The Criterion of Embarrassment

"Now if they had not been lovers of truth, but, as Celsus supposes, inventors of fictions, they would not have represented Peter as denying, nor His disciples as being offended." -- Origen, about AD 248¹

"the criterion of embarrassment renders a historical datum embarrassing; it does not authenticate already-embarrassing historical data." -- Rafael Rodriguez, 2012²

Summary

The criterion of embarrassment says that a story which made its own tellers look bad is less likely to be their invention. John Meier, who made it the first of his criteria, states it this way: the early church "would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position in arguments with opponents."³ The idea is old. Origen used it against the pagan critic Celsus in about AD 248, pointing to Peter's denial.¹ This article states the criterion at its strongest, sets out its critics' objections, and tests it on four cases: Jesus' baptism by John, Peter's denial, the women at the tomb, and Jesus' cry from the cross.

What the criterion can show, step by step. A text contains an awkward detail; later tellers can be seen handling it as a problem; from these, a historian may infer that the earliest writer took it from tradition rather than composing it; and then ask whether the tradition reports an event. Each step needs more than the one before. This is the route tested here; a writer's admission about his own experience need not pass through inherited tradition. Later reactions show reception. They do not by themselves show where the earliest written account got the detail, and that account is the one that matters. Embarrassment says nothing on its own about the reliability of a whole book or about who wrote it.
A defensible form is a comparison, not a slogan. This article proposes three conditions, drawn from Meier and from Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter: a cost the tellers are known to have felt; that cost visible in ancient texts; and an account of the detail as received tradition that explains the texts better than any purpose the writer is shown to have had. A purpose the text itself supplies counts for more than one a scholar can merely imagine. Neither side has to produce an ancient confession. Theissen and Winter put the core idea in ordinary source-critical terms: "historical credibility belongs accordingly to the “remnants,” that is, to unintentional evidence that is not influenced by the tendency of the source."⁴
The critics' strongest points are real. Morna Hooker, in a 1972 lecture reprinted in 2024, already answered the criterion's ancestor: whether the community "could not have invented" a saying depends "on our knowledge of the early community – and that is inadequate."⁵ A detail that does not fit a Gospel writer's plan would prove at most "that the author has included material which he found already existing in the tradition."⁵ Rafael Rodriguez argues that a detail looks embarrassing only inside a story the historian already assumes.² Dale Allison notes that early Christianity was plural, so what shamed one group could serve another.⁶ These objections defeat the slogan "no one would ever invent this." They do not show that ancient awkwardness is worthless. Hooker herself, in 1972, would still use such tools, positively and cumulatively, to move "from the more to the less probable."⁵ Forty years later she wrote that "it is time to throw away the tools altogether."⁷ The 2012 volume where she wrote that is divided on the question.⁷
Baptism by John: probable. Mark says plainly that Jesus "was baptized by John" in a rite Mark calls "the baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins."⁸ Matthew adds a dialogue in which John objects, Luke never names who baptized Jesus, and John's Gospel never narrates the baptism.⁸ A later gospel quoted by Jerome has Jesus ask, "what sin have I committed that I should go and be baptized by him?"⁹ That shows the scene troubled tellers from Matthew on. Richard Carrier's alternative, that Mark composed the scene to cleanse Jesus for adoption as God's Son, has real support in Mark's own text.¹⁰ The baptism stays probable on a qualified comparison: Paul already called Jesus "him who knew no sin" before Mark wrote, making an early cost plausible; John's testimony offered a way to associate Jesus with him without a baptism for sins; and Meier's indirect arguments from Q and the Johannine writings, if their source theories hold, add evidence against Mark originating the story.¹¹¹¹⁸ The absence of an explicit early link to Christian baptism adds little against a model concerned with Mark's implicit theology. Under Markan priority there is one independent explicit narrative, Mark's. That is not the same as no other evidence.
Peter's denial: a core is probable; the scene is not. All four Gospels tell it.⁸ Raymond Brown judges a factual basis persuasive, for reasons beyond embarrassment, but warns that this "does nothing to guarantee the total scene."¹² The best alternative is that a fall followed by forgiveness taught persecuted Christians. That use is documented. A second-century novel, the Acts of Peter, has Peter flee Rome and be turned back by a vision, and a modern specialist calls him there "the patron saint of those with wavering faith."¹³
The women at the tomb: little added by this criterion. Ancient evidence about women's testimony is mixed, and Mark's readers were not a court. Burial custom and storytelling give reasons to put women at a tomb in a story, true or not.¹⁴¹⁵ The signs of cost are ambiguous. Luke's apostles call the report "nonsense," but the report's content was astonishing in itself, and later Gospels' male checkers may confirm rather than doubt.⁸¹⁶ What survives is Allison's point that a story first told by women had to be adopted by churches led by men.¹⁶ The detailed case is in The Empty Tomb.
The cry from the cross: the criterion does not establish the words. Mark and Matthew have Jesus quote Psalm 22:1; Luke and John give other last words.⁸ Later writers were uneasy. One manuscript changes "forsaken" to "reproached," and the Gospel of Peter has "My power, my power, you have forsaken me," which its modern editor reads as an "attempt to modify the problematic sense of God forsakenness."¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹ But Meier and Brown, who both use the criterion elsewhere, argue that a psalm prayer need not have shamed the earliest tellers.³²⁰ That Jesus was crucified is certain on other evidence; the exact words are not.
The crucifixion itself is the instructive case. Paul calls a crucified Messiah "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks."⁸ Yet the cross became the center of the message. Rodriguez is right that cost and usefulness can belong to the same fact.² Independent sources settle that Jesus was crucified. So the case shows that a costly fact can later become useful, not that the criterion produced a false result.

Verdict. The criterion of embarrassment is a real but modest tool. Used alone, as in "nobody would invent this, so it happened," it overstates. Used as one line in a comparison of explanations, with the cost shown in ancient texts, it adds weight. It adds most for the baptism, some for a core of Peter's denial, little for the women, and almost nothing for the wording of the cry.

Part 1: What the criterion claims, and how old it is

The argument in its own words

The criterion is a rule about sources, not about miracles or theology. It asks whether the people who handed on a story had reasons to wish it were otherwise. If they did, and told it anyway, the story may have reached them from somewhere they could not easily overrule.

The argument is ancient. The pagan philosopher Celsus wrote against Christianity in the second century, and his book survives only in Origen's reply. Celsus charged that Jesus' disciples invented his foreknowledge. Origen answered that the disciples' own writings record Jesus predicting their failure:

Now if they had not been lovers of truth, but, as Celsus supposes, inventors of fictions, they would not have represented Peter as denying, nor His disciples as being offended. For although these events actually happened, who could have proved that they turned out in that manner? And yet, according to all probability, these were matters which ought to have been passed over in silence by men who wished to teach the readers of the Gospels to despise death for the sake of confessing Christianity.¹

Paul Schmiedel made the idea a method in 1901. In the Encyclopaedia Biblica he listed nine passages that a believing church would not have chosen to write, including Mark 3:21 (Jesus' family thought him out of his mind), Mark 13:32 (the Son does not know the day) and the cry from the cross. He called them "the foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus."²¹ His reason was aimed at doubters: "If passages of this kind were wholly wanting in them it would be impossible to prove to a sceptic that any historical value whatever was to be assigned to the gospels."²¹ Schmiedel was no conservative. He used the same passages to argue that Jesus was "a completely human being."

Ernst Käsemann's essay of 1954 folded the idea into the "criterion of dissimilarity." Rodriguez quotes him: the ground is safest "especially when Jewish Christianity has mitigated or modified the received tradition, as having found it too bold for its taste."² John Meier, in the first volume of A Marginal Jew (1991), made embarrassment the first of his five primary criteria:

The point of the criterion is that the early Church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator 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 Four Gospels.³

Meier built limits into the rule from the start. Criteria yield judgments that are "only more or less probable; certainty is rarely to be had."³ "Clear-cut cases of such embarrassment are not numerous." And "what we today might consider an embarrassment to the early Church was not necessarily an embarrassment in its own eyes."³ He ended: "the criterion of embarrassment—like any other criterion—must not be invoked facilely or in isolation."³

