I've been reading Hyam Maccoby-- I just finished Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance and I'm currently reading The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. They are extremely interesting. Maccoby's premise is basically that Jesus was a member of the Pharisee movement whose supposed anti-Pharisee views were the work of the authors/editors of the Synoptic Gospels and later, Paul. He asserts that Jesus saw his role as a political Messiah (not as a spiritual Messiah and divine sacrifice for sin) and that Jesus believed that the Jews would be liberated from Roman rule by miraculous intervention, and that he would be a literal king after the Davidic model. Such as he was a political rebel, the Romans captured and executed him.

Maccoby insists that the reworking of the New Testament is an endeavor to shift blame to the Jews for Jesus' death, thus disculpating the Romans (which, given the time in which the gospels were written/edited, would have made sense). The way to do this was to recast Jesus as a religious rebel (whose enemies were the Jews), rather than as a political rebel (enemy to the Romans).

Maccoby makes at least one assumption that I don't agree with. He believes (at very least for the sake of argument, but he does so implicitly) that Jesus was an actual historical figure. I tend to doubt this, since there is really no evidence that there was a historical Jesus. What's more likely is that a single Messianic character was cast from several would-be Messiahs during that period.

What's more, Maccoby seems to accept that figures such as Abraham, Isaac, Moses, etc., were also historical figures. In fact, I speculate that his acceptance of these people as historical leads him to make similar assumptions about Jesus.

It's a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it. It is out of print, but here's the link to it at Amazon.com.