I think if you had passing familiarity with group sociology and religious psychology you wouldn’t be as confused by the parallel. There are studies on how extremist groups recruit and motivate young men despite membership coming at great cost. One of the factors is psychological fulfillment, the other is existential interest, yet another is a “purified” moral worldview. Fight Club is a fictitious example (fiction can tell us about our own psychology) but there’s no shortage of religious examples we have from the Middle East, where young men join a charismatic leader at great social cost including poverty, torture, and death.
So when Jesus says, “leave for house and family for my name’s sake to receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life”, when he says to sell your belongings and follow me, when he says that love is to “lay down one’s life for his friends”, we can interpret this in light of “the received tradition of” social science, which is somewhat more objective than the highly edited writings of the early Christians. The early Christians who would circle dance, who would prophecy, who would imagine they are speaking in foreign languages conveyed by God for deciphering, who would cast our demons… do I really need to say how these would interest a first century Jewish man? Indeed, such things interested first century Greek men, who would join mystery cults which fulfilled similar psychological functions.
You are surprised that young men might join a social group at risk of torturous demise, but this is just what so many revolutionaries in the Roman Empire did, including Jews in the first century. And why? Well, status and gain. But there is status and gain to be had from a religious group that is high trust and likely high fertility. Re: “lions”, do you not know that many Christians practiced secretly? That many recanted at risk of martyrdom, or fled? Do you think they marketed themselves as a way to die by lions?
