Own thoughts:
By 64AD there were already Christians living in Rome. They were distinct from the Jews and they did not call themselves ‘Yeshuans’. They apparently believed in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ, and celebrated the memorial Eucharistic partaking in the body and blood of Christ, for which reason they were accused of cannibalism.
This is attested historically by Tacitus.
Following from this it is difficult to accept that these earliest Christians were merely the ‘Yeshuan’ followers of a good man miracle worker Jesus.
The writings of St Paul around the same time, clearly express a faith centred around the belief in the crucified and resurrected Christ, moving away from the Judaism of the Old Testament into completely new territory. Jesus did not merely preach and heal, but he forgave sin and sacrificed himself as the last blood sacrifice, to correct the old order, and as the new Adam.
He was not just a preacher and miracle worker. His life and death and resurrection was itself the message.
The temple in Jerusalem was still intact when Peter declared in conference with other apostles that kosher and circumcision were no longer necessary for followers of the resurrected Christ, whom the NT scripture says had manifested himself for 40 days to people, before His ascension.
One can discuss the exact details of how Christians explain the divinity of Christ in Jesus fully God and fully man. But it is not reasonable to argue that early Christians did not accept the Incarnation -- and the crucifixion and the resurrection – as very different from the earlier ‘messenger’ prophets or 'sons of God'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Christ
"The
Roman historian and
senator Tacitus referred to
Christ,
his execution by
Pontius Pilate, and the existence of
early Christians in Rome in his final work,
Annals (written
ca. AD 116),
book 15, chapter 44.
The context of the passage is the six-day
Great Fire of Rome that burned much of the city in AD 64 during the reign of Roman Emperor
Nero. The passage is one of the earliest non-Christian references to the
origins of Christianity, the execution of
Christ described in the
canonical gospels, and the presence and
persecution of
Christians in 1st-century
Rome.
The scholarly consensus is that Tacitus' reference to the execution of
Jesus by
Pontius Pilate is both authentic, and of historical value as an independent Roman source. Paul Eddy and
Gregory Boyd argue that it is "firmly established" that Tacitus provides a non-Christian confirmation of the
crucifixion of Jesus. Scholars view it as establishing three separate facts about Rome around AD 60:
(i) that there were a sizable number of Christians in Rome at the time,
(ii) that it was possible to distinguish between Christians and Jews in Rome, and
(iii) that at the time pagans made a connection between Christianity in Rome and its origin in
Roman Judea."
… Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular …
