You’re not understanding (or I’m not making clear) something I’m stipulating about these basics facts: I’m NOT claiming that more facts are better, I’m claiming that the fewer rock-solid biographical facts you offer, the better your chances are, so long as they’re sufficient to identify ONE person and that person only. So–with Lincoln, I’ve decided that to conjure him, I’d need the facts about his death (rather than his birth, which had far fewer witnesses and less documentation) and his somewhat unusual name to get the man I want to have dinner with. Give too many details, and you risk having some small point wrong; give too few, and you risk asking for multiple people who qualify. It’s a very simple game, in that regard, and instead of accepting that Jesus is a hard person to ID reliably, you go into a snit (and start throwing incomprehensible and irrelevant math at me).
How am I “blaming” anything on religion when I’m claiming we’d have the same problem conjuring Jesus as we’d have with King Arthur or Odysseus? Am I anti-British King, or anti-Greek or something? I don’t know very much about Jesus, which is why I asked those more knowledgable than I am to see if they’d be willing to stipulate a few facts about him that would ID him with certainty. I take the reluctance of people to play as a confirmation that he might not have ever lived, or that they’ve got so much invested in dining with him to take bigger risks to do so, or that they’d rather play a game whose rules they don’t really understand.
I think you might be confused by what you call my “hidden-ball trick”–I certainly don’t have a clue what you mean by that. The only thing I can think is that I’ve had to explain what I meant as we went along, and as I found out I hadn’t explained my thinking, but it was nothing as intentional or deceptive as you make it out to be.