In many of the religious debates I enter, I consistently hear that claim that Jesus was just one of many self-proclaimed Messiahs during/around his time. This claim will come from students and professors, but I've not been able to pin them on a source for it. I went and looked back at my freshman Western Civ I textbook (Western Civilization: Beyond Boundaries - Seventh Edition; Noble, Strauss, Osheim, Neuschel, Accampo, Roberts, Cohen) and found the claim there as well, but nothing for further reading was there. Do we have any kind of evidence/sources that would back up such a claim? Do any ancient figures make remarks about it?
I'm pretty sure this was addressed at certain points in another thread, listed in the FAQ, about Reza Aslan's book, Zealot. It looks like the historians who mention this topic in their posts rely heavily on Josephus, who according to them mentions various messianic figures from that time.
I remember that Reza Aslan, in Zealot, makes the argument that the individual known as John the Baptist was simply another Messianic figure whose own career was posthumously eclipsed by the cult following of Jesus, which also attempted to rewrite history by having John recognize the preeminence of Jesus' ministry (the famous baptism scene). In this way early Christians, Aslan argues, attempted to co-opt more famous messianic figures in a period chock full of them.
Two famous Messianic claimants in the period who are still remembered today are Simon bar Giora, the head of one of several rebelling Jewish factions in the First Roman-Jewish War in the 60s CE, and Simon bar Kochba, the head of the Jewish rebels in the Second Roman-Jewish War in the 130s CE. The Jewish interpretation that the Messiah would be a divinely-annointed king of the line of David who would rid Israel of foreign occupation and reestablish the ancient kingdom meant that rebels found messianic claims very valuable.