There'd have been many, many more, before him and after. Faith healers, I mean... Scammers. If he existed, it's all the dude would have actually been. He's just the one whose name got attached to the new start-up cult of the day.

I wonder if there may be a lot more truth in Life of Brian than anyone realised.

There wern't no heubuz... and there were magic holy folks wayyyyy before jebuz

It is very unlikely that any magic was attributed to him at all. If he was a historical person it is likely that he was not unlike many radical rabbis of his time. The mythos was simply attributed to him at a latter time. We can see similar magical folk lore applied to Paul Bunyon and John Henry in American folk lore.

First con man/lunatic. Just saying.

One of the theories I've heard was that during all those years of his life Jesus isn't in the narrative, he had gone up into Asia, where he could have learned herbal remedies, hypnosis, and some of the common sense things that eventually led to things like graveyard shifts (when they started finding out people were going comatose from lead poisoning and then waking up in their graves and clawing the caskets trying to get out) and just...it was beyond the knowledge of the people in that particular geographic area and was therefore magical or miraculous. It's very possible he just learned folk remedies that actually work and brought them back with him. I mean that whole "I am God, we are all God's children and part of God and part of a collective" sound like a lot of the more Eastern-themed religious models.

Long before the invention of organized religion, there were (and still are) shamans, or what were pejoratively called 'witch doctors.' It would seem likely that these were among the first 'magicians.'

i've wondered before if he wasn't the David Blaine of his day.

Nope. Remember the Egyptian magicians thst Moses shamed when the staffed tourned into a snake & ate the snake shafts of the Egyptian magicians? Why does that read like a badly explained porn scene?