Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium Book

I can forgive biblical scholars for writing impenetrable prose. They have to know about 8000 languages. They study the most studied book of all time, and the temptation to split hairs must be overwhelming. On the other hand, biblical scholars write about *the bible*, so they've got an enormous in-built audience that other humanities people can only dream of. So maybe they should actually take advantage of that?
Well, Ehrman does. Kudos to him; he writes clearly and says exactly what he thinks. What he thinks, along with a whole bunch of other people whom he's happy to praise, is that Jesus was a Jewish prophet who thought the end of the world was really, really nigh; that his ethical preaching and his actions were all geared towards this thought, and that most Christian theology, and much of the new testament, has very little to do with the man Jesus who wandered around a couple thousand years ago. It seems pretty plausible, and he's very clear that this is a history book, and not a theology book.
Two problems: first, this is the sort of thing that you might read and then say to yourself, well, you know what? Hell with the Christian tradition then. A more productive angle for a conclusion or something might have been to suggest that since the 'identity' or 'biography' of Jesus never had squat to do with Christianity, people could more productively spend their time thinking about living good lives (and, if you're Christian, therefore deserving God's forgiveness), rather than being New Atheists or Creationists and thinking all the time about other peoples' genitals.

Also, it gets really repetitive over the last few chapters. A bit too much padding over all.