The Jesus cult Christians of antiquity TAUGHT and DOCUMENTED that Jesus was of God the Father, the Lord from heaven and born of a Ghost WITHOUT a human father.
Who in the Roman Empire would have worshiped a KNOWN DEAD CRIMINAL as a God Creator when Tacitus had records that Jesus suffered the ULTIMATE Penalty?
If the Romans HATED Christians and KILLED Christus to HALT the spread of the cult as stated in Tacitus' Annals why did the Romans worship the KNOWN DEAD JEWISH CRIMINAL as God Creator in the 4th century?
The answer is quite easy.
Jesus of Nazareth was NEVER EVER known to be a mere dead man.
We have manuscripts to show that Christians of antiquity ADMITTED THEIR Jesus was born of a Ghost, the Lord from heaven and God Creator.
I agree with most of this. Except "admitted". If you had written "mistakenly asserted" that would be better.
What you are saying is THAT Tacitus, Suetonius and other rational thinkers dismissed Jesus (once Christianity BECAME known to them) as a mere dead man who had BEEN executed as a criminal; and they did not worship him. Then in the Third CENTURY Crisis intellectual life in the Empire became degraded, and people looked for supernatural solutions to insoluble socio-ECONOMIC problems, and in that environment Christianity made headway and later BECAME the State religion.
But consider this: in the scholarly world, Jesus was first known to be a mere dead man, and only later stated to be a god. In recent centuries, scholarship has recovered from Christian control and Jesus has stopped being a God and turned back into a mere dead man.
By the second century, as Pliny tell us, the Christians had already started worshipping Christ as a God, but at that time they were only a small minority, like the people nowadays who "admit" that the Earth is being visited by flying saucers and who have a "consensus" that people are kidnapped by aliens. As Pliny called it: depraved, excessive superstition.
Outside that world, Christ was
from the start a natural figure - a sectarian who had been put to death. It is simply untrue that he was "NEVER EVER known to be a mere dead man".
And now, to bring some happiness to your life, I will write the magic words "Chinese whispers", and "propaganda". Because you missed these expressions out in your last post. Although you did manage to put in NEVER EVER.