The Torah was written down for the first time during the babylonian exile. Palestine was occupied by the kingdom Babylon and israelite scholars finally wrote down what had been before passed on through oral tradition: They were afraid that their culture and religion would be assimilated and wiped out by the Babylonians.
It is my personal theory, that the original jewish religion was ret-conned by the editors during this process. Before, the Jews were polytheists and venerated beside Jahweh the canaanite goddess Ashera. (Can be seen if you read between the lines in the Bible. "cut down your Ashera-poles..."
From his choleric character, I think that Jahweh used to be a god of war of the Israelites, who was then ret-conned into the only god of the Israelites, because when your country is occupied by a hostile military force, you need a god of war.
And consider the time when the New Testament was written. Israel was occupied again, this time by the Romans. And Israel was governed by the brutal tyrant Herodes (it's a historical fact that he was a brutal tyrant).
In this time, someone comes up with an idea for a new jewish cult, that takes all the prophecies about the Messiah and says "this guy is it". The cult is small. The mainstream-Jews see it as heresy and the market is oversaturated with religions: Every country has their own religion, there are even cities with their own gods. So whom is this cult supposed to recruit as followers?
The christian religion could not afford to lose their precious few believers to any of the dozen other religions with their a hundred gods. So they became extremist.
An example for how over-saturated the world was with religious ideas back then is the Corpus Hermeticum. It's a religious book written in the 2nd or 3rd century AD and the author generously mixed christian, greek and egyptian religion into something new.
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