What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

"What does "be agnostic about them" mean here? Because if it means "don't try to assess anything based on them at all" then we would have to "be agnostic" about most ancient sources. And the whole enterprise of ancient historical study would be totally untenable. Does that strike you as reasonable?"

No, however, historians need to be very careful and critical of their sources. Do you know how much blatantly political and moral propaganda is in many ancient sources? Just look at all nonsense claims people make about Obama today, good or bad! All we can say honestly say half the time is this is what someone at the time claimed. We shouldn't have a strong commitment to them being right. We shouldn't be too surprised if we found evidence against them.

Yes, historians do have to have this level of care. So what they do is stay alert for any sign that they are dealing with a political or ideologically biased source and handle it with care if they do. Take Tacitus’ account of Germanicus’ campaigns over the Rhine. There he presents Germanicus as the golden-haired wonder boy who was doing just fine until evil old uncle Tiberius made him withdraw, leaving Arminius and the rebel Cherusci not fully subjugated. Except we know that Tacitus was no fan of Tiberius and there is evidence even in his account that things didn’t quite as smoothly for Germanicus in that campaign as Tacitus makes out. So we seem to be dealing with a biased source here and need to look sceptically at what Tacitus says and what he leaves unsaid. Critical scholars of the New Testament texts do the same thing – these are not unbiased documentary sources, far from it.

I'm saying that the figure we find in the NT is most likely based on an apocalyptic preacher called Yeshua from Nazareth in Galilee who was baptised by John, crucified in Jerusalem by Pilate and whose followers formed a Jewish sect headed by his brother James. The later stories arose out of traditions from this sect as they reconciled his sudden death with their belief that he was Yahweh's anointed one.

I don't think that is "in some unspecified way". I think that's pretty specific.

For someone who claims he's not making very precise claims, you sure act like it.

Where did I say I don’t make “precise claims”? I say I don’t make claims about certainty, only assessments of likelihood. I’m quite clear about which elements I feel we can do that about and leave the rest alone.

Most likely compared to what? That the story was made up whole cloth?

Yes. Amongst other things. Or most likely compared to him being originally a purely mythic, celestial being who was crucified in the sub-lunar heavenly realm and worshipped by a form of proto-Christianity that then vanished without trace. Or most likely compared to a purely allegorical Messiah who somehow got historicised into a non-existent historical one who was depicted as being crucified etc despite the fact this wasn’t part of the Messianic expectations of the time. Or most likely compared to whatever it is that the woman who calls herself “Acharya S” gets out of her incoherent tangle of word similarities, New Age non sequiturs and hoary theosophist fantasies.

Not an impressive claim. It's like the claim "Socrates was kind of like what Plato said he was like," it is a weak claim no one denied.

Given the nature of our evidence, is about the only claim that can reasonably be made. Though I’m not sure what you mean by “weak” here. “Weak” because I don’t make it with any great assertions of certainty or proof? “Weak” because I don’t go beyond a few key details of what probably happened? What would be a more “impressive” claim that could be made with the kind of evidence we could expect about an early first century Jewish preacher, prophet or Messianic claimant? I couldn’t make any more “impressive” claims about Theudas or Athronges or the Egyptian. In fact, I could say far, far less about any of them. We can only deal with the evidence left to us and the evidence for all of these guys is thin at best.

That doesn’t mean it’s non-existent or that we can’t draw conclusions about what is likely to be historical from it.