Bart Ehrman - Was Jesus Violent or Peaceful? Is it clear who the Historical Jesus was?

Extract from Bart Ehrman's book - 'Jesus:Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium'

" I should stress, though, that not every modern scholar has shared this view of Jesus. Quite the contrary, in recent years, in particular, it has come under serious attack. Books about Jesus have proliferated at an alarming rate, with competent scholars (not to mention incompetent ones) setting forth their own understandings of who Jesus must have been. Many of these have tried to deny that Jesus was essentially an apocalypticist—that is, one who thought that the apocalyptic climax of history was soon to appear. And so, just within the past thirty years, we have seen books (many of which you can still find at your local bookstore) arguing, instead, that Jesus was a violent revolutionary who urged his followers to take up the sword against their oppressive Roman overlords; or that he was a kind of proto-Marxist social reformer who urged his followers to adopt a new economic structure of complete equality and community of  goods; or that he was an ancient precursor of the feminist movement, principally concerned with gender issues and the oppression of women; or that he was a magician—not the sleight-of-hand type but the kind that could actually perform stupendous feats of magic; or, most recently, that he was an ancient "Cynic" philosopher who was chiefly concerned with teaching his followers to remove themselves from the concerns and trappings of this life, to give away everything they owned, to beg for a living, and to compel everyone else to do likewise.1 And these are only some of the more serious proposals!

Why is it that scholars who have devoted their entire lives to studying the historical Jesus have come up with such radically different answers? Isn't knowing about Jesus a straightforward matter of reading the New Testament Gospels and seeing what they say? With four such high-quality sources as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, why should
there be any serious disagreements at all? Can't we take these ancient witnesses at face value, and thereby discount all of these scholarly constructs, not to mention the more far-fetched ones (which sometimes sell much better!) ? "

(Pages 20-21- Jesus - Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium)