Toto

Thomas Verenna: Why the Criterion of Embarrassment is "inadequate" cites Mark Goodacre for the proposition that the criterion of embarrassment is incompatible with the criterion of multiple attestation.

davidstarlingm

Then why didn't any of the evangelists omit things that we know were embarrassing, like casting women as the initial witnesses of the resurrection, etc?

When we start our critical investigation by assuming that the authors edited arbitrarily without any commitment to accuracy, we've already skewed our approach.

spin

What's embarrassing about women as initial witnesses? Someone just made that up.

You have no secure perspective from which to judge how ancient editors did their work. You seem to be making up rules whose validity you have no way of testing.

GakuseiDon

My bold below:
So according to Goodacre "they could easily omit" those details. So how is the "criterion of embarrassment" used (my bold)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_of_embarrassment

The essence of the criterion of embarrassment is that the early church would hardly have gone out of its way to "create" or "falsify" historical material that only embarrassed its author or weakened its position in arguments with opponents. Rather, embarrassing material coming from Jesus would naturally be either suppressed or softened in later stages of the Gospel tradition, and often such progressive suppression or softening can be traced through the Gospels.

This criterion is rarely used by itself, and is typically one of a number of criteria, such as the criterion of discontinuity and the criterion of multiple attestation, along with the historical method.

The criterion of embarrassment is simply common sense. That it is difficult to use doesn't mean we should create strawman versions of it. Now carry on.

ApostateAbe

I think that there would be reason for multiple attestation of an embarrassing point if

(1) the embarrassing point is a central and inescapable fact, and
(2) if the point can be spun in their own favor.

The way the Christian gospels tend to treat such embarrassments is to spin them--make it fulfill an invented prophecy, make it fulfill an imaginatively-interpreted prophecy, invent flattering events that mitigate the embarrassment, and of course sometimes the gospels really do make apparent omissions of key points.

TedM

Exactly. Just because the subjectivity of it is perhaps greater than other criteria doesn't mean it has no value. It IS common sense and those here that oppose it to the point at which they say it has no value because the level of subjectivity is high are in my opinion not using their common sense, and are appealing to the same kind of logic one uses when they say 'if I can't see it, I can't believe it.'

spin

Common sense is the bias of one's cultural milieu. Hit and miss, just like intuition. It is no substitute for knowing what you are talking about, evidence and argument based on it. Scholars usually attempt to circumvent their biases, not embrace them.

Juststeve

In trials we generally exclude statements made out of court by witnesses not under oath. Such statements are called hearsay. An exceptions is made when the out of court statement is contrary to the interest of the person making the statement. The idea is that one is not apt to tell a lie that is contrary to their interests and therefore the statement against interest has added credibility.

The criteria of embarrassment is based on the same idea. Neither are foolproof, but if [I]ts good enough for jury trial its good enough for hypothetical discussion between reasonable folk and mythers.

Steve

TedM

Couldn't one say then that evidence is the bias of one's cultural milieu, because common sense is used to judge the quality of the evidence?

spin

Knowing what you are talking about is what judges evidence.