What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Mudhammam]

Then what your brother suggested doesn't fit the evidence. It indicates several separate and distinct lines of source, not just one. I tend to find careful reading of peer reviewed scholarship works better than listening to some dude who happens to be your brother.

Uh, yeah, I guess on that logic it must be a total waste of time to talk to some amateur historian on a forum.

Mere "speculations" are things that are simply possible, but which have no evidential support. Critical scholars work from things which are possible and which have the most evidential support and require the least suppositions. Occam's Razor. See the difference?

Which is why there is virtually no agreement among scholars as to who Jesus was and how the early church started? Sounds like a great method!

What?

Forget it.

That's pretty much what every critical scholar on the planet thinks happened. So ... what?

Your tone is incredibly standoff-ish and annoying.

Ummm ... what? You need to come up with a reason we should think gMark's tradition that Jesus came from a village called Nazareth was wrong in the first place. Start there and see how far you get before Occam's Razor cuts your throat.

Over to you.

I don't have the essay in my possession at the moment but I know it has been suggested that only in one instance does Mark cite Jesus as having come from a village called Nazareth, the other cases having been mistranslated to read that way. If that's the case, then confusion over what Nazarene was meant to imply may have been the cause for the author or a copier to interpret it as entailing a village called Nazareth.