Jesus Christ as your fantasy dinner guest

Great Debates
101

No, if you describe Arthur as having been alive in the first half of the 9th century (I’m just throwing around numbers here–I don’t know much about him) and a King of [name the correct pre-Britain tribe here] and whatever else of factual nature you have, and you’re correct on this stuff, then you’d get Arthur. I don’t see how this is a very high threshold. I guess you’d have to specify “leader” rather than “King,” because that title may not have been used.

It’s just: describe or name someone in enough detail to specify that single person, and don;t get any of your facts wrong. If I wanted to do it for you, RT, based on my knowledge of your job and interests and posts and having met you once at a Dopefest, being able to guess the decade in which you were born, and a bunch of other things I can reliably believe I know to be true about you, I could describe you well enough to conjure you up. It’s not a very difficult standard to meet, but it does demand that you be real, and I’m sure you’re real.

102

And if you got the wrong half-century, or you got the wrong tribe, but got everything else right, then bzzzzt! - thanks for playing.

No, it’s a very difficult standard. By the time you narrowed things down far enough to eliminate everyone with details similar to mine other than me, you’d almost surely have been wrong about something about me, too.

103

I don’t think you understand probability. Let me explain:

The more specifics you include in your description of someone, the more accurate a description you’re creating, if you actually know stuff about them. The more stuff you include, the more you’re likely to fairly accurately describe that person, and only that person.

But the key thing is ‘fairly.’ The more specifics you include in your description, the more you’re likely to be factually wrong about at least one.

This is because P(A and B) =< min(P(A),P(B)). And if A and B are independent of one another, then P(A and B) = P(A)P(B).

So if you’re 90% sure of each of 10 independent attributes you think I have (approximate age, hair color, what state I live in, etc.), and you use all 10 to describe me, the chance that you’ll get at least one wrong, thereby excluding me, is in excess of 65%.

But obviously the fewer attributes you include, the more likely you are to spread too wide a net, and catch others who share those attributes with me: there are undoubtedly thousands of brown-haired men in their 50s who live in Maryland, for instance.

Even if you can toss in a lucky specific that should narrow things way down - like having attended a Dopefest - you still have a good chance of getting multiple me’s. And that’s the sort of specific you’re unlikely to have for Jesus or Spartacus or King Arthur or King David, assuming they were real people.

So if you were limited to what you know about me as a non-Doper, you’d be screwed. You’d almost certainly either cast too wide a net, or too narrow of one. If you somehow managed to get one person, it might well not be me, but someone differing from me in one particular that you got wrong. And I really exist.

Supposing a 20% chance of Jesus’ existence, what you’d want is something like this:

P(invite Jesus) = .2

Which should break down into:

P(invite Jesus) = P(invite Jesus|Jesus lived)*P(Jesus lived) + P(invite Jesus|Jesus didn’t exist)*P(Jesus didn’t exist)

And you’d like the numbers for that to look like:

P(invite Jesus) = 1 * .2 + 0 * .8

The problem I have with your game is that it replaces that 1 with an infinitesimally small number. If you’re going to have a hard time inviting me, inviting Jesus will be impossible.

I have no issue with the .2 and the .8; make those numbers whatever you will. They may be your opinion, but you’ve got a right to your opinion, and I’m willing to assume its correctness for the sake of argument.

But if you set things up so that P(invite Jesus|Jesus lived) is minuscule, then it’s a pretty silly game. That, and only that, is my issue with your game.

104

I disagree with this fundamentally, RT. You and I were introduced. I can’t remember your name right off, but I might be able to if I tried, or if I asked someone else who met you that day. I’m pretty sure you were at one time a resident of Maryland. I think you live there now, but you were certainly a MD. resident then. With just your name, the facts you’ve revealed about yourself online (your profession, your age, your employment by the government, your marital status, etc.) and another fact or two, depending on how unusual your name is, I think I might feel pretty confident that you and you alone would be the person IDed. Which specific facts would you offer on Jesus’s behalf that you feel that degree of confidence in?

105

My point exactly - thanks.

106

To be less cryptic, my point is that your goal isn’t to successfully invite persons if and only if they actually existed. Apparently for you, the question of whether there are a set of specifics that would meet the standards of your odd game trumps whether the person, by the normal standards that most people would use, did in fact exist.

To me, this is kinda like Rick Perry continuing to insist that abstinence education works, even when confronted with evidence that it doesn’t work in the sense of reducing teen pregnancies.

