Sounds to me like Fitzpatrick has some anthropology background, maybe a pretty fair amount, even. Sounds like a GREAT read!
Yeah, the best fiction has a grain of salt [from the dead sea, perhaps?]
After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Edmund Wilson, the literary critic, wrote a book about it. Wilson reflected the hope of his generation that archaelogical and liutereay evidence would be found that would put paid to the whole "myth" of Christianity. What it did. of course, was to make historical Christianity more credible by showing that the "Greek" imagery of the Gospels, especially St. John , was part of Jewish thinking at the time. Of course there was enough new information to hatch any number of hypotheses about Christianity, including the idea that Jesus/John the Baptist were connected the Qumran somehow. They refuse to take Christian writings at face value, with Jesus as a true religious genius (at least) who represented a new element in a very complex Judaism. Goes back to the 18th Century when writers like Voltaire could recognize the signficance of Issac Newton but could not give the same tribute to Jesus.