What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[Pizza]

I'm using both. As I keep pointing out, the mere fact that elements in the story may not be historical is not good enough reason to reject them.

Fair enough, but it's good reason to be agnostic about them.

And the references in Josephus and Tacitus to Pilate and in Josephus to James, the Baptist and Caiaphas all make the chronological setting pretty likely. It also fits with some of what Paul says about the timing of his conversion.

What is the oldest copy we have of Pauline writings and does it come after the oldest copies of these other sources? Don't have dog in this fight, I'm just interested now.

So we have multiple vectors of evidence, both Biblical and extra-Biblical, all supporting the idea that this stuff happened sometime in the late 20s or early to mid-30s AD.

So something happened in between a broad point of time, okay. I can't disagree with that.