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.