outhouse

leaving out the import part is factually quote mining what wiki states.

Are footnotes generally direct quotes?

Toto

Quote mining is taking a quote out of context to imply a meaning that does not exist.

In this case, Bingo said "If wikipedia is correct..." and reported what wikipedia said about a survey in a book by Rodney Stark from Baylor University. He left off a note by a critic that was not specifically related to the question of whether people believed that Jesus was a fictional character.

outhouse

The Footnotes are not part of this debate.


This however is a direct quote applied exactly too bingos big "IF"


Taking half a quote to promote ones personal opinion is factually quote mining.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy...out_of_context

The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.[1]


The original meaning here was to show both sides of the coin, not to promote one side

Toto

The footnote gives the source. How can it not be part of the debate?

The quote can only be understood in context by following the link to the footnote and checking the source. That footnote goes to a polemical book that appears to be more about the belief in god and traditional Christianity than the Jesus myth hypothesis. It gives the author's opinion, without specific criticism of the study methodology, at least from what I can read online.

I don't understand what you are arguing about. Do you think that there are many more US citizens who believe that Jesus was fictional than the study indicates?

outhouse

Possibly, but It is unknown.

Thats the problem here. Do you really think the poll was accurate based on the geographic location the poll took place or other control factors?


Walter is probably correct here.

Toto

The point of the cite was that about 10 times as many Britons think that Jesus was fictional as Americans. I think that is probably roughly accurate.

Bingo the Clown-O

Bump because today is the last day to vote.

And don’t forget – your vote really does count!

- Bingo

ApostateAbe

Should OMG read less WTF and more BBQ?

Grog

This has become my new favorite quote. In his book, The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver quotes Nobel-winning economist Thomas Schelling on why intelligence failed to predict Pearl Harbor or 9/11:

I think this observation says a lot about what is going on in the Mythicist vs. Historicist polemic. Historicists see the idea that Christianity emerged with no actual Jesus figure ever existing as strange, outside what they have ever considered. Since it is strange, it need not be considered seriously. I have yet to observe a "Bible Scholar" or "NT scholar" seriously consider the hypothesis.

Ehrman's book was a joke and really demonstrates my position. He wrote a whole book without seriously engaging the evidence or arguments proffered by the most prominent so-called mythicists (I don't like that term by the way because it carries inherent baggage with, I prefer evolutionists).

Silver discusses at length the fact that the "signal" is much stronger in hindsight. We can see the whole track of events that led to the culminating event. I believe that NT scholars start from the position that there was a Jesus and follow the 2,000 years of tradition in looking for the signal in all the noise.

But how do you distinguish in this case signal from noise? They have no clear ideas on that. What we see is the phenomenon of confirmatory bias. The signal that confirms what they already believe is isolated and emphasized and brought under the umbrella of "Truth" or "Fact."

Is it a FACT that Paul learned about the earthly mission of Jesus of Nazareth from the Peter/Cephas and James in Jerusalem? How many times do we see that dredged up as evidence? Yet, actually, a whole host of questions exists on this. First, Paul doesn't actually say that, we have to read the earthly mission of Jesus into that passage of Galatians. Similarly, 1 Cor 2:8 does not say that Jesus was crucified by Romans or even Jews. Many scholars acknowledge that Paul is referring to elemental powers, spirits, demons. However, they interject Romans as earthly agents of these demons (Romans 13 aside).

In short, the field of NT scholarship seems unable to consider what is thought to be a strange proposition: Jesus never existed. Instead, they, in practice, pursue a signal that confirms their original bias. Our understanding of the origins of Christianity are then stunted due to this failure of scholarship.

ApostateAbe

Sometimes, strange things happen in history. Pearl Harbor gets bombed. Somebody wins the lottery twice. And yet we should not be counting the strange propositions as equal to the plausible propositions. Plausible things happen much more frequently than strange things. That doesn't mean propositions of strange things happening in history should be dismissed and ignored. It just means that making a case for its probability is more difficult. The evidence needs to very clearly favor the proposition. The bombing of Pearl Harbor really was improbable until it happened. Most of the other improbable possibilities remained imaginary at best.

Mythicism is strange because it demands belief that there was a personality cult of a human being who never actually existed. As far as we know, whenever there is a personality cult with a myth of a human leader, that person or a person much like him actually existed. Mythicism requires Christianity to be an exceptional religion. That doesn't make mythicism impossible, but the evidence has to very strongly favor the hypothesis. The evidence does not seemingly favor the hypothesis. So, mythicism remains improbable, the same as the conservative Christian theory of Jesus.

Evidence for a strange theory requires more than strange interpretations. As far as we know, there has never been a myth of a crucifixion that claimed to be anywhere but on the Earth. And, in the supposed time of Jesus, they really did happen on Earth all the time, primarily by the Romans. So, when Paul talks about Jesus getting crucified, what reason do we have to think that it was anything but a crucifixion of a human being by human "rulers of this age" on Earth? If anyone wants to propose the hypothesis that the myth put it on Venus or something, then fine, but there needs to be very good evidence before it is accepted as something probable or even seriously possible.