Many years ago, a movie appeared entitled The Last Temptation of Christ. I bring this up because I place Rabbi Jesus in the same family -- it is a work of historicized fiction written by someone who has allowed their heart to overrule their head.
Rabbi Jesus offers us a fully human Jesus with no awareness or possession of divine identity. It does this by claiming that there is a need to read "behind the texts" and thereby findg grounds to treat the NT as a buffet from which Chilton can pick and choose what he finds to be historical according to his preconceived theory -- and also rearrange what he chooses into a preferred chronology.
Some Gospel episodes are dismissed on little or no evidence, or for simply not fitting into the paradigm; others (including, strangely, many miraculous acts) are accepted, but more often are re-interpreted -- sometimes not objectionably, but more often so either objectionably (i.e., John the Baptist's title for Jesus, "lamb of God," is interpreted as his recognition of Jesus' ignorant innocence and simple-mindedness) and/or pointlessly (Barabbas is made into a follower of Jesus who took part in the Temple cleansing).
There are also a great many questionable assertions (for example, that resurrection was not conceived of as physical -- thus Jesus' followers are turned into, as he is, politically-correct mystics who were seeing visions).
Rabbi Jesus is also a book of psychological pseudo-history, as parables of Jesus are read back as reflecting some traumatic event in the Jesus' lifetime (i.e., Luke 7:31-3, the phrase telling of children singing in the marketplace, is said to reflect that the child Jesus was excluded from the games of others, and this portrayal is his way of getting back at them). It never gets quite as bad as Kazantzakis' Christ who whips himself for having dreams and talks to trees, but it might as well be; the worst it gets is a suggestion that Jesus may have engaged in fornication [145] with (who else?) Mary Magdelene.
Rabbi Jesus, despite the author and the input of historical data, is a work of speculative fiction at best and blasphemy at worst.
-JPH