But you owe a person who you engage in discussion the intellectual honesty that comes with making a claim
If someone on reddit claims in a comment that they once rescued Elvis Presley from a burning building, I'm going to ask for evidence. If they say to me, "There was a story about it in the New York Times on May 2, 1972, but unfortunately I don't have a scanned copy to send you so you'll need to visit a library," I wouldn't nag them about it. I wouldn't say, "There's no evidence for your claim! Stop shifting the burden of proof by expecting me to go to the library. If you don't drive to the library, find the article, scan it in, and send it to me, then you're clearly lying and being intellectually dishonest."
That's the kind of demand you're placing on me, and frankly, it's absurd, especially considering the context in which we're having this discussion. I didn't publish my claim in a book or a journal, where you would expect a claim to be well-documented. We're on reddit and I made a casual, throwaway remark. I'm not here to be your research monkey. I told you where you can look for the evidence if you want to find it.
Telling someone to "go look for yourself" is shifting that burden.
Nope. Shifting the burden would be if I said, "Prove me wrong." That's not what I said at all. I'm saying, here's where you can find the evidence if it's worth the effort to you.
Telling someone to "trust these few people" is shifting that burden.
Nope. That would be an appeal to authority. And I don't recall ever saying that. What I said is, here's where you can find evidence for yourself.
So far you've only dodged.
If by "dodging" you mean telling you precisely where to look for the evidence you're requesting, then yes, I've been dodging. If by "dodging" you mean trying to explain to you why your request is ludicrously unreasonable, then yes, I've been dodging. If by dodging you mean trying to explain that you're misunderstanding how "burden of proof" works, then yes, I've been dodging.
Here's a little thought experiment: tell me what evidence would satisfy you right now. Tell me exactly, in detail, what it is I could provide for you that would satisfy your demands. Do you really expect me to drive to the library and do an entire research project to satisfy some random, aggressive stranger on the Internet who doubts something I said in a reddit comment? You seriously think that's a reasonable, sane request?
And I have looked in those places and not seen the evidence you allude to or have seen that the places do not in fact support your claim.
"Those places?" Which places would those be exactly? As you may recall, I asked you for the titles of the books and journals where you looked. The reason I asked was not to shift the burden of proof, as you claimed, but to try and arrive at a mutual understanding about why our reviews of the literature have yielded different results. If you were truly interested in working towards a mutual understanding, finding answers to your supposed "questions," and having a conversation that yields results, then I would think you would be willing to answer my simple question. You're asking me to do an entire research project for you, but won't even answer a simple question about where you've already looked. Instead, you dodged the question and have the nerve to accuse me of dodging.
Incorrect. I am saying that there has been no evidence presented that supports the claim. That's entirely different from claiming the opposite of your claim.
That's patently false. You wrote: "It's pretty clear from the literature that there's no clear consensus on the matter." That would be a CLAIM.
something that should be trivially easy to support
Trivially easy??? Driving to the library and compiling a complete, fully cited survey of decades worth of literature on the Historical Jesus is trivially easy? What are you smoking? Look, I really can't spend any more time on this. I already hate myself for getting sucked into this nonsense. I will say, as my final word, that I'm not the one downvoting you. Good luck.