The author acknowledges that he “is a believer and, further, a Christian theologian.” He seems to dismiss deconstructionism (vii), and takes Scripture seriously but critically; he uses the Apocrypha, and includes the Gospel of Peter as an appendix. There are no big surprises here, but his bottom line is (implicitly) that, yeah, it happened.
By the way, I’ll note here that ancient biographers did not usually include accounts of the subject’s childhood, so the Gospels’ silence on Jesus’ was not remarkable (this observation per Notre Dame professor [Thomas F.X. (?)] Nobel).