Ok, so I'm no scholar! I'm just a curious person with a tendency to dive down rabbit holes!
Let's just say for starters that the miracle-working, rising-from-the-dead Jesus is pretty much fiction. Part Mediterranean Vegetation God, part Divine Hero ( along the lines of Asclepius, rather than Heracles), part Stoic philosopher and part critic of established religious elites. All put together by Paul of Tarsus with the intention of selling his new cult and getting rich and famous.
That said, there must have been some stories circulating that Paul latched onto as a basis for his idea. Ex nihilio nihil fit.
If we untangle the threads of the Gospel narratives, we find two distinct aspects to the figure of Jesus.
In Matthew we find a young Judaean gentleman who claimed to be, and may indeed have been, a descendant of King David. As a result of certain astrological readings, we are told, he is visited by three Wise Kings (or Magi), who bring him symbolic gifts. He also presents a threat to King Herod, causing his parents to flee, first to Egypt, then later to Nazareth.
In Luke, we find the son of a Galilean carpenter, whose birth is attended by shepherds. He later trains as a Rabbi before becoming an itinerant preacher.
Now, we can disregard the whole 'Holy Byblow' business, I think. That was an invention of Pauls' to appease a Greek audience, who wanted their Heroes to be of divine parentage.
Also, because there is no mention in any other reliable source for the 'Massacre of the Innocents', we can probably disregard that epiode as fiction, based on a prohecy of Jeremiah, the actions of Pharaoh in trying to dispose of the infant Moses, and the general bad character of Herod.
As to the absurd notion of Joseph dragging his heavily-pregnant wife half-way across Palestine to make sure their son was born in Bethlehem, using the excuse of a census taken in 6 CE, after the death of Herod, we can assume that Luke wanted to fit in with the prophecies as well!
It is likely, if not probable, that our Judaean noble was sent to study in Alexandria at the Great Library and attached University.
Our Galilean Rabbi seems to have made his way to the nearby Essene Monastery at Khirbet Qumran and picked up some ideas there.
In any event, it seems that at some point, in Jerusalem, a Galilean preacher named Jesus was making a nuisance of himself by preaching Essene-based reforms and criticising the Temple Priesthood. Meanwhile, a Zealot named Jesus, who had been amking trouble for the Romans, was also arrested.
Not too great a stretch, then, to propose that the preacher was our Galilean Jesus, and the Zealot our Judaean noble?
Now matters get complicated, It's about the time of Passover. At such times, the Procurator, Pontius Pilate, was liable or travle from his HQ at Caeasarea, along with the Cohors Italica -actual Roman troops rather than auxiliaries - to make sure there were no riots or disturbances during this central Jewish festival. Now the High Priest Caiaphas and his Sadducee supporters were modernisers who supported Pilate. But the Pharisee party were anti-Rome and many of them agreed with the Essenes on certain points of doctrine.
The story goes that Jesus and his closest associates ate Passover together, then took a walk in garden nearby, where they were arrested by Temple Guards and Jesus was hauled before the Sanhedrin. Only that makes no sense because the Sanhedrin would have been at their own Passover meals, as would the Temple Guards. Anyway, they didn't sit at night.
But, if Jesus was of an Essene persuasion, and followed their calendar, then his Passover would have been celebrated a day or so before the 'official' one. I offer the following. The Pharisees knew that that Caiaphas, anxious to please Pilate, would tell him about the troublemaking preacher. Pilate would have had him arrested and held until Passover was done, then either whipped, fined or both and let go. The Pharisees, who had their ear closer to the ordinary folk, knew that Jesus had a lot of followers and his imprisonment might cause a riot which Pilate's men would suppress ruthlessly and with much loss of life. They therefore, by means of Judas, one of the associates, sent Jesus a message asking for a meeting. The upshot of the meeting was that Judaea was getting too hot for Jesus, and that they couldn't protect him, so he'd best get out of Dodge and here's some money to help you on your way! At which point Jesus lies low for a few days until the festival is over. He meets privately with various followers to brief them on how to carry on the good work. Then when all the people who came up to Jerusalem for the Passover start to leave, he and his family mingle with the crowds and leave too Maybe back to Nazareth and the life of a provincial Rabbi, or maybe, as some suggest, to Massalia (modern Marseille), a cosmopolitan trading city-state with a thriving Jewish community.
Meanwhile, Judean Jesus, who has been crusading under the name of Barabbas (Yeshu'a Bar Abbas Son of the Father) is tried before Pilate and crucified, to the great sorrow of the Jews who held the Davidian bloodline in high regard.
Two rough contemporaries, with the same name, making a bit of a splash. Wind forward 60 years, and you have Grandpas' tall tales, with embellishment and additions, and somewhere along the line, the two men become conflated into a single figure of legend. Because nobody there at the time thought that any of it was important enough to write down. Paul grabs the name as the central figure of his new cult, and some of the people involved in it start to collect the old tales and write them down as connected narratives, working independently and thus coming up with variations. Centuries after that, a bunch pf politicians and fanatacis sift throuhg all the documentation and decide, pretty arbitrarily at times, what will constitute the 'official' Holy Book.
I am, above all, a teller of tales, but I also have a talent for analysis and deconstruction. So I deconstruct the stories I learned and read as a child, set them against a backgound of the times and consider other relevant material, then restructure it all as a narrative which makes some sense to me. I make no claim to truth or revelation. It's just interesting to me, personally. No doubt amusing to you, but I don't mind that!
