The origins of Christianity by culture or divine edict.

The Bible depicts that hemisphere earth, with a strong metal-like dome covering the world. Because that's what everybody in the middle east thought. It was a circle, but also pretty much flat save for some mountains. You really could build a tower to reach the sky. You really could be drowned by the cosmic ocean if the windows in the vault of heaven were opened, and God spent the entire 2nd day of creation building the damn thing, and a goodly part of the 4th adding little stars into the dome. And upon the end of the world, those stars will rain down to the Earth like snowflakes. Look, at the core, they believed pretty much exactly what their neighbors believed. It was largely a flat Earth with everything revolving around it. They sacrificed goats to appease others and then to appease the gods. And got into the habit of blood sacrifice to God. The Pagans came around with their children of gods stories, all over the place gods were having children with mortals and doing extraordinary things. And in this exact region we first find a little religion called Christianity where God has a child with a woman who is sacrificed to forgive the sins of the people. I mean, if a goat is good how much better must be the son of God (It even makes this exact argument in Hebrews 9). Later to reconcile the polytheistic aspects the trinity was invented (early Christian work was largely Arian with Jesus as a separate but high creation of God, the Messiah, God's warrior). So in the end we have a religion wherein God takes human form through virgin birth (a highly prized quality in Paganism judging from how many stories involve it, even though the Jewish myth of messiah only asked for a young girl) and then God sacrifices God to God to give God permission to God to be less angry at God's creation because their ancestors ate magical fruit from a magical tree on the advice of a talking reptile. This religion, doesn't make sense as an actual way to run the universe. It simply doesn't. It's absurd and why does God need his own God blood to do something? And yadda yadda yadda. But, it does make absolutely perfect sense as what culture would invent. This is *EXACTLY* what that culture would have invented as a religion. And we're pretty sure that's exactly where most religions come from, as sure as the Vikings made a religion wherein good vikings dying in the act of being good vikings would go to an afterlife of a bar in the sky wherein they'd drink booze with the gods, or that cultures on volcanic islands invent fire gods who are mercurial in nature and quick to anger.