What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Mudhammam]

We could say this about most ancient sources. The idea that there are any ancient sources which would fit the description of "secular or humanistic documents" is pretty problematic. Suetonius? Only if you consider a source that says Augustus was conceived when Atia was visited by Apollo in the form of a serpent. Tacitus? Even he has statues groaning as portents of defeats and Vespasian healing the blind and the lame.

As I keep saying, if we try holding these texts to standards that simply don't apply to ancient texts, we are setting the parameters in a way that simply makes no sense. Yes, it would be nice if we had some "secular or humanistic documents". But in ancient history, we usually never do. So we have to make do with the sources we do have and just treat them with the right kind of care, caution and scepticism.

Perhaps. Take someone like Herodotus. His reconstruction of the Persian War on Greece is littered with obvious falsehoods, which we can check with other sources or archaeology, contains nothing short of miraculous and mythical tales, some of which Herodotus disavows for lack of evidence and some of which he believes. His patriotism clearly influences his story-telling. Yet, despite all of this, disregarding his speeches as paraphrases of what people remembered, accurately or not, it's still clear that Herodotus is aiming to write a historical account, even if his idea of what constitutes history is quite different than what we might consider good criteria today. He goes through pains to stress his research and evidence-gathering.

Thucydides is an even better example, the "father of scientific history," who, once again, despite many shortcomings and corruptions, still reads as though his agenda is to give an accurate account of the facts as best as possible.

Or take a character like Socrates, whose life we know very little about, based primarily on the writings of Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon, all of whose purposes differ wildly and don't always show intention of capturing the character of Socrates as they really believed he was---a contemporary of theirs, loved by some, hated by others---and though we can acknowledge many uncertainties due to the writers' biases, a consistent character of Socrates clearly emerges, a man much too like other men, despite his uniqueness, to be mistaken as a purely fictional character.

I'm not saying the man who Jesus came to represent could not have existed, and in fact, probably did; but the attempts to humanize Jesus seem secondary to the message, which is that Jesus was very much not human, and given the lengths they go to make this point I find it difficult to say their credibility is on par with someone like the Greeks I've mentioned---even when the work, such as that of Herodotus or Plato, is far from being strictly driven by a reverence for accuracy.

Could there have been a theological motive to humanize the man who lived and---perhaps over much greater lengths of time than represented by the Gospels---came to represent the Christ, and so they created the man Jesus to do so, placing characters in the narrative that would have been relevant to what Christians were dealing with then? Isn't that at least a possibility to consider, as a framework by which we can do away with psychoanalyzing hallucinations and visions that apparently came to 500 people at one time, whom they believed was a bodily resurrected man that they had watched die only years earlier, and to two people as diametrically opposed as Peter and Paul, who then came to believe in pretty much the same bizarre faith?