Then we’re not talking about the same thing.
What? Do you deny Ronald Wilson Reagan is well-documented? Because that’s the only sense I can make of this post.
I deny that Jesus is as well documented as Reagan.
So do I. What’s your point?
This is a denial that Jesus is as well documented as Reagan?
What? What on Earth are you on about? That statement was about the fact some queries have to bring in someone, or else the system is broken. What did you read?
I said pretty much the same on the first page. I just don’t get it. Christians believe in Christ? Who knew??? 
BTW, I never pegged you as a Christian. I won’t hold it against you, though. 
What happens if you ask “Can I have Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye”? Will that request bring in someone?
Obviously not. You have to ask for the person who inspired the character, possibly with further qualifications if a query that would bring in multiple people will always fail. (Would it?)
But the way I’ve set up this game, you’d need to give a factual description of what this person did, said, wrote (not what others did, said, wrote about him or her) and it would need to be correct in every particular you named or else you’d be disqualified from playing. No “further qualifications” if you fail, no do-overs, no second chances.
With actual historical figures, this is fairly easy, though you need to be careful. Describe Ronald Reagan as the U.S. President who served from 1980-1988 (instead of 1981-1989), say, and you get eliminated, but complying should be easy with Reagan because there are scads of reliable data about his life. Further back, you get into problems, sure, but there are historical figures further back than Jesus who have a known pedigree, reliable birth and death dates, an odd relaible fact or two that survives, recorded by multiple historians. With Jesus, not so much.
Again, not to say you couldn’t get surprised. Specify that Reagan’s dad was known as “John” and it turns out that unknown to everyone Ronnie was actually the milkman’s son, and you could get BZZZZTed. But with Jesus, I contend, virtually every fact you’d be able to put forth has a very high risk of being false. Put out three or four of the most reliable ones you can find, and I still wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of them turns out to be inaccurate. That’s why I make Jesus a high-risk proposition.
pseudotriton ruber ruber: OK, so if I write “The first person to eat an oyster” would I necessarily get someone? How about “The first person to see Mt. Kilimanjaro”?
Hmmm, I’m thinking you’d have to specify an (arbitrary) start date for “People” as I’m sure many primitive life-forms saw Mt. Kilimanjaro, and depending on geological history you might need to specify “the peak or landmass that later became known as Mt. Kilimanjaro” (it sure wasn’t called that when the first human laid eyes on it), but these are risks you take going back far enough. And you’d have to hope that the first brave man to eat an oyster didn’t do it as part of a suicide pact with others ingesting their first oyster simultaneously, but sure. You don’t need a name to specifically ID a person. If the name is certain and is one of your definitive facts, it could be a part of the ID, but not necessarily.
The way you’ve set up this game NOW.
I don’t see that in the OP; all you said was “full description,” which is open to a wide variety of interpretations.
You’ve now added the nitpicky stuff - fair enough. But for most of this thread, you’ve been playing as if we had to be nitpicky like you, without having bothered to tell us.
So we have a new game, starting now. Like I said, fair enough. But blame the confusions and disagreements of these first two pages on yourself, not us.
Well, I’ve been clarifying some points in my game, as requested, to try and be consistent–I hope you’re not implying any evil intent there in my specifying what I meant by “full description.” I think I’ve been consistent all along in rejecting outside sources (biographers, and books) to describe or affirm a player’s existence. So you don’t think I’ve set this as a “Gotcha” exercise for Christians, I suspect you’d have many of the same problems with King Arthur, and I wouldn’t allow Malory to stand as a source of the description either, but would insist on data true to Arthur himself.
No, in retrospect I just think you’d thought you’d said something different from what you’d really said.
But as far as I could tell (and seemingly, as far as others could tell as well) you were doing so as an exercise in being pedantic for no apparent reason.
No, I just think you’re setting up the game in an unnecessarily complicated way, designed to automatically exclude persons who may well have lived, but many of whose particulars are in doubt. But if you know nothing of someone but his/her Social Security number, you can invite that person with certainty without knowing anything meaningful about them.
Sure, it’s your game and you can make the rules whatever you want, but it values the concrete but incidental over the getting the broad picture right but perhaps being wrong about some particular detail. It says the only thing that matters to us about this forest is the exact composition of a particular tree.
Exactly, other the “unnecessarily” part. To me, it’s essential in this thought experiment to distinguish between “100% sure he is real” (Ronald Reagan), “99% sure he is real but with some fishy biographical detail” (Will Shakespeare), all the way down to “20% sure he is real, but with a LOT of fishy biographical details” (J.C.). You have a higher degree of certainty in the latter’s actual existence, but no more solid biographical facts than I have, and I’m trying to see who would forego their chance to play, based on a relatively low chance of success. The other choices are endlessly fascinating to me, and I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be very important to me in playing this game to be sure that I picked people who would allow me to continue playing. Your mileage obviously varies.
I would fully agree that the comparison between the documentation for Jesus and Reagan is a trifle absurd. It’s more logical to compare the documentation for Jesus to that for other ancient world figures. For example, suppose we take the figure of Spartacus.
Our best source for Spartacus is the historical work of Plutarch written about two centuries after the fact. Plutarch gives us not an independent biography of Spartacus, but rather one of the general Crassus, from which we gleans bits and pieces of information. We have a much shorter references to Spartacus in the works of Livy, about one century after the fact, and a few mentions from others sources, none of them any closer in time to when Spartacus lived. Even so, I’ve never heard of anyone expressing doubt that Spartacus existed.
By contrast, in the case of Jesus Christ, we have four biographies and the Pauline letters written at most 70 years after the fact, with the earliest letters probably 10 to 15 years after the fact and the gospel of Mark probably 35 to 40 years after the fact. To me the evidence for Jesus Christ looks remarkably strong in comparison to Spartacus. We could certainly invite Spartacus to the dinner, so why not Jesus?
The reason my mileage varies isn’t a question of disagreement over whether Jesus, or at least someone recognizable as the model for the Jesus of the Gospels, actually existed. It’s about the artificially high likelihood of punting Jesus, or King Arthur, or King David, or Spartacus, or whoever out, assuming they exist. In fact, I’d say you’re trying to make it a certainty that such persons get rejected, whether they exist or not, rather than simply if they don’t.
20% chance that Jesus was actually real? Are you serious? If that’s what you think, then it’s no wonder that you think we’re silly to invite him… But I really have to question that premise.
20% chance that Jesus, as we can describe him factually, was real.