In the movie Amadeus, great liberties are (deliberately!) taken with the historical characters and events, ranging from inaccuracies in the nature of their relationships and accomplishments to outright fabrication concerning the events in their lives. Factual accuracy was not a major concern, and the proximate source for the movie was itself a fictional play. Actor Tom Hucle who played the character “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” reportedly based his portrayal in part on the notorious moodswings of John McEnroe. Etc., etc.
But if any of this means asking for “The historical personage on whom the main character of the movie ‘Amadeus’ is ultimately based” will not straightforwardly produce the dinner guest I think it should produce, then your game is stupid and there’s no point wasting anyone’s time on it.
I don’t see what’s stupid about forbidding secondary sources, which may be flawed, fictionalized, mistaken, etc. when there are certain unassailable facts available. In fact, you may have hit on the most unassailable signature possible–“I’d like to dine with the man who composed the following music: [supply notation for several of Mozart’s most intricate pieces]”. Mozart, and Mozart alone, IMO was capable of composing some of his signature work, and it clearly identifies to the exact degree that even specifying his name is gratuitous.
I don’t care if there’s some other way of identifying Mozart. I care that “The guy ‘Amadeus’ was based on” is a perfectly sufficient way of identifying him.
This is, fundamentally, my point as well, before it got sidetracked by someone accusing me of thinking Reagan and Jesus had pool parties together. (Reagan did laps while Jesus brought him drinks.)
(Well, that, and I’m a programmer and amateur mathematician. Playing with rule systems until they break is what I do. ;))
How about something like “The person who created this very specific graffiti tag on this very specific building”? You can be sure I don’t know who made it, but you can also be sure it had to have been made by someone. You could, with a suitable description, do essentially the same thing for the works commonly attributed to William Shakespeare or Homer: Those works might not have been created by the people we think they were created by, but someone had to have made them.
Bringing this back around to Jesus, well, someone has to be the primary person responsible for the Sermon on the Mount. They might not have been similar to the idea Christians (which I am not) have of Jesus, but they’d still make a fantastic dinner guest once language issues are taken care of.
Anyone else getting an eerie feeling of déjà vu? At least three posts have come up with what seems to be a good description, but PRR keeps suggesting that the magic genie would likely deny that they refer to Jesus. Interesting, but I just can’t put my finger on it.
Why do I get the feeling someone is going to get called a cock in the related Pit thread?
Which three posts would those be? Remember, I’m disallowing anything that references a secondary source, so Jesus in the NT is out, as is Odysseus in the Odyssey and Arthur in Malory, but if you want to point to something that Jesus or Arthur or Odysseus WROTE themselves, or SAID, or DID, that’s fine. I have no problem with “the man who wrote this graffiti,” as long as you’re confident that it was written by one man and not by a team of graffiti-artists, which would risk your getting a BZZZZT!
Thinking it over, for most famous people, their deaths would cover sufficient details, since by the time of their deaths, most would be so well known that it would be multiply recorded (and thus most likely to be accurate.) So with Lincoln, I’d stick to the date and location and his name, and stay away from even the most certain facts (for the sake of this game) that happened with few witnesses: “who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation,” for example, could get tricky if he had a little writing help on it, which no historian asserts but which is possible. Probably “who wrote all or most of the Emancipation Proclamation” would suffice, but why risk it when you’ve already got him by the details of his death?
Dude. All you have on Jesus or Odysseus or Spartacus is secondary sources, written dozens or hundreds of years after they lived.
It makes absolutely no sense to say, “You can’t say ‘the guy the Gospels were written about,’ but what you should provide is a list of specific events from the Gospels.”
Like you can provide an intellectual justification for that.
It’s kinda silly to compare Lincoln or Mozart with Jesus or Odysseus. Because, you know, in the 19th century, there was a great deal of contemporaneous record-keeping. A thousand or more years ago, any contemporaneous record-keeping was pretty much about the lives and deeds of kings.
I guess everyone else just didn’t exist. :rolleyes:
I’m pretty sure Aeschylus did exist. You could provide a characteristic passage from his work, and that will ID him. There are plenty of people who DID stuff, or wrote stuff, that will ID them, the fewer the further back you go, of course. But the failure to come up with a way to ID Jesus is pretty surprising, even to me.
