What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

Or perhaps the Christians were trying to do to the followers of JtB what later Muslims would do to Jesus: assimilate and subjugate. The religious icon of one becomes a "forerunner" of the other.

That certainly seems to have happened. John’s following lasted after his death – we have the story in Acts of Jesus’ apostles meeting some guys in Greece who were giving people John’s baptism and (according to the story) were convinced to baptise in Jesus’ name as well. Interestingly, nowhere in the synoptics are Jesus or his disciples depicted baptising anyone and the only references to Jesus’ followers being baptised or baptising are in sections of gMatt and gMark that are acknowledged as later additions to the text. It’s not until gJohn that we find baptism depicted as a practice of Jesus and his followers. So it seems the absorption of the John the Baptist sect brought this practice into the Jesus sect later in the first century.

Just because JtB does in the Gospels what he is known for doesn't mean we assume there must be a historical core, any more that we assume that Star Wars was real because the retcon of Luke being Laia's brother created some awkward incestuous kisses in retrospect. Sometimes "embarrassing errors" are just errors in either story telling or urban legend development.

Sometimes, but I don’t think that works here. The Luke/Leia relationship forms a coherent part of the larger story. But the Baptism (or, in gJohn, non-baptism) scene doesn’t actually fit in the story at all. This is why all of the gospel writers after gMark have to come up with different ways of dealing with it to make it fit what they are trying to say about Jesus. Obviously the meeting of Jesus and John was in the tradition and deemed important enough to tell about, but it didn’t fit the later Christology. So they have to embroider around it, add an excuse to it or leave the most awkward element in it out. This makes the question of why it was in the tradition at all if it doesn’t fit the story one that can’t be ignored. That it was historical is the most parsimonious answer I can think of.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this argument doesn't give me pause to consider that maybe there is a real story buried somewhere under all this mythology. Indeed, that and various other awkward glitches in the story are probably the most convincing arguments I've heard yet for historicity. However, there's a difference between "giving me pause to consider" and proving a case.

As I find myself saying repeatedly in these discussions, people who want cases to be “proved” should avoid this subject altogether. As usual, this question comes down to trying to make an assessment of likelihood. It is likely that this odd element that doesn’t really fit the story is in there because it happened historically. The alternative – saying “well, it’s in there because … ummm … it just is” doesn’t have much force.

Now speaking of the true story buried somewhere under all this folklore and mythology, I'd like to ask you a question I've asked every other historist I've run into:

What, if anything, can we actually know about The Historical Jesus and what is that knowledge based on?

I've yet to hear an answer any more specific than "some religious leader who was crucified by the Romans".

I can give you a bit more than that:
(i) Born in Nazareth and grew up there
(ii) Had a brother called James
(iii) Was an apocalyptic preacher like John the Baptist
(iv) Was baptised by John and probably inspired by him
(v) Preached that the coming apocalyptic cleansing of the world was going to happen in his lifetime or soon after
(vi) Crucified in Jerusalem by Pilate sometime between c. 30 and 37 AD
(vii) Was claimed to be the Messiah, though whether he made this claim himself is unclear.