This song is not relevant to this discussion. Professional historians use both apologetic AND non-apologetic texts to construct a historical model that seems more plausible than implausible. Once one ascertains the common elements in both the non-apologetics and the apologetics, the only thing that emerges in common is an ordinary human folk healer and rabbi who also indulged in a few down-home sayings.
That plausible human model for Jesus, an historical rabbi -- the only model that fits with the principle of parsimony routinely applied by every modern professional historian today -- has nothing whatsoever to do with your song's refrain about "making believe he's there". Your song's refrain is only about the religious woo surrounding the notion that this ordinary human rabbi somehow survived crucifixion and is still around. That is why your song is a red herring. It's about Christianity, not modern historiography, which has been perfected today by many serious professional specialists in ancient history, many of whom are not Christians at all.
The latter group and their careful findings constitute the subject of this thread, not the Christian woo referenced in your song.
Got it?
Stone
It has been pointed out to you at least 100 times here (literally 100 times! ... in fact probably 200 times or more), that the people who write about the historicity of Jesus and who lecture about the historicity of Jesus, are not "historians" in the usual academic sense of that word meaning university academics who lecture and research in various branches of non-religious modern and/or ancient history.
The people who write and teach about the historicity of Jesus, people such as Bart Ehrman, Dominic Crossan, E.P.Sanders and many thousands of others, are Bible Scholars, Theologians, and Christian religious writers in general.
As far as what is consistent in the earliest writing as evidence of Jesus - in all of the biblical writing, what is universally consistent, is that all the writers claimed that Jesus was a multiply miraculous supernatural scion of God. Although it is also certain that none of those biblical writers had ever known any such person, and instead what they were writing was religious belief handed down to them from earlier anonymous unknown believers with no evidence at all beyond religious beliefs in the supernatural.
The so-called "non-apologetics", if by that you mean non-biblical writers such as Josephus and Tacitus, are really not relevant or credible as independent evidence of Jesus for numerous reasons. And especially not credible because none of that writing is known from any author such as Josephus or Tacitus at all. On the contrary, even the most religious of Christian bible scholars accept that the earliest known words that we have attributed to Josephus or Tacitus come from copies made by Christians themselves in the 11th century and later, i.e. a whopping 1000+ years after people such as Josephus, Tacitus, Jesus, James, Paul and any gospel writers had all died!
And even after that utterly fatal fact as far as writers like Josephus and Tacitus are concerned, it is afaik the case that amongst a great mass of historical writing produced by those authors over a number of huge volumes commenting on all sorts of political and other issues of that time, almost nothing at all is said about Jesus or James or any other biblical figures ... those few paragraphs are no more than minimal passing mentions.
And on top of that, there is afaik no evidence at all that authors like Josephus or Tacitus had ever claimed to have personally met, seen, heard or otherwise known anything at all about anyone called Jesus or James (or any other such biblical figure). On the contrary, as far as anyone can honestly tell from their writing, those authors were merely repeating whatever was being said at the time by Christian preachers who were telling tales from the bible. IOW - Josephus, Tacitus and the rest are not independent sources for anything about Jesus, James or others ... they are simply making ultra brief passing mention of what was commonly said by Christians at the time.
Further than that - this same "James" (supposedly the "same" person "James"), who was said in a c.200AD copy of one of Paul's letters to be someone that Paul once met as "save James, the lords brother" (a sentence which was never again repeated anywhere by Paul, and which probably only meant a brother in belief anyway), that same "James" supposedly wrote his own gospel, in which afaik he makes absolutely no claim to having ever been a family brother of Jesus. So even that same "James" apparently never supports any claim of being a relation of Jesus. In fact, afaik, that author "James", never claimed even to have ever met any such person as Jesus!
So, even if the 11th century Christian copying of Josephus and Tacitus was not an interpolated alteration by the later string of copyists (who are universally agreed to have been in the frequent habit of altering any passages about the biblical figures, wherever they later decided to portray it differently than any earlier writing), that same "James" of Paul's letter, was upon the actual evidence, almost certainly not any family brother of Jesus, and almost certainly never knew any such living person as Jesus.
Elsewhere you mentioned "parsimony" claiming that is the criteria for judging what should be accepted as likely or unlikely in respect of Jesus Historicity. But it's not anything so tenuous or so "woolly" as anything called "parsimony" that is necessary ... what is necessary is actual "Evidence"! ... that is tangible, reproducible, credible evidence ... evidence of that which is being claimed (not evidence of something else entirely!) ... and "that which is being claimed" is that Jesus was known to people at the time as a real preaching figure ... but there is actually no evidence at all that any of the gospel writers or Paul or anyone else had ever even as much as falsely claimed to have known or met any living Jesus!
The actual evidence is that none of the believers had ever known any such figure. Instead, Jesus was to all of those biblical and non-biblical writers and unknown figure of religious faith. He was someone that the writers (i.e. the earliest biblical preachers and writers) believed in, as a matter of received religious faith, derived either entirely from their reading of the ancient OT scriptures (as Paul emphatically insists), or from a belief in divine revelations communicated to the faithful by God from the heavens (again, as believed by Paul), and/or as preached stories of messiah beliefs from earlier unknown people for whom there is zero evidence.
The actual "evidence" in all of this subject, is evidence only of religious faith-belief in a messiah figure who was completely unknown to everyone. He was not known to any gospel writer, he was not known to Paul, and he was not known to any non-biblical writer such as Josephus or Tacitus or anyone else (and according to his own gospel, he was apparently not known to "James" either!) ... he was a figure of religious belief.
Whether that belief was in fact based upon a real person, whether the beliefs were true (discounting all the vast mass of impossible beliefs claimed for Jesus), is another matter entirely. But the crucial factor is that despite 2000 years of insistent claims to the contrary, the true fact of the matter is there is actually no evidence of Jesus ever being known to anyone at all!
