The Empire never ended, sayeth PKD.
I'm a PK, son of a PK, so I grew up goin to church. Defected in later high school, at some point.
Looked into various other religious sentiments and spiritual teachings. Eventually realized they're all just stories, mostly altered by following political regimes.
Always funny to hear people argue the truth or validity of "The Book". Presumptuous, to say the least. It's a Catholic production, edited for the masses to their liking. Disposes of the troublesome empowering bits, but keeps the "bend over and take it" ones. And changes some names and locations to obfuscate and confuse.
With the number of times Romans changed the calendar, not to mention the Gregorians pretty much just adding 1000 years to the narrative, many of those events were taken from other histories and combined, and the major focus between old and new might have just happened closer to 1000 or less years ago, not 2000. More like, the middle ages. Crusades, Black Death, Constantinople/Istanbul, Kievan Rus, Tataria and Genghis Khan... A world in political upheaval and turmoil.
My thoughts on the New Testament are that it happened around that time, and that things like King Arthur and Knights Templar fleeing from the STURCH are directly related to before and after... Whatever that was.
But, it's like any story, or collection of them, there's things to be gotten from it. But there are also many others.
Scaligerian versus Fomenko aside, mixed up "pagan" wrapped up in a new package, etcetera... There's a LOT missing. Weren't they glad when the printing press fired up. All of those poor monks going blind into the wee hours copying what they're told to copy, trying to "illuminate" the writings to pass on secrets and hidden clues.
A rose by any other name, indeed.