Christian apologists use the criterion often, and in strong forms. In his 2006 debate with Bart Ehrman, William Lane Craig said, "Any later legendary account would certainly have made male disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb." He added that the Gospel writers "faithfully record what, for them, was an awkward and embarrassing fact."²² Gary Habermas calls embarrassment "probably the strongest consideration" for the unbelief of Jesus' brother James.²³ J. P. Holding's "Impossible Faith" argument makes the women and the cross two of its seventeen "factors": "If Christianity wanted to succeed, it should never have admitted that women were the first to discover the empty tomb or the first to see the Risen Jesus."²⁴ Critics use it too. Ehrman, arguing against those who deny that Jesus existed, wrote that "aspects of the Jesus story simply would not have been invented by anyone wanting to make up a new Savior," because the earliest followers proclaimed a crucified Messiah.²⁵

Richard Carrier, who argues that the criterion fails, states the popular form in order to attack it: it is "based on the folk belief that if an author says something that would embarrass him, it must be true, because he wouldn’t embarrass himself with a lie."¹⁰ That is not Meier's version, which speaks of a church that would not go out of its way to create trouble for itself. The difference matters, because Carrier's objections hit the folk version hardest.

A defensible form of the criterion

Theissen and Winter give the clearest statement of why the rule might work. It is not special pleading for the Gospels. It "corresponds to the line of argument practiced everywhere in source-critical historical scholarship," which prizes "unintentional evidence that is not influenced by the tendency of the source."⁴ They call it "opposition to traditional bias," and they state its condition precisely: "That which contradicts such clearly demonstrable tendencies (or at least is in tension with them) has a claim to authenticity."⁴ The word that matters is demonstrable. The tendency must be shown in the sources, not imagined by the historian.

The three conditions below are this article's synthesis of Meier, Theissen and Winter, and Hooker's objections. They are not a rule any of them states in this form.

A known cost. The detail worked against something the tellers are known to have believed or wanted. The belief that Jesus was sinless is documented before Mark wrote, in Paul's "him who knew no sin," and Mark's own John says that Jesus is the greater: "After me comes he who is mightier than I."⁸⁸ So a baptism "for forgiveness of sins" carries a cost that modern readers did not invent. Whether Mark himself felt it is disputed, as Part 3 explains.
Ancient evidence of the cost. Later tellers soften, explain or drop the detail, or opponents use it against them. Here the first three Gospels are useful, but only under a stated assumption. This article assumes, with most scholars, that Matthew and Luke used Mark. On that assumption their changes to Mark show how later tellers handled a scene. They show nothing new about where Matthew and Luke got it, since that is Mark. The question that matters is where Mark got it, and their changes do not answer that.
A better explanation than the alternatives. The historian compares two accounts. On one, the detail was already in the tradition and could not easily be dropped. On the other, the writer composed it for a purpose. A purpose the text itself supplies, such as a theme the writer develops or a scripture he quotes, counts for more than one a scholar can merely imagine. But a purpose need not be confessed to be real, and indirect signs of intention are evidence. Neither side may claim a default. Hooker put this plainly in 1972: "the burden of proof, to prove or disprove authenticity, lies neither on one side nor on the other," and a scholar "is not entitled to assume, simply in the absence of contrary evidence, either that a saying is genuine or that it is not."⁵

These conditions speak to where a detail came from. Whether it happened is a further question: whether the people who first told it were in a position to know, and whether anything better explains why they told it.

What it can and cannot establish

The criterion is often treated as a single verdict, "authentic." When the argument starts with later writers' handling of an earlier account, it involves a chain of separate claims, and each link needs its own support. This is not a necessary route for all historical evidence: a firsthand admission can bear directly on an event, if the writer's identity, access and interests are established.

