(Do we have to assume that they're all "less educated"?)Perhaps not all, but i do think education was/is an important factor.
One of the things apologists like to do, and have done throughout history, is strut out their "experts" - whether they are persons carrying graduate/post-graduate credentials or others who have somehow demanded the respect of their contemporaries. Status, money, and power seem to be assets consistently held by the "winners" of history, who get to write it as they wish. I would think education would be the next-most important factor in possessing those characteristics, right behind being born-into the "right" social eschelon. I'll admit that I might be a bit tender on this point, since I've got a college-level education and it had nothing to do with my JW belief and deconversion.
The posts made have been educational. Here-and-there, I'm getting pieces of what I'm looking for: the psychological atmosphere necessary to create and perpetuate these belief systems. But it appears it's harder to discuss that aspect than it is to discuss the theories about behaviors people employed to progressively create a new world-view. It's interesting to think of how they might have done these things, but we don't seem any wiser about how they rationalized their behaviors, how their audiences had to think to one day decide to adopt a story as the "Word of God". I don't think one's highest level of education determines whether one believes myths & legends. I think there's something else in our make-up as humans that produces 1) the ability to create and perpetuate a massive deception and 2) believe it as irrefutable fact. But I don't know what that is.
I can see the "Law" being exploited for material gain and power. But there had to be a simpler way than this convoluted, 600+(?) item "covenant". Or was there something in the human psyche which demanded that complexity?
And John was probably writing about oppressive NERO when he wrote Apocalypse (Revelations).
Reminds me of Preterism and its pre-70 C.E. dating of that book - though I understand that's not your perspective.