DBWI:What If Pontius Pilate didnt spare Jesus.

He had - far as we can tell - a growing following, his proto-messianic teachings striking a real chord with a lot of the underclass. That could have grown into something. Example, look at Ada Byron and the Engineerists. A random mathmatician with a poetic bent should not catch on but under the regime of the time, with the message of everything being part of a comprehensible system, and then dying of a disease you can romanticise while her own mother locked her up & demanded she repent? You get one of Europe's 'third religions' and that's just on a 200-year span of time.
Good point - although on the other hand, Europe in the 1600s was exactly the sort of environment where new teachings and movements flourished (look at the Neo-Cathars, or the Church of the Resplendent Sky). Roman Judea had some of the right characteristics - a weak government perceived by many as illegitimate, major divisions between secular and spiritual authorities, sudden cultural shifts - but, you could argue, lacked the atmosphere of simultaneous crisis and ennui that gave rise to the Engineerists and the other romanticist movements.
 
True. And Yeshua did manage to do quite well under Pilate but how would he have managed under Judas I?
Probably nowhere near as well - Judas's power rested, pretty much, on the back of the Pharisees, so he wouldn't have had much choice but to act against Yeshua from the beginning rather than grudgingly tolerating him until his support base got too large. On the other hand, this persecution might have strengthened the movement - possibly at the cost of turning it into an explicitly anti-authority religion, in the vein of the later Nihayat La-islam faith.
 
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