A text contains the detail. This is simply observed. It shows nothing about the writer's attitude. A writer can keep a source's detail without believing it, and can invent a detail he does not believe.
Later tellers handled it as a problem. Changes and omissions are observed; that they answer a problem is an inference from what changed and its context. Where that inference is persuasive, it shows how the story was received in their time.
The earliest surviving writer took it from tradition. This is an inference. It needs either a cost that writer can be shown to have felt, or another early source for the detail. Theissen and Winter raise the obvious doubt even here: "could it be that elements in tension with or opposed to the tendencies of the tradition are not a reflection of the life of Jesus, but relics of one of the earliest phases of Christian history?"⁴ Hooker adds that showing a detail clashes with a writer's aims first requires showing what his aims were.⁵
The event happened. On this route, the inference needs step 3, tellers in a position to know, and a comparison with other accounts of why they told it. Establishing an earlier tradition does not itself establish its truth.
The writer was reliable in general. One admitted failing does not show that a whole book is reliable. It is a small point in a writer's favor, nothing more.
The writer was an eyewitness or wrote with one. Embarrassment cannot show this. A writer who criticizes an apostle need not be that apostle, and need not have his permission. An argument that first assumes the traditional authors in order to explain the embarrassment, and then uses the embarrassment to prove the authors, runs in a circle. Authorship is weighed in Who Wrote the Gospels?.

How it differs from the other criteria

Embarrassment overlaps with four other tests, and the same data must not be counted twice.

Dissimilarity asks whether a saying differs from both Judaism and the later church. Embarrassment is close to the second half. Dagmar Winter states the link plainly: "The criterion is therefore also called the criterion of embarrassment."²⁶ Rodriguez agrees that "our criterion, at the broadest level, is one side of the criterion of double dissimilarity."² Hooker's papers of 1970 and 1972 were aimed mainly at dissimilarity and coherence.²⁷ But the 1972 lecture also takes up Schmiedel's pillar sayings and the redaction-critical form of the argument, so its objections reach embarrassment too. Part 2 sets them out.
Multiple attestation counts independent sources. It can support an event where embarrassment fails, and the reverse. Mark Goodacre points out that the two can pull against each other: a tradition told often and prominently was presumably not felt as a deep shame.²⁸
Hostile attestation is a report from an enemy. It is a different argument. When Celsus mocks the disciples' desertion, he shows that the story was known and usable against Christians. He does not add an independent witness, because he took it from the Gospels.¹
Coherence asks whether a detail fits what is already established. It can confirm a judgment but cannot start one.

Part 2: Why the intuition has force, and how it fails

Later tellers did soften awkward material

The criterion rests on something real: later tellers sometimes drop or soften what an earlier source said. Some clear cases from Jewish and Christian writing:

Chronicles and Bathsheba. Second Samuel 11:1 says that "At the return of the year" David "stayed at Jerusalem." It then tells of Bathsheba, Uriah's murder and Nathan's rebuke, and only after that, at 12:26, of Joab taking Rabbah. First Chronicles 20:1 opens with the same words as Samuel and goes straight to the capture: "But David stayed at Jerusalem. Joab struck Rabbah, and overthrew it."⁸ The shared wording shows that the Chronicler is following Samuel here, and the episode of 2 Samuel 11:2 to 12:25 is missing from his account. He gives no reason. Reading the gap as protection of David's name is a common interpretation, not something the text says.
Josephus and the golden calf. Josephus retells Exodus at length for Greek readers in about AD 94. In his version Moses is gone forty days, the people fear he has died, and then "His appearance filled the army with gladness."²⁹ The golden calf of Exodus 32 does not appear in his account of Sinai at that point. Josephus gives no reason.
Matthew and Mark. Mark says that at Nazareth Jesus "could do no mighty work there"; Matthew says "He didn't do many mighty works there because of their unbelief."⁸ Mark's Jesus asks, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except one—God"; in the Greek of Matthew he asks, "Why do you ask me about what is good?"³⁰⁸ Neither Matthew nor Luke keeps Mark 3:21, where Jesus' own people say "He is insane."⁸
Copyists. Bruce Metzger's commentary on the Greek text reports that the words "nor the Son" in Matthew 24:36 are missing from most manuscripts, and judges that "the omission of the words because of the doctrinal difficulty they present is more probable than their addition."¹⁷ For Mark 3:21 he writes that the original wording "apparently proved to be so embarrassing" that some manuscripts changed Jesus' "own" into "the scribes and the others."¹⁷
Hezekiah's payment to Sennacherib. This is the one case here where the older account can be checked against the other side. Second Kings praises Hezekiah: "after him was no one like him among all the kings of Judah." Yet it reports that when Sennacherib took Judah's fortified cities, Hezekiah sent to him, "I have offended you," paid "three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold," and "cut off the gold from the doors of Yahweh’s temple."⁸ Isaiah 36 tells the same story in nearly the same words but goes from 2 Kings 18:13 straight to 18:17, so the payment is missing. Second Chronicles 32 says only that Sennacherib "intended to win" the cities, says nothing of a payment, and ends with gifts brought "to Hezekiah king of Judah."⁸ Sennacherib's own Rassam Cylinder, dated 700 BC, a year after the campaign, claims "forty-six of his fortified walled cities" and says Hezekiah sent "30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver" and "a mounted messenger of his to me to deliver (this) payment and to do obeisance."³¹ The gold agrees exactly. The silver does not, and the cylinder places the payment after Sennacherib left, at Nineveh, where Kings has the demand made at Lachish. The full comparison is in Why Did Sennacherib Fail to Take Jerusalem?.

