Atheism

Once you realise that a person who hears voices in their head is not the messiah but ~~a very naughty boy~~ someone suffering from psychotic delusions, it kind of starts to make sense. Jesus's behavior - if we ignore the embellished "miracles" - is very consistent with a run-of-the-mill schizoaffective disorder. Believing the world is ending or that a grand cosmic battle between good and evil is occurring is very common in such sufferers. The patient's internal world is unstable and collapsing, so their anguished mind constructs a narrative where the outside world is literally ending or collapsing as well. Distorting reality allows the mind to frame overwhelming personal distress as a grand external conflict and allows the individual to avoid confronting their agonizing internal reality. Who knows what trauma Jesus may have suffered as a child?

If we allow ourselves to suppose that the Jesus story is a heavily distorted recounting of real events, there are many reasons to conclude that the central character believed his own purpose was to herald the end of the world. He preached that "the Kingdom of God is at hand", made grandiose statements such as "this generation will not pass away", and so on.

His followers were expecting Jesus to actually physically lead them through the gates of heaven. Ever since he died and did not in the end laugh at death, Jesus's followers have been saying, "Well, err.. how about now?" This has literally gone on for 2000 years, with an increasing number of people for some reason thinking that their lifetime actually is the end times that Jesus was talking about. The worrying thing is that today, we humans have the ability to bring about the end of the world for real.

It wasn't just Jesus though. There have been many other cults based on the Jewish religion which have had varying degrees of success. David Koresh and his Branch Davidians spring to mind as a 20th century example, or the following in 16th century Münster that Jan Matthys managed to accrue before his uprising was brutally crushed by the German state. And as a more successful example, the cult of Mohammed. In all of these cases, the cult leaders believed they were heralding the end of the world. As with the Jesus story, none of Mohammed's believers bothered to write down what he'd said until decades after his death, because they didn't think it was necessary as the world would surely end "any moment now".