I can’t remember if I’ve asked you this before, Sam McKenzie Jr., so forgive me if I’m ploughing tilled earth all over again. Have you by any chance read Bart Ehrman?

He’s a highly respected scholar of the historical Jesus. A quick Google search will pull up a score or more of his eminently readable popular works. He also writes for academia, though not in such a non-specialist-friendly way.

If you’re interested in what historians are able to decipher with respect to Jesus’s career as a apocryphal messianic preacher, Ehrman has a lot of light to shed on the subject.

Jim