Again, I would think the goal here would be to construct a ‘game’ to translate

P(invite Jesus) = P(invite Jesus|Jesus lived)*P(Jesus lived) + P(invite Jesus|Jesus didn’t exist)*P(Jesus didn’t exist)

into something as close as possible to

P(invite Jesus) = 1P(Jesus lived) + 0P(Jesus didn’t exist)

but it’s clear that that isn’t your goal. I have no idea why.

107

Well, you’re losing me by writing in math, not English. Far as I can tell, you agree that I could ID you (or you me) much more satisfactorily as a known, specific person than either of us could do with Jesus. Correct?

What’s the point of an imaginary game, a thought experiment in which one can conjure up legendary or mythical figures who might be fictional, partly fictional, composites, etc.? I think I’m being remarkably straightforward here in positing a game in which one can conjure people from the past but only those who are factually proven to be real. You can take your chances with someone you want to talk to very badly, but there’s a serious penalty for choosing someone whom you can’t describe with strict accuracy, so in this game, you would be well advised to choose people who are real. For some reason, you’re getting on my case because I wouldn’t feel enough confidence in Jesus (or Arthur’s) actual existence (as judged by the number of rock-solid, historically verifiable facts about their lives) to include them on my list. I keep asking Christians (and Dio) simply to name facts that they’re positive about, and I keep getting non-responsive answers (or in your case, math) telling me how offensively wrong this thought experiment is. Would you do me the kindness of writing your description of Jesus based on what he did, said, wrote, etc. that you feel would describe him and only him, without resorting to what people interpreted about his life? If you feel sure that he turned water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana sometime between 10 AD and 35 AD, for example, then say so, and don’t simply reference chapter and verse to me and say “that guy described in this passage.” As a Christian, would you be willing to assert that he performed that miracle?

108

Yes, now that I know you apparently know my name, or think you could find it out from others. In today’s society, a name (if not overwhelmingly common) plus a few details can narrow things down pretty fast.

None. We aren’t debating that. To quote myself:

P(invite Jesus|Jesus lived) = “the probability that you invite Jesus, given that he was in fact a real person.”

I think you’re being remarkably straightforward in making it somewhere between difficult and impossible to do so in many cases. If Jesus really existed, then the description of Jesus as the person the Gospels were written about should be quite sufficient, shouldn’t it?

If he was mythical, or the composite of multiple people, then according to you, dinner gets canceled anyway, because it’s got some sort of built-in truth detector, which is fine. But given that stipulation, what’s this extra layer of crap about? Its only *functional *purpose is to exclude him should he have been an actual person.

These are two different things. This is a double test: (1) they’ve got to be real, and (2) there’s got to be enough reliable specifics about them so you can narrow things down to them on the basis of those specifics, rather than any other useful standard, without being wrong in a single specific.

That’s very different from merely being willing to gamble this series of dinners on one’s belief in Jesus’ reality. My problem is that even if Jesus walked the earth 2000 years ago, and was roughly as described in the Gospels, chances of being able to jump through your hoops and get him invited to dinner is quite small. Didn’t really attend a wedding at Cana, but did a dozen other specifics I select? Bzzzt - no dinner. Attended the wedding, but didn’t turn over the moneychangers’ tables? Bzzzt! Attended the wedding, and turned over the moneychangers’ temples, but the Beatitudes came from someone/somewhere else? Bzzzt! Wedding, moneychangers, Beatitudes, but I goof up on the Aramaic name that has come to us as Jesus - not Yeshua after all, but something just a little bit off? Bzzzt!

You see the problem, right?

(Say, “Right.” This is your cue.)

Math can often make things clear in a way that words can’t. It doesn’t seem clear to you, for instance, that as you’ve designed things, greater specificity would lead to more false negatives, while producing a more robust description.

Of course not! Because if I listed 10 other miracles that he actually did, but the Cana story was a myth, then BZZZZZZT!

If you don’t get that by now, then you really don’t get it.

109

Besides, you’ve never bothered to say what the problem is with “the person the Gospels were written about,” given that (a) the object is presumably to invite Jesus if he in fact existed, and (b) you’ve got some truth sensor operating that will determine whether there was exactly one person meeting the description, and either (i) if so, invite the person, and (ii) if not, call off the dinner.

From reading your posts, it’s as if you want all this self-defeating gunk because you want it, rather than for any clear reason.

110

(Just saw your “location”–DUH!)

