What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[DeistPaladin]

I'm still uncertain if the claims of Paul, Mark's Gospel, and other early epistles such as Hebrews, aren't sufficient for establishing that the earliest record of Christian belief contains a historical figure named Jesus, regardless if he lived 10 years or 100 years earlier, or if he in fact represents a conglomeration of actual Jewish teachers who took themselves as Yahweh incarnate when speaking their brand of divine wisdom, or if he is a celestial being or idea composed of older myths and philosophies and accidently misunderstood by first century Christian readers as a historical man, either by intention of the authors or by vulgar misinterpretation of an illiterate audience.

Sure. For that matter, there could have been a real Hercules, just not the super-strength son of Zeus. The mythmakers might have done a similar job at cribbing from reality and embellishing it beyond recognition.

I say that seriously. We do know there was a "Davy Crockett". I find it unlikely that he, as the song goes, "killed him a bear when he was only 3." There was a George Washington. The man was barely in the grave before the mythmakers were busy concocting stories about a cherry tree and him throwing a silver dollar across a body of water. Elvis existed and how long did it take after his passing before adoring fans began to see him everywhere, hatching conspiracy theories that he faked his own death?

And those are just secular figures. Religious figures, prone to deification among superstitious followers, will be even more subject to mythmaking. Perhaps in another world, Jim Jones or David Koresh are said to have "died for our sins"? Would they have died for a lie? Could such people have been crazy cult leaders if they managed to attract such a following? Oh, the possibilities, given the versatile application of the Trilemma argument.

As a Jesus Mooter, I say, "OK, it could have been so. And? What, if anything, can we know about The True Story?" If the answer is "nothing" or only vague concepts like "some sort of religious teacher or something" then there's really not much point in such musings.

And what similarity, if any, would The True Story have to the Gospel account, which is so drenched in the supernatural that most of the anecdotes make no sense with the miracles removed. Let's say there really was a Clark Kent. No costume, no powers, no Krypton; just a foundling adopted by childless farmers who later moved to a big city to be a muckraking reporter for a newspaper, fighting corruption (crime) in his capacity as a reporter. What similarity would the real life story of this ordinary Clark Kent bear to the classic DC narrative? You'd be writing a different story about a different person.