Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Criterion of Embarrassment Argument

Form

  1. Historians use the criterion of embarrassment: a source is unlikely to invent material that embarrasses its own cause, so such material is probably authentic.
  2. The gospels contain much that would have embarrassed the early church: women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb, when a woman's testimony counted for little; Jesus baptised by John, implying John's seniority; the disciples' cowardice and Peter's denial; Jesus's family thinking him mad (Mark 3:21); his cry of abandonment on the cross; his admission that he does not know the day or hour (Mark 13:32).
  3. These details are therefore historical.
  4. Since the embarrassing details are historical, the narratives containing them are trustworthy, including the empty tomb and the Resurrection.

The argument is a staple of William Lane Craig's and Gary Habermas's "minimal facts" case.

My Positions

  1. The criterion is weak, and historians of the New Testament have largely stopped using it. What embarrasses us need not have embarrassed a first-century author, and we cannot usually tell. Women at the tomb fits Mark's running theme of reversal (the last shall be first, the insiders fail, the outsiders see) and the historical fact that women were the mourners who attended tombs; it is a narrative choice, not a reluctant admission. The volume edited by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne in 2012 sets out why the "criteria of authenticity" as a method is in retreat.
  2. At most, the criterion yields a mundane core that I already grant. If the baptism, the crucifixion, the scattering of the followers, and the family's doubts are historical, then there was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who was baptised, executed, and abandoned (The Historicity of Jesus). None of those is a miracle. The step from "the women found the tomb empty" to "a body left it" is not this argument; it is the Resurrection argument, with all its problems intact, and the criterion does not help with it.
  3. It is applied selectively. The embarrassing details that support the apologist's case are confirmed; the embarrassing details that do not (the prophecy of the imminent end in Mark 13:30, the incompatible genealogies, the failed sign at Nazareth, the inconsistent resurrection accounts) are explained away. Meanwhile the hundreds of un-embarrassing miracle stories receive no support from the criterion at all, and the apologist treats them as confirmed anyway (Cherry-picking).
  4. Religious texts include embarrassing material for their own reasons. The Qur'an records God rebuking Muhammad (80:1–10); the Book of Mormon has Nephi behead a drunk man on divine instruction; the Hebrew Bible makes Israel faithless at every turn. In each case the embarrassment serves a theological point, and in each case the apologist who uses the criterion for his own scriptures declines to apply it to the others.
  5. Fiction uses embarrassment for verisimilitude. A story in which the hero's followers are brave and his family supportive is a worse story. That a detail is unflattering tells us the author was a competent narrator, which is not the same as a reliable one.

Sources

  • Meier, J. P., A Marginal Jew, vol. 1 (1991), for the criteria as classically stated
  • Keith, C. and Le Donne, A. (eds), Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (2012)
  • Allison, D., Constructing Jesus (2010)
  • Ehrman, B., Jesus Before the Gospels (2016)
  • Carrier, R., Proving History (2012), ch. 5, on the criteria

Also see