Is it all in the timing of the arrival on Earth? At least with someone like Koresh and others, they are here now in front of me (or were), and I can listen to what they really say, and base my determination whether they are Lord or not on seeing and hearing them, what they say and do. With Jesus Christ, all I truly know of him is what various followers wrote about him decades later- aka hearsay and second or third hand hearsay. So why is being a Jesus follower seen as normal, and Koresh type follower seen as brainwashed or insane?
This may as well be a rhetorical question, as the answer is obvious: culture, tradition, momentum.
It’s pretty difficult for a human to sell themselves as a god, so the vast majority fail to gain any following. But if they manage to gain a following there are various aspects of religion that help it to propagate and protect it from skeptical analysis. I could start listing these out but that’s a big topic in itself, and not limited to Christianity.
Do you want to talk about how it is that Jesus managed to gain a following (even if posthumously)?
But yeah it helps that he lived thousands of years ago and his life is just a bunch of legends. The frequency of miracles seems inversely proportional to our ability to record and verify them.
Because Jesus actually is Lord, and David Koresh was not. 
Well it is interesting that many have made the claim, yet his popularity is by far the highest- I assume because he was the first to make that claim, but I am not sure there
were not others before who did?
Don’t blaspheme! We all know that the one true god is Roger Ebert.
It used to be that believing Jesus is Lord = wacko.
Then it started to change and after a few hundred years it was not.
It even came to a point that believing Jesus is Lord = normal, believe Zeus is Lord = wacko.
Like damn they just swapped, sitting back look at this shit, wow!
You can see how these things play out in real time with Scientology.
Clearly a construction, self-proclaimed by it’s inventor but it gains enough temporal distance from it’s origins that anyone unaware of how it began will only look at the structure around it and the number of followers and assume it must have some validity.
No reason at all why the same thing won’t happen regarding Koresh. After all, the first gospel probably wasn’t written until 40 or so years after the death of Jesus. We aren’t even at that point yet for Koresh.
Probably because one of them rose from the grave and the other didn’t.
…yet.
All it takes is for one person to write down, as a second-hand eyewitness, that Koresh did precisely that and you now have equal evidence for both.
Isn’t it spelled Waco?
Well, one thing Jesus had going for him was that he was riding on preexisting beliefs. He himself was a Jewish teacher, and one of many who taught somewhat similar things. And the “Lord” claim came from an idea of Jewish Scripture of a Messiah who would eventually come.
This doesn’t work so well today. No one is looking for a religious savior to come, other than maybe Jesus himself. Okay, so there is still some belief in a possible Messiah by Jewish people, but the requirements are far more stringent* due to Jewish people being fooled in the past. Some cult leader isn’t going to cut it.
And, if you look at history, what gets labeled crazy is not so much based on what is true as it is based on how much it differs from the accepted wisdom. Sure, Jesus’s followers were considered crazy by many, but there was a large group that didn’t think his beliefs were that far out there. Throw in Paul teaching people to not go overboard, and it makes sense that Jesus had enough people following to reach the critical mass needed to jump from cult to sect to full on religion.
These small time cult leaders don’t. They just seem so obviously wrong that we can’t figure out why someone would possibly believe them. So we call them crazy.
If they wanted to be more accepted by the world at large and not their small cult, they’d need to latch onto something more powerful and widespread today. They’d need to abandon the idea of being “Lord.” Few peopl are looking for a human “Lord” these days.
*Yes, some would say the requirements were just as stringent in the past. But given how many people would follow this guy or the other guy as a Messiah, I don’t think that stringency had stretched so much to the lay people.
It also depends on what they’re teaching. Most mainstream religions have mostly the same core teachings: Be a good person, help those less fortunate than you, be peaceful, etc. Whether the theology is true or not, most of it is still good advice. But most of the religions that get labeled as “cults” have teachings like isolating yourself from everyone outside of the cult, giving the leader all you have, etc.
“I hear Jesus cured a blind guy.”
“Well, that’s not great evidence.”
“Fair enough; tell me about Koresh.”
“I hear he wears glasses.”
Most people, I’m going to guess that it’s around 99.999% who are Christian have had that taught to them from the time they were infants. It becomes a very odd thing to question. I will also guess that the percentage of people who follow Koresh types decided that as adults. Not all of them, but percentage wise a lot of them.
Not really, the Jewish messiah isn’t divine.
They also tend to have founders who’s ultimate goal seems to be to structure things so that they get to have sex with lots of teenage girls. (Koresh being no exception.)
another way to look at it, believing anyone is lord = wacko
It’s not just familiarity. Most folks raised Christian are also unfamiliar with, say, Hinduism. But most folks raised Christian don’t consider Hindus to be crazy (deluded, maybe, but not crazy). Even weird religions like the neo-pagans or Unitarian Universalists generally still get more respect than cultists.
