That is interesting, and I hadn’t heard that about his book, not that I’d heard much of anything about it actually. But I certainly had the impression that it was, how should I put this, basically a fictionalized account.
I once looked up the Popes in an almanac, and sure enough, they went right back to St. Peter.
There's a LOT of fiction in the Religious World...
No, not fictionalized, but elaborated on, using non-biblical sources.
So O'Reilly is far from a "biblical minimalist", for example: he says that Jesus' miracles were reported by eye-witnesses.
In fact, no eye-witness source outside the bible or apocrypha records such miracles, but for O'Reilly, that is enough to be classified as "history".
Therefore, an appropriate "compare and contrast" here would be O'Reilly's popular "biblical maximalist" version, versus more scholarly "biblical minimalist" books by the likes of Jesus Seminar leader John Dominic Crossan.