It seems to me that you and I are defining “success” rather differently. You're hung up on a very short-sighted notion of success, limited to what he personally gained for himself during his brief time among Mankind. To me, his success is not limited to that brief moment of human history, nor to his own experience and what was in it for him; but to the effect that he has had—and continues to have—on nearly all human history, for thousands of years thereafter.
Actually, it seems to me it's you who is trying to equivocate it in a direction that's irrelevant for the thread.
1. Jesus was a success eventually among
GENTILES, who didn't much care about the Jewish requirements for a Messiah.
2. Among the
JEWS, which is the topic here, Jesus was provably much less successful than two dozen other messiah claimants.
Even Sabbatai Zevi got more followers as a Messiah, and that one converted to Islam and started preaching Islam, which is, you know, pretty much the worst Messiah ever. It's Messiah Epic Fail. On a scale of what not to do to ruin your job qualification, it ranks up there with a porn actor castrating himself
Even taking DOC's unsupported delusions about a couple thousands of Jews converting to Jesus (but apparently forgetting to tell anyone to write about that, or to do anything worth mentioning, etc), that's peanuts compared to other Messiah pretenders. The guys mentioned DID get more JEWS to follow them than Jesus.
Plus, really, even going by DOC's delusions and trusting the Gospels and Acts, we have to conclude that after Jesus and his followers performed miracles in a city of 30,000-50,000 people (the estimate for Jerusalem in the 1st century CE), plus all over three provinces, and pulled a resurrection, and got... what? A couple thousand converts? (Again, that's unsupported, but I'm taking DOC's word for ad absurdum sake.) People who didn't perform any miracles got more followers than that.