That doesn’t exactly greatly widen the number of people who prr-existed, to coin a term.
Why? You’ve gone out of your way to make it unlikely that anyone besides kings and writers from a thousand years or so ago are prr-identifiable, and now you’re surprised that your method is indeed effective.
Not in the least. Why should we care whether someone is prr-identifiable? Christians in general will remain unaware of the whole notion of prr-identifiability, and the few of us who are, think it’s a crock. Not to mention, it’s not a concept that’s likely to gain currency outside this lone thread on this message board.
I never stipulated, btw, that you couldn’t refer to the NT events, just not to that book (or any book) for your sources. It’s the problem with Gatsby–saying you want Fitzgerald’s model for Gatsby doesn’t get you anyone, though there are numerous models that he used, but if you pick things out from the book that Gatsby did, or said, and they turn out to be taken from the same model, then you’re good. Likewise, if you think the Round Table was real, and Guinevere was real, then you don’t need to refer to Malory to get King Arthur. I’m asking the simplest, concerete question here and you’re running around chasing your tail, having a conniption fit becasue you can’t answer it: what did Jesus do, or say, or write, that you’re factually certain of? I think your answer is “Nothing” or “Who cares about facts?” or something of that sort, and instead of being honest, you’re giving me a lot of static instead to cover up for your failings.
How would the number of people identifiable by your standards in a given year compare with the number of people estimated to have been alive at that time?
Except that you got the facts from the Gospels, or from Fitzgerald, or from Malory.
Again, intellectually justify why ‘I’d like to invite the guy that was the basis for Homer’s The Odyssey,’ isn’t kosher, but picking a bunch of possibly-facts about Odysseus from The Odyssey, and saying, ‘I’d like to invite the guy who matches up with this set of facts’ is.
And so am I.
I don’t think you have an intellectual justification for this distinction, because surely you would have provided it by now in response to repeated inquiries from a number of posters.
Hell, I don’t believe there is one.
And I think you’ve succeeded in your pursuit of your tail.
If it makes you happy to think that, then by all means do so.
Facts are important. But underlying the Gospels are facts, too: either the authors had one particular person in mind, or they cobbled together the Gospels from stories about multiple persons, or they simply made the whole thing up. One of these is a fact; the other two aren’t.
Clearly you don’t like that sort of fact. Your irrational rejection of that sort of fact colors this entire thread. I can’t help you with that. But a number of posters have said in this thread that this sort of fact makes sense to them. And AFAICT, nobody besides you has said that your limitation on the use of facts makes sense to them.
You might be right when everyone else is wrong. But given that you’re a minority of one in your own thread, some intellectual justification for why you insist on your particular standards is long overdue.
But suppose, arguendo, that we buy into your notion that the possibly-facts in the Gospels or the Odyssey or whatever are usable as individual facts, but the possibility that the author(s) may have had a particular person in mind isn’t.
The next problem is your insistence that facts only matter if you can line up a sequence of facts that are all true, without exception - that going 3-for-3 is potentially good, but going 9-for-10 is useless.
Go ahead, intellectually justify that one. Try to explain why that one is somehow about your caring about facts while I don’t.
You’re simply being arbitrary. Which is fine, as long as you don’t pretend it means something.
I’ve set it up this way (a way that works for thousands of historical figures, and pretty easily if you’re careful enough) to set the bar high for figures you’re uncertain about. Again, my motivation for making this thread about Jesus is the frequency with which he gets chosen as a potential dinner guest. Since there is no issue with many other other potential dinner guests, both ancient and modern, as to whether they exist, and what they did, said, wrote, I found that curious, and continue to find it curious that people want a dinner guest whose very existence (outside of a dubious source of legends, myths, folk tales in the Gospels) they’re unwilling to stipulate as actually having happened. I’m still waiting for what you think Jesus did, said, wrote. Your silence on this subject is deafening. “Whatever the Gospels said” is inadequate, and that seems to be as specific as you’re willing to get, which is not very specific at all (and in places contradictory to known history and logic, which you claim to be a big proponent of).
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.
Repost it in GD, and I’ll respond. I’m not interested in your name-calling and your temper tantrums in the Pit, thanks all the same. I still have a little respect for you, RT, and I don’t want to lose it altogether by responding there, and anything I have to say there I’m not allowed to say, even in the Pit.
