An embarrassing criterion

The Criterion of Embarrassment is often used to prove that Jesus must have been a real person. Indeed, he simply must have made potentially embarrassing things, too. Like being crucified. Or being condemned by his own mother. Or being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist. I mean, if it wasn´t true, widely known and easy to check, the Gospel writers would never be forced to admit such things, right? 

Well, wrong. In reality, the Criteron of Embarrassment is embarrassing. First, even the people making the argument admit that the Gospels were written between 40 and 70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, after a devastating war in Palestine, and that both their provenance and authors are unknown. Indeed, they were written in Greek, not Aramaic (presumably the first language of the earliest Christians). Also, most Christians at that time lived outside Palestine, many probably far outside it. So how could anyone check the claims of the Gospels? And no, you can´t claim that the traditions the Gospels are based on must be early. They are mostly absent from Paul, Peter and James...

But a more important question is this: Why would anyone check the claims in the first place? Historical-critical scholars (not to mention modern Christian apologists) tacitly assume that uneducated Christians in Asia Minor 1,900 years ago had the same mentality as a sleuth, perhaps with a dash of Sherlock Holmes and a German philologist? "Let´s try to find out if this Jesus bloke really was rejected by his mother, I mean that´s so shocking, so if they don´t lie about that, maybe we all get resurrected at the Second Coming?" Yeah, that´s how it works, surely.

It doesn´t, of course. Here are some examples. The Church of Scientology is a relatively strong new religious movement, founded by L Ron Hubbard. Now, the Scientologists are spreading all kinds of lies about Hubbard´s early life. They can be double-checked. Indeed, they *have* been double-checked. There are official documents from the US military showing that Hubbard was talking hokum about his glorious past as a US submarine hunter during World War II. There is just one problem: *people interested in Scientology* don´t give a damn. *They* don´t double-check the claims, preferring instead the message of the cult. The Criterion of Embarrassement would work only if the Scientologists have admitted that Hubbard had a mediocre record in the Navy, since that was indeed well-known and could be checked. But the Scientologists brazenly claim the opposite, and their supporters don´t care. This also proves another point: a religious group usually doesn´t have to admit to embarrassing facts about their founders or leaders, since they can usually get away with it *even if the facts are well known*. Which they weren´t in Asia Minor around 100 AD.

Another example: Carlos Castaneda. His books about Don Juan have been debunked god knows how many times, and yet continue to sell in the millions. Few of the readers care to double-check the claims of the books. Note, by the way, that Castaneda (the real founder) invented another founder for his religion: Don Juan, who is a fictitious person. He did so *right under the very noses of the skeptics*. Yet, he got away with it. 

Yes, the Gospels did contain things which were embarrassing...for later generations of Christians. Which is why the later Gospels sound like veiled polemics againts the earlier ones. They weren´t embarrassing for those who wrote them down. Why should we believe that Christianity is any different from the new religious movements that proliferate today? We know from other evidence that religious groups can use a variety of methods when a scripture finally becomes embarrassing. They can burn the old scriptures. They can revise them, hoping nobody will notice. They can re-interpret them. They can claim to reveal an esoteric tradition which says the opposite of the literal text. Or they can write entirely new texts, perhaps based on supposed new revelations. We know that Christians used all of these strategies when dealing with outdated notions in their scriptures. We also know that modern religions do exactly the same things. The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith got new revelations, found new scriptures, or revised old ones, to take just one example. 

So what is the problem, really? The Criterion of Embarrassement is just a speculation. Is there any *real* evidence that the author of Mark found certain things truly embarrassing, but included them anyway, since so many people knew the truth, that he just had to admit it (or that he was so honest that he would have admitted to it anyway)? None I´m aware of. It´s just an assumption. And that assumption is belied by comparative religion.