What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Mudhammam]

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?

To some extent, sure. I see the Johannine material as refuting Gnosticism by affirming the ethereal, deified Christ to be the flesh and blood Galilean Jesus of the Synoptics, whereas those Gospels drop hints at his divinity but seem content to imagine Jesus as a human prophet who becomes elevated to a position somewhere between God and the angels, at his baptism in Mark, and perhaps at his birth or resurrection in the others.

The difficulty is that even the pre-Gospel letters, at their core of the Christ idea, contain the notion of a Jewish man who died and in some sense was bodily resurrected, even if their mentions are oddly scarce and vague. But without a doubt the foundation of Paul's Christianity is the much older Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead, a process which Paul interprets Jesus as having begun. Why did he think that? What were other contemporary Jewish beliefs about that apocalyptic event? We know the Pharisees anticipated it while the Sadducees did not.

Could Jesus have lived much earlier than the typically ascribed period, already mythologized by the time the epistles were written and then revised by the Gospels to fit into a more recent and relevant setting?

Could Jesus have simply died at some arbitrary point in the past and then been conceived many decades later as a resurrected Messiah due to a newly discovered revelation, whether through "eyes being opened" to the scriptures or hallucinatory visions and dreams? Was "speaking in tongues" a sort of Bacchic frenzy in which people thought they could communicate to, for, and as Jesus, even "seeing" and "hearing" him in a way they believed ensured their specialized resurrection of the dead doctrine? What would Paul have thought of the Gospels? Would he have approved or been aghast?

How did Christianity begin and why does it make the claims it does is a puzzle and anyone who thinks any solution is going to be easy or make perfect sense to our modern intuitions hasn't considered all of the evidence. As Bart Ehrman wrote, and I can understand why, "The real problem with Jesus is not that he is a myth invented by early Christians—that is, that he never appeared as a real figure on the stage of history. The problem with Jesus is just the opposite. As Albert Schweitzer realized long ago, the problem with the historical Jesus is that he was far too historical."