Jesus was Caesar ?

The last thing that any Jew would do is deify a human being.  Because Judaism was older than Rome was, the Romans exempted the Jews from emperor worship as a show of respect.

If Christianity originated among the Jews, then the first Christians had to have had some legitimate reason to believe that Jesus Christ was God.

BTW: Didn’t the 1^st century AD Jewish historian Josephus mention Jesus? And should proof that Jesus Christ existed be limited to proof that the person Jesus Christ existed? If Jesus Christ never existed, how can you explain documentary evidence for the existence of Christians?

What church?

During the 1^st century individual Christian congregations submitted to the authority of Paul and the original Apostles.  Tradition holds that as the Apostles died off they appointed successors which had authority over local congregations.  But by the mid-2^nd century there were too many congregations to be administered by just a few apostolic successors.  And in the meantime heresies were already in the works long before the Apostles were all dead. The Apostles and their immediate successors never had any earthly authority to do anything about heresies other than warn people about them.  The power to excommunicate heretics and legally define what Christianity is did not rest in a single entity until the earthly leaders of the church had the backing of law that came with Constantine in the 4^th century.

The Apostles had the ability to tell us what Christian doctrine is, but they had no earthly power to enforce it.

Have you given any consideration to the historical details presented in the New Testament that don’t pertain specifically to Jesus?

If Jesus Christ never existed, then the entire NT is something of a fraud.  If the NT was written close to the time period during which Christ supposedly lived, then it would be natural for it to include historical details in an effort to give the fiction some validity.

But if the NT was written long after the period during which Christ was supposedly living on earth, then would the writers have bothered to include historical details?  Would the writers have known about the details themselves?  Would the NT’s target audience have known enough about the historical details for the details to have any impact?  Or were the historical details themselves made up as a ruse for people who likely wouldn’t know or couldn’t verify history from decades earlier?

I think most historians and Bible scholars say that the earliest any of the NT was written was in the 2^nd half of the 1^st century.  The earliest (as far as I know) that anyone has dated a NT document is Thiede’s dating of the Gospel of John to around 46 AD.  But if the historical details in the Gospels are accurate, would we have reason to give the Gospels an earlier date, i.e., they were written closer to the time of Christ and may have been eyewitness accounts as Christian tradition maintains they are?  Would an earlier date give the Gospels validity as historical documents and not just religious polemics?