Gopnik writes a solid summary of the current scholarly consensus (such that there is one) concerning the gospels and the historical Jesus. It’s well worth a read. It’s also quite dense so it bears close attention.The article is here.
I find his assessment of Bart Ehrman especially amusing:
The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over—but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading.
But perhaps the most important point Gopnik makes is this:
If one thing seems clear from all the scholarship, though, it’s that Paul’s divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story can’t be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshipped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism.
Preaching Grace on the Square 
In response to the second above the pithy saying of J A T Robinson can be given that no tradition can exist without a generating event. The idea of Paul’s ‘divine Christ’ assumes that Paul created this tradition rather than Paul writing in response to an already established apostolic experience of Christ’s death and resurrection (1Cor 15.3-7; Phil 2.5-11) and then of his own experience (1Cor 15.8). Gopnik’s effort to somehow drive a wedge between Paul and the gospels does not hold water. The gospel accounts also accord high esteem to Christ as the Son of God, the unique Son of God and more indirectly God (Jn 1.1). Robinson argued towards the end of his life–strangely we hear little of his criticisms of NT scholarship–that all the gospel accounts were more than likely written before the fall of Jerusalem and that John’s account may have been the first written! Gopnik appears only to know about the Jesus Seminar scholars and chooses (?) to ignore other scholarly opinion.