What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Crossless2.0]

I feel the same way. The earliest Christian works seem to paint a celestial Christ who in recent history appeared as the Logos incarnate and triumphed over bodily death, though with only a few scattered references to an earthly existence and a great deal of emphasis on past and future apocalyptic events in the heavenly realms. Then comes the biographical narrative adapting a list of earlier composed wisdom sayings and oral teachings that some have suggested were only branded by Christians in Jesus' name. Then comes Matthew and Luke-Acts, written probably 15-25 years later, putting Jesus' life story in the contexts of Judaism and Rome, respectively, with many more mythological additions. Near the end of the century we have the Johannine community responsible for John's Gospel, his namesake's epistles, and Revelation, all clearly influenced by Gnosticism, though expanding on the concepts that both the earlier epistles and biographies elucidated separately.

If we start with a Celestial Christ that only later becomes grounded in a historical context by way of an oral tradition and, later still, the Synoptic Gospels, would you say that 'John's' Jesus -- pre-existing Logos and earthly ministry -- represents a sort of compromise meant perhaps to resolve the tensions between those earlier traditions? Or do you think the Johannine view is another strand entirely in this tangled braid?