According to Wiki, Michael Grant completed an undergraduate degree in Classics, but thereafter concentrated with a PhD on the subject of Numismatics (ie a study of old coinage and money etc.). Here is the brief bit that's given in Wiki -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grant_(classicist)
Grant was born in London, the son of Col. Maurice Grant who served in the*Boer War*and later wrote part of its official history. Young Grant attended*Harrow*and read classics (1933–37) at*Trinity College, Cambridge. His speciality was academic*numismatics. His research fellowship thesis later became his first published book –*From Imperium to Auctoritas*(1946), on Roman bronze coins. Over the next decade he wrote four books on Roman coinage; his view was that the tension between the eccentricity of the Roman emperors and the traditionalism of the Roman mint made coins (used as both propaganda and currency) a unique social record.
As early as the 1950s, Grant's publishing success was somewhat controversial within the classicist community. According to*The Times:
Grant's approach to classical history was beginning to divide critics. Numismatists felt that his academic work was beyond reproach, but some academics balked at his attempt to condense a survey of Roman literature into 300 pages, and felt (in the words of one reviewer) that "even the most learned and gifted of historians should observe a speed-limit". The academics would keep cavilling, but the public kept buying.[4]
That's nowhere near being a specialist academic “historian” focused as an "expert" on the origins of the New Testament and the Historicity of Jesus.
Afaik, Classics is a quite general degree combining such things as the history, languages, philosophy, and archeology of the ancient Greek & Roman empires.
The link also suggests that Grant was a freelance author for most if not all those 70 popular-level books on Roman coinage and Roman history etc. That is – he was not writing from the position of a tenured university academic researcher. He was just making a living as a freelance writer with an interest in that area of Classics, particularly Numismatics.
I don't say any of that to denigrate Grant or to rubbish the career he made for himself as a writer of books on classical History, but the above is nowhere near being an “expert” academic on the historicity of Jesus and the veracity or otherwise of the Biblical writing. It also seems from the above that he wrote only that one single book on the Gospels ... and as far as I know that book is not cited by anyone as worthwile evidence for Jesus.
If that's the level of “Historian” that can be named as “the expert consensus” showing that Jesus was real, then that level is close to zero.
