What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

There is nothing in the evidence compelling me to think that they made this guy up.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has suggested that anyone made this guy up.

You should have a chat to Minimalist then. Though I'll admit it is pretty hard to work out exactly what his incoherent thesis is through all the shouting.

Take away the miracles from the synoptics' accounts and you're left with the story of an apocalyptic preacher who did some exorcisms.

Take away Zeus and the other Greek gods from the Iliad and you have a war between two states. You could simply remove the supernatural from the Iliad and claim we have a historical account of the war that destroyed Troy.

And a lot of people believe that's actually what we do have in the Illiad. The difference being that the story we find once we take away those elements from Homer is so remote from any possible historical events that, as historians, we can't do anything much with the remainder except say it may preserve some memory of a Bronze Age war. The Jesus stories, on the other hand, are written down between 40 and 90 years and seem to depend on material written down as early as the 50s or even 40s AD. By ancient standards, that's very close to the events. That's why this approach has more validity here.

Does that mean we regard the Iliad as a "historical document" that tells us anything reliable about the Trojan War?

See above - apples vs oranges.

The Gospels are, at best, religious propaganda and, at least, mythology, hardly anything that any rational society should put any stock in.

Many of our ancient sources are things that no "rational society should put any stock in". But historians have to work with the material they have, not the material they'd like but don't have. The fact remains, as I have to keep reminding people when they want to sweep the gospels aside completely, that these texts tell us something very useful and highly pertinent: what their writers believed about Jesus. By comparing these differing views and trying to use textual analysis to peel back the layers of where they got their ideas from we can get closer to the historical Jesus. To try to dismiss the gospels altogether as potential sources to be handled (like all ancient sources) with due care is not just wrong-headed, it's pigheaded.

But I do get a smile every time I hear an apologist or a historist holding up the Bible and saying "historical documents". It reminds me of that Tim Allen movie where an alien race sees and Earth TV show and thinks the same thing.

As much as I like that movie, that's a worse analogy than your Illiad one.

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I was thinking about the TF:
Assume Josephus actually described Jesus as: "a wise man . . . For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was the teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly."
Wouldn't this be evidence against the theory that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet or a revolutionary? This description would seem to support the theory that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, Jewish holy man, or Cynic philosopher IMO.

It would be evidence against him being a revolutionary, since Josephus took a dim view of them as opposed to preachers like Onaias or John the Baptist. But why would it argue against him being an apocalyptic preacher? There's strong evidence that John was an apocalyptic preacher as well, and Josephus gives a fairly neutral account of him.

Josephus is less neutral about people who seem to be apocalyptic preachers - like Theudas or the Egyptian Prophet - who stir up large crowds and mobilise them in a threatening manner. He doesn't depict John that way, though he says Antipas feared he may do this and says that's why he was executed. So Josephus doesn't seem to have a problem with end times preachers, though he is less impressed with ones who lead thousands of armed followers on Jerusalem.