The Agnostic Christian said

An argument I hear a lot for the authenticity of the Gospels is the Argument of Embarrassment or the Criterion of Embarrassment.

 

“The assumption 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 embarrassed its author or weakened its position in arguments with opponents.”

 

What if a universally acknowledged New Testament apocryphal writing contained a passage that was embarrassing to its central character? One such work does exist. The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

 

“And Paul sent away Onesiphorus with all his house unto Iconium, and so took Thecla and entered into Antioch: and as they entered in, a certain Syriarch, Alexander by name, saw Thecla and was enamoured of her, and would have bribed (flattered) Paul with money and gifts. But Paul said: I know not the woman of whom thou speakest, neither is she mine.”

 

Bart Ehrman, in a fairly throw away comment (not sure if he had this in mind when he said it), says of the Paul portrayed in this passage that he does not put himself in the best light. When he said this it struck me because I hear all the time from Christian apologists that ancient people who made stories up about their heroes would only have put them in the most glorious of lights, and the fact that the Gospels contain embarrassing elements is an evidence of their authenticity. Yet here we have Paul in an apocryphal work telling a bald-faced lie.

 

This is very strong evidence against the Criterion of Embarrassment in my opinion.
  

But again, it’s not, because this was never accepted by the mainstream Christian church.  And what ‘Christian Apologists’ are you talking about?  The doctrine in question was never meant by scholars (who came up with it) to say “This means everything in the gospels is true!”  It would be useless in that case.  It’s meant to distinguish elements in the gospels that are more likely to be based on something that really happened.  And it’s not considered to be infallible, in any event.  It’s just one way of analyzing the text.  

Paul and Thecla comes across as Christian fanfic–a story written to appeal to a larger audience, with all its breathless innuendo.  Maybe there are little snippets of actual oral history in there–gossip–which is notoriously unreliable to begin with.  

Again, the Doctrine of Dissimilarity doesn’t mean no Christian would ever write something less than complimentary about Jesus, Paul, Peter, etc.  It means that they’d include something they’d rather have left out, because it’s widely known to be true.  Like Jesus’ family treating him like he’s crazy when he goes to Nazareth.  

The weakness of the Doctrine is that we need to know why such a thing was written–maybe there was somebody who wanted to discredit members of Jesus’ family who were trying to gain influence in the church.  So the story could have been created to say “They rejected him in life, now try to use their blood connection to him to gain power among us.”  It’s a useful tool, but it’s not infallible, and no scholar says that it is, far as I know.  

Paul and Thecla is such an outlier, though, that it’s not a good text to consider in this context.  Try something else.  

You claim that an entire field of serious scholarship is wrong, when you clearly have no qualifications of any kind.  And have somehow gotten the idea that historical scholars–like Bart, who is an atheist, and uses the dioctrine of dissimilarity, along with other criteria—are attempting to prove the entire bible is factually true. 

I think that pretty much defines the phrase ‘know-it-all douche” don’t you? 

Btw, I strongly suspect you have have mischaracterized the arguments you were allegedly responding to.  I have never once seen a ‘Christian apologist’ say “The bible is true because this thing here is embarrassing.”  They wouldn’t ADMIT to the dissimilarity, as we’ve seen happening on the main forum with Rev. Firth. 

They want to believe all, you want to believe none.  SAME THING.