history of jesus the man

There are none.

one would have to point to the work of the jewish historian and Roman apologist Josephus who wrote about jewish history during the time of Jesus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus

The Flavius Josephus passage is considered to be an interpolation, and not reliable. Louis Feldman, one of the greatest living Hellenistic scholars and a professor emeritus at Yeshiva University, who has specialized in the works of Flavius Josephus, published a study of contemporary and near-contemporary (contemporary and near-contemporary to our times) scholarship on the Josephus passage, and found that 84% of scholars publishing on the subject considered the passage to be at least in part, if not in toto, an interpolation.

Which is why I cited wiki's entry, which records the criticism of the alleged fictional entries or Roman propaganda of Josephus.

And also why I consider that John Crossan book "The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant," (1991, ISBN 0-06-061629-6) produces a better understanding of the contemporary Jesus than Albert Schweitzer's "The Quest of the Historical Jesus."
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/

amen.

I don't deny that the boy ever existed, but that's not the question here. I'd say it's about a fifty-fifty shot. However, of one thing i'm certain, and that is that the character portrayed in the so-called new testament is just not plausible. Once Paul took over, it just got worse.

Sorry to be intrusive; however, in my opinion, at the point of the followers coalescing into a new Gentile religion did it become something very different. And, today we celebrate Saturnalia with Christmas trees, and the god of fertility, Eastre has nothing to do with His death.

But, it was likely imminent, since something may not have seemed correct anymore to have a pantheon of gods, and Christianity, as the new Gentile religion for the masses, solved that problem. We still have football and wrestling for those that might wax nostalgic for the old pagan culture.