Who maneuvered it?
I'm going with Constantine as the instigator and the Christian religions that followed the creation of this collective book called "The Bible". The why is simple. Power over and control of the masses. There was, and still is, a definite agenda. That agenda was and still is conversion/recruitment (join us or die).
Most of the authors of the various collective 'books' of the Bible were not even present during the historical events being presented. They wrote stories that had been orally passed down for generations. And when this happens, stories tend to become exaggerated and changed. Much of what is written in the Bible is not literally true and many of our various Sciences have disproven these stories. Some of the Bible authors also had serious issues (Paul for example). Why would God want such a dickhead writing for him?
Knowing the history of beliefs prior to Christianity helps to illustrate where these current ideas came from. For example, the ancients celebrated the 'resurrection of the sun' each year as it returned; many beliefs held to a virgin birth and sun being God as the Light and giver of Life. These have been adopted by Christianity and made more humanistic.
There are no original manuscripts available to authenticate that which we see in the current Bible today either. So to take the Bible as 'truth' means you've decided to believe in mythology that has been presently disproven as well as the fact that "God" has sat in heaven for 100s of thousands of years with indifference to the suffering and anguish going on here on Earth and then one day decided "Well, I think we've had enough of this" and sent his son to the most illiterate, backward part of the Earth to spread his good word (ignoring the fact that the ancient Jewish sages had been spreading the same good words long before Christ arrived). Why not go to China or elsewhere on the planet where people were more advanced and actually could read and write? No, we have him coming to goat and sheep herders in the most backwards part of this planet. But he didn't really succeed did he? I mean, how did Christ make things better? Every advancement we've made here on Earth to better our situation has come from us. We created penicillin, we created sewage systems, we abolished slavery, we created dental hygiene, we investigated how the human body works and developed procedures to heal the wounded and sick.
I think Jesus Christ was a man who wanted to help people and some powerful other people figured a way to deify him and use him to their advantage.
