shimen: huh? I’d judge it by the same standards (among others) mentioned above.
Joe: why do you say that? It’s a fact that more and more information is always discovered, and that new historical theories are always advanced, but they don’t always (or even usually) contradict the previous. A large amount of historical narrative is indeed conjecture and theory. This isn’t narrative- this is directly evidence-based. And, for the record, with people like this, as mentioned in the beginning of the cited book, much of the historical evidence used by scholars does indeed come from CONTEMPORARY sefarim, like Rashi. The mechaber discusses how Rashi mentioned R Meir several times, and uses different details to try to deduce when he lived- historians do the same thing.
But saying that a story cited in an apocryphal way (as is very obvious when one reads the ENTIRE introduction, or at least pages 21, 22, 25-27) in a sefer 800+ years post-story, based upon a real historical figure in completely ahistorical context, is more accurate than the historical information the very mechaber of the sefer also lists in context which completely contradicts it just because it’s written in a sefer?