Historical Jesus as a Fifth Gospel

Many scholars (e.g., Scot McKnight) are  now pushing back on the whole historical Jesus project because it entails a rejection of the Gospel story of Jesus in favor of the Scholar’s Jesus as a kind of fifth and definitive Gospel. In terms of what they are objecting to, consider the following quote:

The church, by claiming faith in Jesus as the unique occasion of divine revelation, thus lays upon itself the obligation to do history. And to “do history” means to undertake, with as much information, sympathy, and realistic imagination as possible, the reconstruction of the religious, social, political, and cultural context in which Jesus of Nazareth lived an died. It entails, further, the renunciation of a simplistic reading of the identity-confirming narratives, even if these are the ones offered by the gospels. Such a reading can only result in bad history. But bad history, for the church, results in bad theology, the subtle Docetism of anachronism. It marks the retreat from a fully and truly human Jesus, one who acted meaningfully and coherently at a particular moment of human time. If history, for the church, is important, then undistorted history is very important. Only by meeting this obligation with intellectual integrity can the church, with integrity, continue to witness to that message proclaimed by the first apostles, expounded by Paul, and reflected in the gospels: that the horizontal plane of the human and the vertical plane of the divine met at the cross of Jesus of Nazareth.
Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, pp. 214-15.

As I read this quote, I was nodding my head in agreement with the first three sentences. Yes, history is important to the church, its testimony, and theology. But then comes the sucker punch from Fredriksen. History requires renouncing the Gospel narratives because they commit a docetic anachronism! Really?

So many objections one could make here: Is there any “undistorted history”? Do the Gospels have to be history or theology? Why not history through theology? Is the scholar’s history less ideologically loaded than a theologically freighted Gospel? Is a secular history more valuable to the church than a revealed history? And so forth.