There were definitely people in Palestine during that time doing some of the same itinerant preaching and living off the land. In the Bible there's John the Baptist, for example. There's also allusion to the dozens---if not hundreds---of other people doing exactly the same thing during this time in the gospels. The idea of Jesus came from these. But the four gospels weren't even written by people who would have known Jesus. They were written about 90 years after that time frame and they all borrow from or flat out copy previous texts. This amalgam of a person is what was rolled into the Jesus character.
There were definitely people in Palestine during that time doing some of the same itinerant preaching and living off the land. In the Bible there's John the Baptist, for example. There's also allusion to the dozens---if not hundreds---of other people doing exactly the same thing during this time in the gospels. The idea of Jesus came from these. But the four gospels weren't even written by people who would have known Jesus. They were written about 90 years after that time frame and they all borrow from or flat out copy previous texts. This amalgam of a person is what was rolled into the Jesus character.