I’ve read an adjusting book that suggests the apostle Paul, or Saul of Tarsus was a Roman plant, a double agent meant to divide the Christian sect.

From his sudden conversion to all subversive things he wrote in his letters, it seems like he’s introduction subservience to Rome into the creed.

Read in that manner, he would be amazed that not only the christians embraced those aspects of his, but that they in time managed to become the main faith of the Roman empire and supercede it by a mile.