What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Anomalocaris]

I use to think he wasn't a bad guy, but then I saw 'the passion'.. (Which illustrates a biblical truth I did not fully grasp.) after finding Jesus innocent, he had him scourged.

Congrats for basing historical opinions on such reliable sources.

Pilate, the real Pilate, was a corrupt governor, a politician. And that's as much knowledge as we get from real historical sources. There's no record of any Jesus trial or punishment. And since there's no record, we don't know if and how that person was punished, since even his existence is up for debate.

Plus the fact Christian agenda has changed over the years. Once upon a time the Christianity saw itself inheriting the corpes of ordered world that it was rotting from within, and saw it expedient to ease its burrowing by suck up to the Romans and bash the Jews so as to better access the circle of power. So pilatus was good if irresolute character and the Jews the villisns.

Now orderly human progress has nonetheless left Christianity in the dust and Christianity has gone form being the masters of the institutions of progress to being its waste discarded out the back end, all of a sudden pilatus, a symbol of the ordered human institution of progress for that era that more or less works, is the villain and a bunch of religiously besotted and stagnant Jews gets favorable mention.