The Criterion of Mortification

The Criterion of Mortification April 13, 2015

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal featured the comic below, which illustrates a popular misunderstanding of the criterion of embarrassment which scholars sometimes use. I’ll share more thoughts below the comic.

SMBC proof by mortification

First, it is worth pointing out that, in historical studies, the fact that an author is honest about something does not automatically mean they are honest about everything. Patterns of honesty may make them more trustworthy, to be sure. But sometimes we acknowledge things because we have no choice.

And that leads us to the criterion of embarrassment, which suggests that it is possible to identify things which an author is unlikely to have invented, because those details did not fit well in the author’s worldview or undermined something that they otherwise seemed concerned to accomplish.

The criterion of embarrassment is not about whether a modern reader feels mortified when reading something. It is about the unlikelihood of certain things having been invented by an author, based on what we know from their writings and contextual data about what they would have found problematic, and so are unlikely to have made up.

If only we knew how first-century Mediterranean peoples felt about shouting at trees…


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