"Vast swathes of the gospels can be shown to be utterly false, but this does nothing to show that there wasn't a historical Jewish preacher as the ultimate point of origin for the later stories."
An absolute gem indeed
See Jeppo, the thing with us is that we can take it when O'Neill says things like this. We don't pretend that most of the gospel record isn't unsupportable by evidence, so when he says things like this we don't bat an eyelid; when we factor in his own atheist bias, it's hardly surprising that he's going to come up with statements like this.
First of all, thanks to Evangelion for publicising my review of Fitzgerald's silly little book. In response to the point above, I think Fortigurn has misread what I said. I'm saying "Even if vast swathes of the gospels were be shown to be utterly false, this does nothing to show that there wasn't a historical Jewish preacher as the ultimate point of origin for the later stories."
That said, most scholars, Christian, non-Christian or Calathumpian, accept that vast swathes of the gospels can't be taken at face value via some literalist reading. So saying this is not some evidence of any "atheist bias", it's simply accepting a consensus of reasonable scholarship.
Yet how many other historians so much as mention Athronges, the Samaritan, Theudas or the Egyptian? None. Apart from Josephus, no writer so much as gives them a sentence's worth of attention.
I guess O'Neill doesn't consider Luke a historian, eh?
Well, no actually, I don't. But my comment was in the context of Fitzgerald's discussion of extra-Biblical sources, so clearly "Luke" isn't relevant.
Josephus, who was completely agenda-driven, is the credible historian while Luke, who was also completely agenda-driven, was not.
As others have already noted, there are several reasons we can't consider whoever wrote gLuke as a historian in the way we can for Josephus. The fact that he can depict Theudas' sect as arising before Judas the Galilean shouldn't exactly fill anyone with great confidence about his ability as a competent historian anyway.
I don't expect O'Neill to agree with me and at the same time I don't have to agree with him.
Blunders like the one above indicate how seriously the author of gLuke can be taken as a "historian". He takes the new genre of "gospel" and dresses parts of it up in some of the trappings of historical writing of the time. Ditto for Acts.