(Disclaimer: I absolutely do not mean to offend Christians. So please do not take my words that way.)
What is the historical, secular view on Jesus' goals and importance in Roman Judea? I've asked some of my friends who have done research on it, and they say these are some of the prevailing theories: Jewish political revolutionary who wanted independence from Rome and used religion as a way to do that / social worker / person with an unspecified mental illness that led to visions and was taken as a sign of divinity / etc.
While almost all historians and scholars of Christian origins believe Jesus was a real person, there is nothing really approaching a consensus on "who" he was. There is a diversity of scholarly opinion what he said or did, how he perceived himself, how others perceived him, what his intentions were, etc. If you read 100 different scholars you get 100 different Jesuses, and much of the time (as many scholars themselves have noted, going back to Schweitzer over a century ago) Jesus ends up being reflections of the scholars themselves, the Jesus they want to see, the Jesus that agrees with them. The prominent Historical Jesus scholar and co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, has called this inability to form consensus on the identity and purpose of Jesus an "embarrassment" to historical scholarship. Part of the problem, though, is that they have very little hard data to work with. It's like having only a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and trying to figure out what the whole picture was. It is always necessarily going to be largely speculative and untestable.
Having said all that, the most common general view is that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who preached the imminent coming of the "Kingdom of God," and possibly the coming of the Danielic "son of man" as a celestial, Messianic liberator. After he was crucified (most think it was for some kind of disruption at the Temple during Passover and possibly for claiming to be the Messiah). his followers, for whatever reason, came to believe he had been raised up to Heaven and would shortly return to usher in the Messianic age.
There are some good reasons that the apocalyptic Jesus is the majority view. For example, many will point out that John the Baptist was apocalyptic and the post-Easter Jesus movement was apocalyptic (certainly Paul was), so it does not seem likely the trajectory would go from apocalyptic, to non-apocalyptic and then back to apocalyptic.
There are other scholarly views too, though, of course. the revolutionary/zealot (Brandon, Aslan), the cynic sage (Crossan, Funk), social reformer (Thiesen, Horsley) and of course the traditionalist Christian views (NT Wright. LT Johnson).
The Early Christian Writings site has an index to some of the prevailing theories and their most prominent adherents.