be adopted as the official Roman religion. I don't think anyone would argue that Eusebius wasn't a Christian because his views about the Son differed to what was going to develop into modern Roman Catholicism, though.

I would also suggest that if a Jew today could get on a Tardis and whoosh himself to the time of King David (when there also was no temple), that it would be a completely foreign Judaism in most cases (today, he would probably be seen as a zealot who took on all kinds of non-Jewish traditions). Never mind that the Hebrew would be different, but they still might be able to communicate.

The TARDIS has a telepathic translation circuit so travellers would be able to communicate. A modern Jew would be able to learn the differences and see that David's kingdom wasn't as great as tradition makes it out to be.

The evidence from surface surveys indicates that Judah at the time of David was a small tribal kingdom.[19] The Bronze and Iron Age remains of the City of David, the original urban core of Jerusalem identified with the reigns of David and Solomon, were investigated extensively in the 1970s and 1980s under the direction of Yigal Shiloh of the Hebrew University, but failed to discover significant evidence of occupation during the 10th century BCE,[20] In 2005 Eilat Mazar reported the discovery of a Large Stone Structure which she claimed was David's palace,[21] but the site is contaminated and cannot be accurately dated.[22]