1) You may be referring to the fact that the very story of Jesus's life and miracles is a common myth archtype. Just look up savior myths. These were common from 100's of years BC through long after Jesus. Something I thought was neat is that some of these characters were even crucified- there is an amulet from about 400AD that at first glance is an obvious image of the crucified Jesus on a cross- but if you read the inscription it is in fact Baal, an older form of the same myth. Even the NT gospels appear to be nothing more than the myth with random OT quotes (mostly poorly quoted and with errors anyways
) 2) It is possible that you are wanting to know about apocalyptic Judaism. Just as we have televangelists today who preach all sorts of things, there were many Jewish people around Jesus's time who ran around preaching about the end of the world.
The earliest gospels (all apocryphical now) written by those who most likely would have first or second hand knowledge of Jesus clearly made him out to be from a branch of Judaism called Apocalyptic Judaism. They believed the end was immanent, and were extremely vocal about it.
Many of these people were believed or even claimed to be prophets, were believed to do miracles and had followings.
Interesting to point out that Jesus was not mentioned in any history of his exact time, but there were many other such leaders who were discussed and mentioned due to their mass collections of followers or their public disturbances.
History is written by those who are victorious, not those who fade away so we aren't told about the others.
If you do even some basic research into the history of Christianity you will easily find hundreds if not thousands of groups nearly forgotten or simply written out of existance because they failed to thrive. (and in terms of the victors consequently were "proven" wrong)
As for compairing other groups to Jesus during his time, you might have some better luck actually looking into Judaism because the whole movement (from which Christians came) was a Jewish thing and had nothing to do with Christianity in the first place.
I hope this helps.
When I get home I will see if I can find a notebook I kept more info on this subject in, from which I could probably get you some more specific names and groups. Did you know more specifically what you are looking for?
Oh wow! 
