Burden of proof

[struggle4progress]

6. Summary:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Hercule's life resembles that of Jesus in many ways
There are no physical artifacts from the first century
We don't have any real evidence Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really lived
Even the persecution of Christians by Saul doesn't make it into the historical record
Philo of Alexandria spoke of the Incarnate Word, the Logos
There's that special pleading again

Bottom line: This is a largely rhetorical plug for one of her books, hitting a number of one-liners that by now are so familiar that they approach mind-numbing banality

I suppose I should say clearly, that anyone who thinks carefully about Christianity must admit that traditional Christian theology cannot be proven in any scientific sense, and I think somewhat more is true: any Christian who thinks carefully about Christianity must admit that any attempt, to provide scientific proof for traditional Christian theology, really rather badly misses the target

My objections to "Acharya" have nothing whatsoever to do with her view that Christianity has been cobbled together from other pre-existing ideas: in fact, I would think we should be very surprised indeed, if we did not find in the early Christian texts abundant traces of the cultural world that spawned Christianity. My objections are somewhat different: I think when she is right, she is boring and platitudinous, echoing triumphantly as great insights banalities that have been long recognized, and that when she is wrong, she exhibits clearly her complete lack of real scholarship and her reliance on nineteenth century crackpot sources that no one takes seriously, while maintaining the same tedious triumphant tendencies

The view, that Christian ideas are a variety of mythology, is probably an idea that comes very naturally to modern thinkers, and in some sense, any scientific approach to Christianity might be forced to regard the religion as mythology, at least for the purposes of the scientific investigation, since I cannot imagine (say) how science can treat miraculous claims, except by rationalizing them away. So her views in this regard seem uncontroversial to me. But she goes astray, of course, because she lacks the background and training for the scientific investigations she purports to do and is therefore reduced to reliance on secondary materials -- which she lacks the critical instincts to sort out. A prime example is her Horus=Christ hypothesis, which she has cobbled together from dusty old books lacking any scholarly merit. It is indeed interesting and informative, when someone actually tells a coherent story, based honestly on actual facts, linking aspects of some ancient culture to early Christian thought, and so the story "Acharya" wants to tell about Christ as being modeled on Horus would be interesting and informative, if it had the slightest truth to it -- but sadly it is complete bullshit, based on one false claim after another

And that seems to be her modus operandi, again and again, evidenced in the video here as the nonsense "Hercule's life resembles that of Jesus in many ways." One can like or dislike the Jesus narratives; one can regard them as based on fact, or one can imagine them as fantasies based on wishful thinking; but it really requires a special idiocy to imagine that Jesus is modeled after Hercules

The natural conclusion that I reach, whenever I examine anything from her, is that she is a babbler with little regard for historical niceties. Her assertion here "Even the persecution of Christians by Saul doesn't make it into the historical record," for example, may sound convincing to someone who doesn't think too much or doesn't know too much. But in fact it betrays how little she knows about the actual paucity of our knowledge of that time. Pontius Pilate was a figure attested to only briefly here and there in our surviving copies of copies of copies of Roman texts, and yet we did not know the actual title he held in Jerusalem until it was reconstructed from a fragment of a stone inscription found in the early 1960s. What does "Acharya" think remains? If you want to read something written by a Pharisee, for example, the texts of Paul (formerly Saul) are the only texts left: Jerusalem was razed by the Romans, and the population dispersed into the diaspora; Roman itself was later sacked and burned; two thousand years of conquests and depredations separate us from that time; we're lucky to have anything at all