pseudotriton ruber ruber: ignorant and intellectually dishonest is no way to go through life

[RTFirefly]

A few more things:

@pseudotriton_ruber_ruber

instead of accepting that Jesus is a hard person to ID reliably, you go into a snit (and start throwing incomprehensible and irrelevant math at me).

As I’ve already mentioned, the math wasn’t exactly incomprehensible, unless you’re a retard.

But the thing that a number of us in the thread had a problem with is that Jesus, if he existed, was quite easy to ID reliably: he was the person who was the basis of the Gospel accounts about his life. If there was one and only one such person, then bingo! Jesus shows up at dinner. If the whole thing was a myth, we get nobody. If ‘Jesus’ was actually a composite of two or more itinerant Palestinian preachers from that time period, then we also get nobody.

This would be your goal, right? To get Jesus as a dinner guest if he was real, but not if he wasn’t?

That was certainly how you set it up in the OP:

let’s assume you could have as many ideal dinner guests as you would like, but with the following stipulations: you must name them all at once, with a full description (so you don’t get Abraham Lincoln, the dentist), as many as you like but all on one list, AND if even one of them comes up “No such person, sorry” the entire list gets cancelled.

Would anyone put Jesus on their list? Personally, assuming the language thing could be worked around, I’d love to have Jesus over for dinner, I’d love to shoot the shit with him, ask him loads of questions, but there is no fucking way I’d gamble getting such a fantastic gift as having a limitless series of fascinating dinner guests on anyone who may not have existed, so, sorry, JC is right out. Is there a Christian so dead certain that Jesus walked this earth that they would choose Jesus under the (improbable) circumstances I have described?

Underlining mine.

Obviously there’s some room to interpret ‘full description’ but the whole point, as you described it, was that you were gambling your ability to invite the rest of your historical-figure guests on whether Jesus actually existed.

But instead, your point seems to have been to come up with a way of maximizing the likelihood of excluding historical figures from eras where accurate, detailed, contemporaneous accounts were the exception. As you say,

I’m NOT claiming that more facts are better, I’m claiming that the fewer rock-solid biographical facts you offer, the better your chances are

IOW, you don’t want a ‘full description,’ and that’ll actually backfire!

Give too many details, and you risk having some small point wrong; give too few, and you risk asking for multiple people who qualify.

So you’re creating this very small ‘sweet spot’ where you have just enough facts to exclude anyone else, without having enough to make it nearly certain that one of your ‘facts’ might be wrong. Seems like the goal is to not invite Jesus at all.

Is there a point to this?