These cases show that softening happens. They also show its limit. In the Gospel and copyist cases the later writer's motive is a reasonable inference from what he changed. In the Chronicles and Josephus cases the omission is certain and the motive is not. Shared wording supports the Chronicler's use of Samuel; his omission then shows selection, not that Bathsheba existed. None of these omissions by itself establishes the truth of the older account. In the Hezekiah case the truth was settled by a different kind of evidence, the enemy's annals, and they agree with the older and costlier account on the payment itself. That is one checked case, not a rate. The criterion concerns reception. The step from reception to source, and from source to event, needs further argument.

Nor is softening uniform. Luke keeps Mark's "Why do you call me good?" word for word, though Matthew changes it.⁸ Justin Martyr, about 155-160, quotes the question with no sign of unease, as proof that Jesus "boasts not in accomplishing anything through His own will or might."³² A detail one evangelist softened another left alone, so "embarrassing to the church" usually means "embarrassing to some tellers at some time." A count of what each later Gospel keeps gives a rough base line. B. H. Streeter found that "Matthew reproduces 90 % of the subject matter of Mark in language very largely identical with that of Mark; Luke does the same for rather more than half of Mark."³³ So an omission by Matthew is unusual and worth noticing. An omission by Luke means little by itself, unless he is following Mark closely at that point. Even so, a handful of chosen examples does not show how often later tellers softened things, or how often a softened detail was true.

Six documented ways the criterion can mislead

The critics' objections are strongest when they name a purpose that is attested in the sources, not one merely imagined. Six kinds have documented examples.

Different groups, different shame. Allison criticized the criterion in 1998 for this reason: "this tool may not do justice to the pluralism of the early Church, and ... all of the relevant items are embedded in the Jesus tradition, which means that they were not sufficiently embarrassing to be expurgated."⁶ Theissen and Winter make the same point about plural streams of tradition.⁴
A cost turned into a message. Paul preached "Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks."⁸ Rodriguez puts it well: "Nothing was so difficult for early Christian theology as the crucifixion of Israel’s messiah. But nothing was so fruitful for early Christian theology as the crucifixion of Israel’s messiah."²
Failure followed by restoration. A fall that ends in forgiveness can teach. Brown reports this objection to Peter's denial: "Is it not clearly suggested that he repented, and does it not then have a positive thrust, offering readers courage in their trials and failures?"¹² Paul's own past shows the pattern in a first-person source. He writes that he "persecuted the assembly of God and ravaged it," and calls himself "not worthy to be called an apostle," but then: "by the grace of God I am what I am."⁸ The admission serves his message. Nobody doubts that Paul persecuted the church. So usefulness alone does not show invention.
Polemic against rivals. Theodore Weeden argued in 1971 that Mark is "assiduously involved in a vendetta against the disciples."³⁴ If so, the disciples' failures in Mark are attacks, not admissions. The Fourth Gospel's handling of John the Baptist may answer a rival group. Meier reads it that way, and the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, a fourth-century work, report that "one of the disciples of John asserted that John was the Christ, and not Jesus."³³⁵³⁶
Literary design. Ehrman argues that women discovering the tomb fit Mark's theme that insiders fail and outsiders see: "it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples."²² A writer's theme can explain an awkward scene without an event behind it.
Scripture supplies the words. A detail can be awkward and still be chosen because it fulfills a text. The cry from the cross quotes Psalm 22:1, a psalm the passion narratives use repeatedly.³

