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James_Miller comments on How would you take over Rome? - Less Wrong
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Imperial Rome was in general extremely tolerant of new religions, of which there were many new mystery cults - as long as they accepted a few ground rules vis-a-vis politics, and even those ground rules were negotiable. For example, the Jews were allowed to break all sorts of rules like not sacrificing to the emperors or ejecting legion standards from the Temple. As far as we can tell given the sources available (which likely skew pro-Roman), the Jewish revolts were not really the Romans' fault.
This also means that there was intense competition among religions which would reduce the chance that any one religion could gain adherents.
On the other hand, a printing press is an enormous advantage for spreading memes.
That's right, and that's also probably why Christianity grew extremely slowly early on. (I wouldn't go the religion route myself unless I had technological miracles to employ.)
I wonder why Christianity won so big in the end then, given that it wasn't displaying early memetic virulence.
People have speculated about that for a long time. Relevant factors seem to be the decay of the Roman military discrediting Christianity's major rival, Mithraism, lack of vitality in the pagan faiths such as diminished oracular activity discrediting them ('the silence of the oracles'), and good political luck.