“The crucial thing to say about this new theory is that the argument for the substantial historicity and accuracy of the Gospels never depended on their dating, anyway. True, lots of scholars have argued as though that was the case, with ‘radical’ scholars dating the Gospels late (and so darkly suggesting that they were all unreliable) and ‘conservative’ scholars dating them early (and so brightly suggesting that everything in them was taken down by eyewitnesses at the scene). But this is actually a mistake. The historicity and accuracy of the Gospels depends on our putting together the whole jigsaw of the first century, with Judaism and early Christianity side by side (and indeed confusingly intertwined with each other), and with Jesus as the middle term straddling both. The historicity of the Gospels depends, not on when they were written, but the historical plausibility of the picture they describe.” – N.T. Wright
This was taken from N.T. Wright’s The Original Jesus: The Life and Vision of a Revolutionary
While I disagree with Wright’s apparent wholesale dismissal of evidence pointing to an early date for the Gospels, his main point is well taken. Indeed, his methodology here is about as close as the historian could possibly get to a full forensic examination. In his ‘Resurrection’, Wright summarises, “…For all these reasons I conclude that the historian, of whatever persuasion, has no option but to affirm both the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ with Jesus as ‘historical events’ in all the senses we sketched in chapter 1: they took place as real events; they were significant events; they are, in the normal sense required by historians, provable events; historians can and should write about them. We cannot account for early Christianity without them. The tomb-and-meetings scenario is warranted, indeed, by that double similarity and double dissimilarity (to Judaism on the one hand and the early church on the other) for which I argued earlier as a methodological control in the study of Jesus. Stories like these, with the kind of explanation the early Christians offered, make the sense they make within first-century Judaism (similarity), but nobody within first-century Judaism was expecting anything like this (dissimilarity). Stories like these do indeed explain the rise of early Christianity (similarity), but they cannot be explained as the back-projection of early Christian faith, theology and exegesis (dissimilarity).” The Resurrection of the Son of God (p709).