It was there for all to see.
Christianity Versus Christendom
Porphyry, a third-century philosopher from Tyre and an opposer of Christianity, raised the question “as to whether followers of Jesus, rather than Jesus himself, were responsible for the distinctive form of the Christian religion. Porphyry (and Julian [fourth-century Roman emperor and opposer of Christianity]) showed, on the basis of the New Testament, that Jesus did not call himself God and that he preached, not about himself, but about the one God, the God of all. It was his followers who abandoned his teaching and introduced a new way of their own in which Jesus (not the one God) was the object of worship and adoration. . . . [Porphyry] put his finger on a troubling issue for Christian thinkers: does the Christian faith rest on the preaching of Jesus or on the ideas forged by his disciples in the generations after his death?”—The Christians as the Romans Saw Them.
