What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Mudhammam]

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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.

I'm not saying that the gospels are exactly like works like those of Herodotus and Thucydides. We have a clear difference in genre to begin with. What I'm noting is that the idea that Herodotus and Thucydides are straight history with some (to us) "supernatural elements" in them while the gospels are something totally different is a very modern idea. The ancient world view was utterly permeated by unquestioning belief in what we term "the supernatural" that it is hard for us to grasp. The whole distinction between the "natural" and the "supernatural" is a very modern idea that the ancients would find alien to the point of being incomprehensible.

So Herodotus and Thucydides are not straight history with a bit of "supernatural" while the gospels are something else and much more "supernatural". All these works are by people for whom what we call "supernatural" phenomenon were part of their everyday world view.

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.

Is the message that he was "very much not human"? There is zero in the synoptics that make any claim that he was anything other than a man given special status by God and having some miraculous powers as a result. Other than that, its mainly the story of a preacher who did some faith healing. It's only later, in gJohn, that it becomes the story of a semi-divine being. As I say above, I'm not saying that the gospels are exactly like Herodotus and Thucydides' works. But this atrificial distinction between "this is history and can be taken seriously" and "this has magic in it and so can't be accepted as having any history in it at all" is classifying things in ways that Herodotus and Thucydides would find weird.

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?

Lots of things are possible I suppose. I just can't see anything in the evidence that makes this scenario a more parsimonious one than the much simpler idea that they said they were talking about a recently deceased preacher because ... they were.

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?

I can't see the problem with those beliefs arising out of reactions to the sudden death of a preacher who these people thought was the Messiah. There is nothing in the evidence compelling me to think that they made this guy up.

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For the most part I find your hypotheses about Jesus entirely reasonable, yet there are still a few things that seem difficult for me to swallow. I know you've repeatedly stated that this is not a field of research for anyone who is seeking high degrees of certainty, but I still can't seem to find the "historicist" framework for the Gospels to amount to much more than unjustifiable assertions about what one ought to grant as true or reliable amidst an account that appears anything but concerned with historical veracity. We should, I suspect anyhow, first and foremost understand Christian literature as expression of certain mysteries and the context they're placed in as little more than the vehicle by which the characters and stories come alive, as truth, for a largely uneducated group of vulgar and superstitious adherents. There almost seems to be a Herodotean conception of history involved, which is to say the Gospel writers consider of less importance what events actually occurred but rather how they came to be remembered in the collective minds of their people, and perhaps more critically, how they came to effect the current situation---with the unfortunate mixture that they express none of Herodotus' scrupulousness in their investigations about what people outside of their specific religious sect actually believed. Why should we place an arbitrary value on which elements in the story are driven purely by theological explanation of the mystery in concrete terms as opposed to those that contain a kernel of historical truth beneath the layers of religious indoctrination? I still don't think I've heard a convincing explanation as to why many different members of a Messianic cult, with full knowledge of their leader's humiliating death, would suddenly proclaim that he had been resurrected in the flesh and walked among them post-Easter. This makes much more sense to me, if their visions followed the belief---the belief they acquired the same way other myths develop and come to be accepted over time---rather than the belief following their visions.

On a related note, what's your view of the apologetic method known as the "minimal facts approach"? How do you avoid giving them just enough rope to hang yourself with?