Yeah. Not buying it. Christian scholars have fragments from texts quite early in the first century, which is about as early as you can reasonably expect. They have enough early documents to definitively identify Gnostic gospels as written later, and that is not an easy task.
If you were trying to pick a religion to make a cult from in the first century, Judiasm would be the last thing any Roman aristocrat would have thought of. The people were obsessed with tradition, laws, and their own cultural history. All of those make them difficult to manipulate. Compare this to Rome's own religions and mythology, which were shamelessly revisionistic to the needs of the present, and would have been ideal for starting cults. Regardless of whether or not Christianity is true, for any Judiasm-based cult to take root as a religion would have required many well educated Jews who genuinely believed what they were saying.
I will buy, however, that it's an author making an outlandish claim in an attempt to sell his book.
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