Roger Pearse

I can't understand the question.

aa5874

What proof was put forward to show that Apollo, Zeus, Achilles, Osiris, or any other god is mythical?

Those who believe in gods put out information about these entities and the information has been almost universally dismissed as myth.

What proof do I need to show that a man cannot be the son of a ghost, raise himself from the dead and go directly in to space unassisted by external propulsion?

The HJers need proof and they have had 2000 years, so far nothing.

EarlDoherty

Since the subject of "burden of proof" seems to have shifted to this new thread, I think it fitting that I reproduce my recent posting on the subject from the "Jesus Project" thread:

“Burden of proof” is, in addition, a misnomer. It implies that the mainstream or established position has provided a “proof” for its position. That is not the case (“burden of assumption” maybe).

Let's say what’s required is at a minimum “burden of attempted demonstration.” The traditional position has to some extent provided that, even if a good portion of it is simply pointing to the Gospels and saying, “See, that’s what the historical! record says and that’s what we’ve put our money on.” That puts the ball in the anti-historicist court, and their burden has been to (a) show the inadequate nature of that ‘attempted demonstration’ and (b) provide a counter-demonstration of their own. Mythicism for over a century has done precisely that, with a lot deeper and more substantial technique than the position it is questioning.

For a few decades (until about mid-20th century), mainstream scholarship made a few serious attempts to discredit contemporary mythicism (Goguel in 1926 was about the best), but they soon became outdated, and since then, mainstream scholarship has largely thought to rest on its laurels (like Michael Grant quoting others that “the mythicist case has long been roundly annihilated”). By now, and not just on the basis of my own book and website, mainstream scholarship—and note that I do not say ‘historicist’ scholarship, because there has been no scholarship designed to demonstrate the historicity of Jesus in the last half-century, except for a few brief sections in larger works trying to counter someone like Wells which do little more than appeal to the same old tired ‘proofs’ like ‘Josephus and such-and-such explanations for the silence in the epistles’—has made no further effort to discredit modern mythicist argument.

The refusal of modern scholars like the Jesus Seminar to take on The Jesus Puzzle (even when offered $5000 to do so), or even to review the book, is an example. (And it looks like even The Jesus Project is going to cop out, and I’m not just referring to Hoffman’s quoted attitude toward me. After all, it’s largely going to be made up of the same modern scholars.) This has left the ‘ball’ in the hands of people like Jeffrey Gibson, and we’ve long seen the sort of tactics they engage in. Of course, other Internet apologists not so highly qualified as the Seminar and Gibson have, in the vacuum left by official academia, taken up the task, but I would say that these have so far been more than adequately handled by the mythicist side.

So where does the “burden” presently lie, Chris (Zeichman)? It’s puerile to say it still lies with us, and not very insightful. You, personally, are at least attempting to assume a burden, though those attempts regarding my views on Q are hardly comprehensive and don’t really address mythicism per se. Others here with reasonably efficient qualifications, like Ben Smith, do their part, but still sometimes cop out when the going really gets tough (withdrawing to their own different conceptual universes). Others, who shall remain nameless, think that making a lot of noise is all that the burden requires, and you are perilously close to doing that in your “burden of proof” contention. Spin and others are right, in that it simply boils down to an appeal to authority, the authority of the established assumed position. (And you know what happens to those who naively ‘assume the position.’)

And although of course I would never presume to equate myself with Copernicus, I would say that The Jesus Puzzle, and a half-a-million (and climbing) word website, constitutes presenting evidence. Others, too, have presented evidence for the mythicist case. If the old geocentrists wanted to maintain their traditional position, they could hardly simply continue to point to the established Ptolemaic system and say, “hey, the burden of proof is on you.” Ignoring Copernicus’ evidence (though, of course, of a different kind, since it relates to purely scientific observation, whereas the historicity of Jesus cannot be so cut and dried—but it involves “evidence” nonetheless) would hardly have been a laudable position.

Considering what the geocentrists would actually have had to appeal to in countering the new Copernican system, perhaps it would not be surprising if they simply chose to do nothing other than scoff and huddle together in their different universe with eyes and ears blocked.

Earl Doherty

gurugeorge

I voted all of the sensible choices, because they all have a burden of proof, of one kind or another (HJ-ers have the standard "entity x exists? prove it!" burden, MJ-ers have a less onerous burden of proving how texts and beliefs about entity x came to exist). The point many people are coming to realise is that people on the sundry HJ sides of the coin have hardly even begun to attempt to take their burden seriously. Due to historical circumstances, their position has just been taken as a given.

Or, to put it another way, the gospels (or more broadly the Christian canon) themselves were the first attempts to fulfil the obligation of that burden of proof. Those Christians who promulgated that view had a character they believed existed, of a certain type (God made flesh) and they provided what purported to be eyewitness accounts.

This "proof" was good enough for hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people, down through the course of history.

It's just that standards are higher nowadays.

aa5874

It's not the standards, it's their power and control that have diminished.

mountainman

Where is the FICTION option?
How do expect me to vote without
the category of FICTIONAL Jesus?

Insufficient memory?
HJ is one.
MJ is two.

Extra memory card required for a third
option perhaps, or is scholarship still
stuck on its second raised finger?

Doug Shaver

Any or all of them. For any X, whoever says "You should believe X" has the burden of proof.

If the proof already exists, then the burden is very easy to meet. That doesn't mean there is no burden.

spin

Polls are fine and dandy, but they won't help you more than giving some support to your misunderstanding of the notion of "burden of proof". Definitive statements about the way things are (or were) require substantive evidence to support them. This requirement of evidence is commonly known as "burden of proof".

You still haven't got much of what has been going on here. You are playing without all the cards in the deck, so it's no wonder that you don't get it.

1. Myth in the context of religion has a clear meaning based on religious explanation. When you talk about the only possibility -- beside some real core to the Jesus tradition -- of Jesus being 100% myth, you are using the term "myth" to mean something like "unreal". Stop misusing the term when its meaning should be clear from the mythicists who argue that Jesus was mythical.
   
2. Others have argued that Jesus was not mythical, but originally fictional. A number of claims have been made about this fictionalized figure, such as Atwill and Carotta. Where is that in your poll? Nowhere because you lack the distinction.
   
3. Jesus may have been neither mythical nor fictional, but still not real, as I have shown in the case of Ebion, a figure who entered tradition as the founder of the Ebionite movement, but who was not real, not myth and not fiction. Let's call it traditional for lack of a better name. Those people from the past who talked about him thought he was real. He gained traditions and even a hometown. If Jesus was the fruit of Paul's mystical vision (described in Gal 1), with Paul's proselytizing of his Jesus the converts accepting the tradition see Jesus as real.

Why is this diversity so hard for you to understand? If you do understand, why do you use such loose terminology?


spin