What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Minimalist]

As a side note, as far as I know, no archaeological finds locate Nazareth as an inhabited village until many years until after Jesus is said to have lived. It may not prove that Nazareth didn't exist (even if no writer mentions it until the Gospels---not even Josephus, who mentions a number of insignificant towns in the vicinity) but mythicists have made something of it nonetheless.

A reasonably reputable xtian scholar, Steven Pfann, did some excavation under the aegis of the IAA in the late 90's and identified a single, first-century, family farm. That actually makes sense. It was a short walk to the major town of Sepphoris which meant that the farmers would have had a local market for their produce.

In any case it doesn't matter. The fairy tale known as 'luke' requires that it be a large enough town to have a "synagogue" and a population which had to be reminded who he was. This was not some shitty little hamlet of 10 houses with a population that was all inter-related. This fairy tale reflects a much later reality.

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I gave you the textual evidence that the Q material exists. Perhaps you could pause for a moment and explain why it is there if it isn’t evidence of some kind of lost source, sources and/or oral traditions.

Tim, I'm sure you find this far more compelling than I.

We have two obvious traditions. One, and for the sake of convention let's call it "pauline" which has a supernatural hero in the sky just like every other mystery cult god popular at the time. We do not have the original documents. We do not even have whatever it was that Marcion put out in his canon c 140. What we have is what emerged from the dispute. The notion that the proto-orthodox would have taken anything from Marcion in toto is absurd. Just as they fixed up the gluke to suit their needs we must assume that "paul" was equally massaged. The bad news is that it would take an archaeological find on the order of the Dead Sea Scrolls or at least Nag Hamadi to get the originals and it is just not likely to happen or at least no one should plan on it happening.

So on the one hand, here is "paul" with his space-cadet jesus and on the other is gmark with his live-in-the-flesh jesus walking around Palestine. Richard Carrier refers to this as "euhemerization." The attempted meshing of the two is hardly seamless.

Now, were there other groups wandering around with equally screwy beliefs? Doubtless. Pliny the Younger reports interrogating Xtians in Bythinia-Pontus in the early second century and there is nothing reported which bears any resemblance to what you would have us believe was standard xtian doctrine at the time. In fact, Pliny probably wrote Chrestians not Christians and was helped out by a well-meaning scribe who thought he correcting the spelling. But we can avoid that for the moment. Could those groups have influenced later xtian groups? Maybe. What is missing is actual evidence. As with my earlier example of the tachyon or even the sexier concept of Dark Matter one can theorize anything but don't sit there and insist because some bible-thumper thought it up that it means anything at all in the real world. I'm not the only one who points out that Q exists in the wind. The primary argument against it is that something so important should have been preserved.... or at least mentioned.

Xtianity emerges into the cold light of day in the mid 2d century. Far too much of anything before that is wishful-thinking.