Most of us grew up singing a cute little song at Christmas that began like this: “You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen, but do you recall, the most famous reindeer of all …”
That is clearly a secular song rather than a religious one. But I do believe a religious version of it would not be too hard to come by. It might go something like this: “You know Mary and Joseph the shepherds and wise men, Herod the tyrant and Jesus who loved them, but you don’t recall, quite a few others at all “
Now, the chorus would be a bit tricky. Imagine taking the tune of the chorus to “Rudolph: and trying to fit this list into it: Josephus, Tacticus, Pliny the Younger, Phlegon, Thallus, Seutonius, Lucian, Celsus, Mara Bar-Serapion and the Jewish Talmud. What, you ask, could that list of odd sounding names have to do with Christ and Christmas? Quite a bit actually.
If the only information we had about Jesus was from the Bible itself, that would be more than enough for any reasonable mind to believe that there was such a person as Jesus. The Bible is the most well-attested document of ancient history and was written early. Even many famous critics attest to this fact. John A.T. Robinson dates all four gospels between 40 and 65 A.D. William F. Albright has all the New Testament books dated prior to 80 A.D. Jesus was not some mythical figure made up many years later, he was written of by eyewitnesses.
There are some 15,000 ancient manuscripts containing all or part of the New Testament, some dating back as early as 50 A.D., others from the early 100s. In letters written between 95-100 A.D., early church fathers quote from 25 of the 27 books of the New Testament. Furthermore, we can historically trace an unbroken chain of belief in the historicity of Jesus Christ from the time of the apostles till now through people with names like the Montanists, Donatists, Novations, Catholics and many more. They had differences and none were right on everything, but all knew that there was a figure named Jesus, one who came as a babe to Bethlehem, lived, died and rose again.