Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society. Even today in the US politicians know they need to demonstrate their Christianity to become president -- I doubt we'll see an atheist, Jewish, Hindu or even Muslim president within my lifetime (I'm 31).
Also, religious dogma largely lives separate from science and philosophy. It is true that many aspects of what "Christianity" is have been defined by consensus in the Vatican Council (including what scripture -- and which specific version of that scripture -- is considered canonical) and some Christian churches have been adjusting their dogma since (e.g. the CoE has become more accepting of homosexuality, the Catholic church has accepted evolution as factual). But saying "religion has undergone strenuous debate" is a very romanticized view of history.
Not to mention that much of Christian theology/philosophy foregoes the possibility that any other religion might be true to the point where Pascal's Wager only works if you supply the premise "All other religions and sects are definitely wrong" (i.e. you can't accidentally insult the "True God" if you submit yourself to the Christian God and turn out to be wrong).
Its just as true of Eastern Christianity.
> the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America.
All of those examples are largely a consequence of imperialism (largely, on the part of societies comprising Western Christendom.)
That's not to say that there aren't a few cases of durable Christian communities in regions (IIRC, particularly in the Middle East and East Africa, and some in South Asia) where they aren't a result of the heritage of ties between the common ancestor of modern Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christianity and the Roman empire, including those descendant churches ties to imperialist European states, these isolated communities are notable as exceptions within Christianity.
Not before many, including the earliest Christian leaders, were killed for their belief in Jesus. Christianity has proven to be a determined startup.
Christianity: The YouTube of 0AD
It is a coincidence of history that Greece happened to have a a Christian faction that was good at converting people right around the same time that that Roman empire was collapsing.
Many other religions that tried to similarly gain traction were met with destruction before they hit critical mass, so you must be careful to acknowledge some survival bias here for your religion of choice. Christians, by pure chance, got the timing right.
Comparing the persistence of Christianity to Baal and Thor is, I think, just this side of intellectually dishonest. If you're going to discuss comparative religions and their place in the dustbin of history, then like with other such comparative discussions, you shouldn't be making comparisons to things long since dead, especially myths. Instead, you're up against other extant religions with their own rich and ancient histories—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.
More importantly, the persistence of any of these religions provides no informative or measurable proofs of their truth claims. At best, we'd be delineating the ways in which they provide subjective meaning—but that tells us nothing at all about their objective truths. We cannot really say we've identified any of Jesus' flaws, given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws. We can critique the flaws of his followers, but that still doesn't inform any objective and secular discussion of the truths and meanings of religion.
It's true that billions find meaning in their chosen religions. Millennia of effort has provided no conclusive evidence this is anything other than subjective, though.
I'm not sure that all of those stories claim that; only four of these stories were accepted as canon by the later consensus of Christian churches, but others are known to exist, which have somewhat different contents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel
Also, Christian churches reached some kinds of consensus about what they say the canonical gospels said about Jesus, but not everyone who has read those gospels agrees with those interpretations; there have continued to be some debates about what Jesus said about himself and what his early followers believed about him. Some of those interpretations have been considered heresies in mainstream Christianity for a long time, but there have been a lot of such views which people have held to quite strongly, and often claimed were supported by their readings of even the canonical gospels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_heresies
After all, one of the reasons that Christianity even had all of those ecumenical councils and promulgated those creeds was that there were lots of people who claimed to be followers of Jesus and didn't believe some or all of those things. (And maybe there would be more today if there had been a separation of church and state throughout the Middle Ages.)
>And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
Neither has His Divine Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, from a pulp science-fiction franchise. The popularity of a character as a character does not indicate their historicity.