The Criterion of Mortification<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal featured the comic below, which illustrates a popular misunderstanding of the criterion of embarrassment which\u00a0scholars\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/04\/the-criterion-of-mortification.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Criterion of Mortification\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal featured the comic below, which illustrates a popular misunderstanding of the criterion of embarrassment which\u00a0scholars\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/04\/the-criterion-of-mortification.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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{"id":29632,"date":"2015-04-13T13:01:17","date_gmt":"2015-04-13T17:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=29632"},"modified":"2015-04-13T13:01:17","modified_gmt":"2015-04-13T17:01:17","slug":"the-criterion-of-mortification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/04\/the-criterion-of-mortification.html","title":{"rendered":"The Criterion of Mortification"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal<\/a> featured the comic below, which illustrates a popular misunderstanding of the criterion of embarrassment which\u00a0scholars sometimes use. I\u2019ll share more thoughts below the comic.<\/p>\n

$\"SMBC$ <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s worldview or undermined something that they otherwise seemed concerned to accomplish.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0they<\/em> would have found problematic, and so are unlikely to have made up.<\/p>\n

If only we knew how first-century\u00a0Mediterranean peoples felt about shouting at trees\u2026<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"