What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[GrandizerII]

Because we're not talking about the text, we're talking about the motivation behind the text. If we just go by the text in the gospels, it's horse shit. Hearsay accounts by some random person, as far as we know. I'm referring to this:

reading between the lines to see hints pointing toward a person who more likely existed than not because they don't seem to make sense otherwise.

You can't do that without knowing something about the person writing it, in my opinion.

We (including you) do know things about the person/people who wrote them. We don't know their names, but we do know that they were, for example, Christians in the first century who saw Jesus as the Messiah risen from the dead, baptized by John the Baptist, etc.