What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Mudhammam]

The historicity of Jesus or anyone else may be a trivial matter to the non-historian, but for someone whose interest lies in dissecting ancient texts to illuminate past events, in this case the birth of Christianity and arguably the most influential figure in human history (which I should think makes it a topic of some interest to both the non-historian and the non-religious as simply a matter of understanding the development of Western culture), it's a frustrating puzzle that is persistently relevant.

While I've only read two of Ehrman's books, I don't see any inconsistency in his refutation of the Gospels as understood by the average evangelical, on the one hand, and the mythicist on the other. After all, even the consensus among secular historians who have devoted much of their lives to studying the ancient past seems to be that after cutting through the mythological bullshit, a strong case for a historical core to the Jesus story remains, these facts in particular:

Born a Jew in Galilee.
Baptized by John the Baptist.
Crucified under Pilate.

The idea that within a few decades, a group of people thought this man had been the Messiah and rose from the dead, while not extraordinarily strange in consideration of the other things ancient people believed, is still strange, and difficult to account for given the scarcity of reliable details.