What’s wrong with “Give me the person now known as Jesus, who was a carpenter-turned-preacher. He lived approximately 2,000 years ago, with most of his teachings and story being written decades after his death and becoming the work known as the New Testament” is the same thing that’s wrong with “Give me the person now known as Odysseus, who was a king and a warrior. He lived approximately 3,000 years ago, with most of his adventures being written decades after his death and becoming the work known as the Odyssey.” Being written about after one’s lifetime is NOT something that one does oneself, so that wouldn’t count. Odysseus’s dates can be fudged with the weasel-word “approximately”–okay the actual guy lived 4,000 years ago, but what’s a millennium between friends? Either you are willing to assert his dates, or you’re uncertain. If your dates are wrong, you get a big BZZZT, and if you’re correct (or very lucky) you get to have dinner with Odysseus. Me, I wouldn’t take that chance.
How has **RT **done well when he won’t even venture a provisional description? If I find fault in someone’s description, he (or someone) can try again to come up with a better one, until you have one that works, that even a fault-finder like I am can’t really find much to complain about. That’s what I’ve been doing myself with my own flawed descriptions with Jesus and others. I agree that Pythagoras, and others whose biography is hazy, are hard to conjure, and I don’t see why people are upset that this is true, with this very particular game and its demands–you can’t get Pythagoras easily (though I think you could posit that he was the first man to realize the truth of his theorum, which you could simply re-state, if you think he was the first) and you can’t get Jesus, and you can’t get Odysseus–you can try, and that’s what I’m asking people to do. I’m hearing a lot of “WAHHHH–this is hard! Unfair!”
Because authors often have distinctive literary signatures which have survived intact, and because Kings had scribes to record their dates and their deeds, and because inventors and painters left behind artifacts for which they can be held responsible, they are identifiable by my strict standards further back than others, but that’s just how it is, not how I’m seeking to punish Christians for their foolish faith. Far as I’m concerned they can play the Jesus card, and who knows, maybe they’ll hit the nail on the head with whatever facts they choose to play. I’m just asserting that I think that’s far too risky and I’d rather play a safer card. I wish we could settle this by a bet, but this is an outcome that can never be more speculated about. I’d be interested to see who would actually bet on Jesus appearing based on the scarcity of facts they would confidently put forth.
I’m not changing the rules, though I am defining more completely as people raise valid questions about them, and I am being agreeable to fault being found with my provisional description, as I find ways to improve them. You get on my case for noting about Lincoln that his proclamation didn’t free every slave in the universe immediately, and I agree: even before you posted this objection, I had agreed that the facts of Lincoln’s death are the least ambiguous and also specific enough to limit it to one person only, so I’d try to stick with those rather than ambiguous facts, even though if I had to use Lincoln’s writing, he was a unique enough stylist that a swatch of his prose would certainly suffice, such as the delivery of the Gettysburg Address on such-and-such a date.
It is interesting, though, that when I though I’d found a certain public utterance of Jesus, multiply recorded, and associated with the most well-founded and unambiguous part of Jesus’ life, his crucifixion, THAT got shot down as literary B.S. by Dio. So you’ve got an undocumentable historical figure who is, maybe because of that undocumentablity, the number-one pick in the parlor game of “Who would choose as your dinner guest?”