Clutch

Vorkosigan, with the $[Republican deficit] question:Where is the bar set for JM'ers?

Sad to say, but there's no avoiding some philosophy of language here -- in particular, a theory of names. That is, "Jesus existed" is just the material mode of the more careful, "The name 'Jesus' picks out an actual human". (In both cases factoring out ambiguity of names.)

The standard view of names is a social-causal theory of reference: If the use of the name N, in my mouth, traces back through a socially mediated causal chain, to the "baptism" (in the non-religious sense) of an object, then I refer to that object through the utterance of that name.

Of course, this treats as immaterial a potentially immense baggage of false beliefs or connotations that might have become attached to the name in the interim. The idea is that these are false beliefs about the very object I name, rather than defining characteristics which, being false, entail the non-existence of a referent.

All of this suggests that the bar for successful reference, hence the existence of the referent, is very low indeed. Notice that the baptism need not even have been with the name N in order for my use of N to pick out the referent; all that's required is a causal transmission story between whatever name was employed for the baptism, and the development of the new name N. For example, Plato was not called 'Plato'; still, the right relation holds between what he was called and our use of 'Plato', so that when we use the name, we refer to Plato, the very guy. Even though we may have very seriously false beliefs about him.

This theory of names is not bulletproof, to be sure. But in the absence of some developed notion of when a name should fail to refer, it's hard to see how the standard for concluding JMism with any confidence could be reached.

Clutch

No takers, huh? Well, the OP was probably too boring.

Anyhow, here's Goliath taking a view on the matter:In other words, Goliath rejects the socio-causal theory of names, in favour of a description theory.

The causal theory, again, says that our use of the name 'Jesus Christ' refers to an actual guy just in case there was an actual guy named '_', and there's a causal chain leading from his being called '_' to our using the name 'Jesus Christ'. (There are subtleties, but that's the rough outline.) However many false connotations got attached to the name in the meantime, just doesn't matter.

On the other hand, Goliath says that 'Jesus Christ' is simply defined as "born of a virgin... yadda yadda... died and stayed dead for a while... came back to life... flew around in the sky a bit... went to heaven" or somesuch.

So if there was no individual who satisfied those descriptions, there was no Jesus Christ. I take it that's Goliath's view.

Is that standard for JM-ers, though?