I don't know. (And not being a Christian, the question isn't all that important to me.) What we have are some very early interpretations of his life, seemingly written by people who never met him. We can write with some assurance about what one faction (the Pauline) of very early Christians thought about Jesus. Pushing beyond that point to the man himself, is very hard. The many attempts to reconstruct the so-called "historical Jesus" have never been able to reach agreement.
But I can speculate about the broad outlines. I suspect that the historical Jesus was far more... Hebrew... than later portrayed in Christianity. Jesus was almost certainly a man of his times. And as an ancient Hebrew, I expect that he would have been totally aghast at any suggestion that he was God in human flesh, God's avatar or whatever later Christian theology says he is. Equating any man with God would have sounded like the worst sort of blasphemy to his ears. If Jesus returned today, he would almost certainly reject the Christianity that's arisen in his name.
I don't take most of the material in the gospels as narration of literal historical fact. Instead, the gospels seem to me to be written so as to portray Jesus as wandering around fulfilling what Jews of the time took to be prophecies of the messiah. So particular events aren't necessarily included because they really happened that way, but because each event in the story fulfills a prophecy.
For example, Jesus was undoubtedly born, because everyone is born. But not necessarily in Bethlehem, since that town (kind of a Jerusalem suburb) was the site of Davidic prophecies of the coming messiah. It might be true that Jesus was from Galilee because so much of the story takes place there. The story of the trip by Mary and Joseph south to Bethelehem prior to Jesus' birth was probably just intended to portray that particular Bethlehem prophecy being fulfilled.
"The character of Jesus is something unique to the NT.
I think that the model for Jesus is the OT prophets. He does differ quite a bit from those figures, but he's several hundred event-filled years later.
We have a holy guy who is not married, who never talks to God, seems to have no home, is friends with strangers, goes around preaching with a group of guys, and seems to have no direction.
Except to fulfill the prophecies and head to Jerusalem, where he met his end.
God never tells him to go anywhere or do anything. He may be the first hippie doing his own thing. As opposed to all the characters of the OT who seem to have a goal or a direction."
As portrayed, Jesus seems to me to have a direction. He was always preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God and implicitly, the realization of the messianic prophecies that people associated with that. Then finally, he set off to Jerusalem to set it all in motion.
I'm inclined to think that his crucifixion really happened. Mainly because it's so contradictory to the thrust of the rest of the story that the early Christians wouldn't have included it if they didn't have to. God's instrument on Earth, the long-expected messiah, being executed. That execution does suggest that the authorities did take him seriously, which suggests that lots of people were hailing him as the messiah, who would set things right and overthrow all the established powers, both Roman and Jewish.
The subsequent history of Christianity revolves around rationalizing the death of the messiah, without having to deny that he had been the messiah, as the bulk of the Jews concluded. Jesus had risen from the grave! He had descended to Hell and vanquished Satan! Jesus' death was all part of a divine plan, an atoning sacrifice, like the lamb on the temple altar. And on and on, we all know the story from there.