I’m rejecting the Gospels because I’m rejecting ANY and EVERY secondary source about a person, who may or may not be accurately portrayed. I’m rejecting Malory, but if you’ve got facts about Jesus, bring 'em on. If there’s stuff in the Gospels that you’re sure happened in the way described, then I’ll accept it as coming from you, and YOU (not Mark or Luke) will take your chances that it’s sufficiently accurate. I’m interested in knowing what you think is historically reliable, but you can’t seem to come up with very much.

How would I know that Cana didn’t happen? You might get a BZZZT! but not from me. I’m happy to let you play my game your way, and take your chances. I’ll stick with Abe Lincoln, and I’ll enjoy myself.

111

And let me give an example from a work I am expert in: Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Suppose you attended our latest Fitzgerald conference, and heard a paper arguing that Gatsby was based on a real person, a neighbor of Fitzgerald’s named Max Gerlach, and in my game you ask for “the man on whom Fitzgerald’s Gatsby was modeled.”

Problem is, Gatsby is a composite–he was based on Gerlach, and (to judge from papers read at past conferences) on about 12 other people. Now if you ask for Max Gerlach, who was born in a certain place at a certain time, and lived in Great Neck in 1923, and owned a car dealership in Flushing in the 1930s, and liked to call Fitzgerald “Old Sport,” then that’s who you’ll get. But if you ask for the man who Gatsby was modeled after, there’s really no such person. So it is with Jesus–there may, probably are, pieces of his story that actually happened, but I sure don’t know which parts those are, and the longer you refuse to share your reliable ID of JC with me, the surer I am that you have very little more certainty about those parts than I have.

112

So this is just another debate about the historicity of Jesus? Good grief.

I’m going to play along, though. I probably wouldn’t invite Jesus, just because I think the odds of getting a hit outweigh the benefit of talking to him. However, since I’m still trying to get a feel for how strict/assholish the entity (?a genie?) of this game is, below is my description.

“Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph and Mary. Born between 20 BC and 10 AD. Crucified by the Romans for causing a disturbance in the Jewish temple.”

I’m assumming that this would get shot down if there were 2 people that met this description, but I doubt that that will be the case, despite how common those names were and how many people the Romans crucified.

By my count, I have 9 qualifiers. That might be too many. I might take out Mary’s name, since it could be wrong and is so common that it doesn’t help my odds of preventing a duplicate much. I might spread out the born-on-date range a bit. But I think that’s pretty good.

Would this get shot down because I said “Jesus” instead of “Yeshua”? Would “Joshua” be OK?

113

Was he called Jesus of Nazareth (in Aramaic) during his lifetime? I’m not snarking, just asking if this was a label that he got afterwards (like centuries after his lifetime) or if this was how people referred to him at the time. I’m not imagining the form of his name (“Jesus” or “Joshua” or “Yeheshua” or whatever) would be an issue, since we’re playing in English, but he would have actually to have been called “…of Nazareth,” for this to be valid as Nazareth is a fact important to his story. Same with “Yusef” and “Miriam.”

I think you’d have a bigger problem with “Son of Joseph.” Don’t you think he was the son of someone else and that Joseph was a cuckold? Call someone “son of” someone, and he would need DNA from that someone to avoid the BZZZZT. Did Jesus have Joseph’s DNA? Again, serious question. I don;t think he would have if there’s any truth in the New Testament, but what do I know?

And is “causing a disturbance in the temple” the charge? Again, just asking–do we know what exactly the Romans charged him with? I always thought there was a charge of “blasphemy” in there somewhere–death by crucifixion seems a little harsh for just “causing a disturbance” but maybe that was how it was back then. I’d hate to get caught running a stop sign in ancient Roman territory.

114

Did you read your own OP?

Just for refreshers:

So “the answer would come back to you” - from where? Where is the BZZZT! coming from that tells you, “no such person”?

Ahhh, forget it. Done wasting time.

115

What does this have to do with what we’re discussing? This is strictly your tangent.

116

I think this gets to my main question: How much of a pedantic dick is the arbiter of this game? If I said “Jeshua ben Joseph, of Nazareth”, would that increase or decrease my chances, or would they be the same?

I’m not a Christian. I believe that he was the biological son of Joseph and Mary. But, again, if Joseph raised him, wouldn’t he be considered the (adoptive) father anyway? Would the arbiter of this game nix this because of DNA?

