What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

Uh, yeah, I guess on that logic it must be a total waste of time to talk to some amateur historian on a forum.

Not at all. You just have to stick to what the evidence and the critical scholarship indicates and not bungled, erroneous crap from your brother. If your brother told you the evidence indicated that the gospels were all working off one single narrative, your brother was wrong. You should pay attention to people who know better than your brother. Clear?

Which is why there is virtually no agreement among scholars as to who Jesus was and how the early church started? Sounds like a great method!

There's virtually no absolute agreement on most things in the humanities. Sorry, but if you want absolute agreement then mathematics and physics are down the hall and to your right. Here in history we work from the evidence we have and come to the argument to the best explanation; the one that explains the most evidence and requires the least suppositons. For about a century now pretty much every scholar on the planet has concluded that, using these parameters, it's most likely there was a historical Jesus. You think they're all wrong? Let's see you explain why.

I don't have the essay in my possession at the moment but I know it has been suggested that only in one instance does Mark cite Jesus as having come from a village called Nazareth, the other cases having been mistranslated to read that way. If that's the case, then confusion over what Nazarene was meant to imply may have been the cause for the author or a copier to interpret it as entailing a village called Nazareth.

Utter gibberish. gMark makes it perfectly clear that Jesus comes from Nazareth and says so in the very first thing he says about him. Want the Greek? - ἦλθεν Ἰησοῦς ἀπὸ Ναζαρὲτ τῆς Γαλιλαίας = "then came Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee". Mark 1:9. Clear enough for you?

Your tone is incredibly standoff-ish and annoying.

Then let's just say that after 30 years of studying this stuff in depth, reading the sources in the orignal language and taking all the critical scholarship into account, some dude responding to me with some half remembered crap from his brother and something he doesn't quite remember that he didn't quite get around to saving but which sort of kind of said something or other doesn't exactly impress me.

Clear?

If you're going to respond again I advise you make sure you are very clear on what you're saying and why. Or just don't respond.