# Jesus Christ as your fantasy dinner guest **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 20, 2011, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jesus-christ-as-your-fantasy-dinner-guest/593476 "2011-08-20T23:08:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 158
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jesus-christ-as-your-fantasy-dinner-guest/593476/158 "2011-09-01T20:19:26Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > To what purpose? Shouldn’t the goal be to get Jesus if he exists? I’d think that his potential nonexistence should, IYHO, be a sufficiently high bar. Adding in a way to minimize the likelihood of being able to invite Jesus (or Odysseus, or Spartacus, or King David, or whoever), given that he lived, is artificial and purposeless. > Yeah, and you’ve been railing throughout against people continuing to use Jesus as an example. :rolleyes: > > That is completely dishonest. Of course we’re willing to stipulate Jesus’ “very existence…as actually having happened.” > > I’m willing to give dozens of examples of what I think Jesus said and did. What I’m not willing to do is assign a probability of 1 to any given one of them, excepting his living in the generally agreed-upon time range, and his death by crucifixion - which doesn’t exactly narrow it down to one person. > > And you have yet to give an intellectual justification for this particular standard. > > Maybe we should talk about specificity and accuracy. If you gave an otherwise good description of my wife, describing her height, weight, build, hair color, hair length, whether she wears glasses, and the clothing she’s wearing today, but got her eye color wrong, would someone fail to identify her right now due to that? Almost certainly not. AFA most people AC, this would be a quite accurate description and more than sufficient to identify her by, regardless of that one minor error. The specifics that are accurate suffice to make up for those that aren’t. > > Unless that person is you. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish between her and a brick wall. > > That’s where _your_ logic takes you. Which is why it isn’t logical at all, and is why giving you specifics about Jesus is a waste of time. Your method can’t tell the difference between my wife and a brick wall, so it certainly isn’t going to do a good job with the specifics I’d provide about Jesus. This amounts to an admission that you can’t describe Jesus in a way that is 100% accurate and specific enough to limit it to him and him alone. You could describe your wife that way (and you wouldn’t get her eye color wrong) so why would I allow a do-over, or a certain number of errors, in describing Jesus or Odysseus or Arthur? I find it comical that you’re not willing to try, even to try to come up with a provisional definition in which I can’t easily find some historical, factual or logical errors. I’m starting to think that Christians don’t actually believe in Jesus’s existence at all, and that they’re really into it for social reasons, family pressures, desires to conform, or to feel superior to non-Christians. It sure doesn’t sound like there’s very much about Jesus himself you’re certain about. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jesus-christ-as-your-fantasy-dinner-guest/593476)._