I haven’t read the arrest report. This is what I believe happened, and I’m being purposefully vague to get the guy that I’m aiming for without including another Joshua who had parents with the same common names and who was crucified by the Romans for some other reason.

117

Pretty damned pedantic. That’s what this is, a very pedantic game that I’ll remind you (once again) began when I read someone’s blog about the old dinner game, and my thought that “Yeah, I WOULD like to chat with JC for a bit” and my then wondering how the rules of designating a dinner guest would be. If they were REALLY pedantic, but still fair, and punitive (to people giving vague or a-historical descriptions), I realized, I probably would NOT request Jesus’s presence, because I couldn’t describe him specifically and certainly enough. After a little more thoiught, I realized that there were plenty of worthwhile dinner guests whom I COULD describe with certainty and specificity–mostly recent, mostly well-documented people, but I would finally have to reject Jesus if he couldn’t pass the pedantic screening device I’d invented. But I was curious to see if this was just my own lack of reading, or if there was anyone who felt they could devise such a description. So far, not, and I seem to have irritiated RT Firefly into a snit good and proper. Sorry about that, RT.

Dunno–that depends on whether he was called by that name. I guess “Increase.”

Sure, he would. “Father” means something. So does “adoptive father.” You have to pick one, though–no hedging bets “Either the father or the adoptive father or the guy who was married to his mother, or something of that nature, not excluding his buddy, business partner, friend, acquaintance or landlord.”

Purposeful vagueness to game the system gets a BZZZZT!, I’d say. If you can’;t ID the guy with certainty and specificity, you run the risk of being eliminated. That’s why I’m choosing known, historical figures and specifying the details I’m most certain about–because that’s what this game values.

118

Is it? I thought I was explaining certain issues with a description of Jesus that someone other than me wrote.

Don’t know why you’re so irritiable about a thought experiment. Don’t you know what a thought experiment is? You need some rules and guidelines, and I’m supplying them, as best I can. If you really need an answer, let’s suppose that God exists, as improbable a thought experiment as that is, but 's never paid much attention all this gabble about Jesus or Judaism or Christianity–he’s all-powerful, can do anything, but he’s specifying that he’ll bring back anyone you want for a dinner guest as long he actually existed and you describe him accurately on all counts. He happens to be a very pedantic and demanding dick of a God. Can you wrap your mind around that concept?

119

It seems to me that you need to walk a fine line between getting too specific (lest you get a detail wrong. If I’m trying to get George Washington, I’m not going to put down the date that he signed Declaration of Independence, because maybe historians are off by a day), and being too vague (lest you get 2 people that meet your description).

But, hey, it’s your game.

Maybe because you’ve made it into a “game” that is no fun to play.

Or maybe it’s because this seems to actually be you arguing against the historicity of Jesus or the accuracy of the New Testament. Why not just ask people what they believe about Jesus? They will tell you, we’ve done these before. Most Christians on here do believe the NT. Some believe in Jesus, and don’t care if the side stories are literally true. Poeple will tell you if you just ask them instead of constructing some kind of gotcha game.

120

Well, it’s no fun for hard-core Christians, or Arthurians, to play because it does bring into doubt the validity of their whole belief-systems, I’ll give you that. It’s NOT just a “side-story”–it’s the whole story that may well have no basis in historical fact.

I think it’s a lot of fun to think about–in fact, I’ve come up with a safe description of Jesus Christ that I think may work:

“I request the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew born between 10 B.C. and 10 A.D. to a woman whose name translates into English as ‘Mary’, who preached throughout Galillee and Jerusalem in Aramaic to large crowds, until sometime between 25 A.D. and 35 A.D., when he was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate’s rule–as he was dying on the cross, he was audibly heard to cry out in Aramaic ‘My father, why have you forsaken me?’”

I think this narrows down the list of qualifiers sufficiently, and should satisfy Christians that they have the right man, though I’m not sure that I’ve allowed too much leeway by way of dates (I think I chose a little conservatively here, and so unnecessarily opened the doors to some other Jesus, though it’s pretty unlikely). I chose the quotation because multiple Gospels specify that those were Jesus’s last words, and I figure if he never said that, then most of what he was quoted as saying is also suspect. Likewise, if he wasn’t crucified under Pilate’s rule, then who knows what else has been gotten wrong in the NT?

I still might not pick him as a dinner guest, because there are so many interesting people who are much safer picks, but I think this description may get an historical Jesus, if one is possible.