Carrier presses a dilemma that covers all six: "If a statement was embarrassing, then why is it in the text at all? ... Yet any such explanation will entail as much reason to invent it as record it. The EC thus becomes self-defeating."¹⁰ The dilemma is strong against the folk version. It is weaker against a comparative version, because one reason to record a story is that it was already known and could not be dropped. That is a reason to record, not a reason to invent. Hezekiah's payment is a checked example of a costly fact that one teller kept, two later tellers dropped, and the enemy confirmed. The question in each case is which reason the evidence better supports.

Rodriguez adds that the redaction-critical version is "triply tentative": it depends on spotting material against an evangelist's tendencies, on identifying those tendencies, and on "a particular source-critical hypothesis."² And an evangelist may keep a source's awkward detail through simple inattention, which Goodacre calls editorial fatigue, rather than respect for history.²

Hooker's objections, 1970 and 1972

Morna Hooker's two papers, a 1970 seminar paper published in New Testament Studies and a 1972 lecture published in Theology, were reprinted unchanged in a 2024 collection.⁵ They are usually remembered as attacks on dissimilarity and coherence, and most of their pages are. But the lecture also answers the older form of the embarrassment argument directly:

There were, for example, Schmiedel’s famous pillar sayings – sayings which the early community clearly could not have invented; but if we are to apply this rule, then we must first be sure that we have understood the saying; and then, when it comes to asking whether there could have been a situation at some stage in the community’s life to fit it, some commentators prove to have more lively imaginations than others; the force of the argument depends once again on our knowledge of the early community – and that is inadequate.⁵

And it answers the redaction-critical form, the claim that "anything which is incompatible with an evangelist’s plan and purpose could be regarded as authentic": "Such incompatibility would, however, prove nothing – except that the author has included material which he found already existing in the tradition. And, of course, to establish even that we should first need to discover the plan and purpose of the evangelist."⁵

These are serious objections, and this article accepts the second one as stated: it is step 3 of the chain above. The first is the strongest general objection to the criterion. The narrow form answers part of it by requiring the cost to be shown in ancient texts, not imagined. It cannot answer all of it, because the earliest communities are known almost only through the texts being tested.

Hooker did not conclude in 1972 that the tools should be dropped. She wanted them used "in a positive way, to increase our confidence about a saying, and not in a negative way, to blackball one."⁵ She rejected skepticism as a default: "we are being no more ‘cautious’ or ‘safe’ in our procedure if we discard doubtful material than if we retain it."⁵ She asked that every judgment give a saying a reasonable "pedigree," "whether it is attributed to Jesus or the church."⁵ And she described the result as a scale of probability, not a sorting into true and false: "We are moving here only from the more to the less probable."⁵ By 2012 she had gone further. Looking back on the papers, she wrote that she had concluded scholars "must continue to use them—though with great caution!"⁷ But she also wrote: "Perhaps, however, the time has come to abandon the whole enterprise of trying to discover the “real historical Jesus.”" And: "I suggest that it is time to throw away the tools altogether, and to opt for plain common sense."⁷

Hooker's alternative is still historical reasoning. She asks readers to understand Jesus in his Jewish context and examine his impact on his followers, rather than divide isolated sayings into authentic and inauthentic piles. Her closing appeal to common sense follows that positive proposal.⁷

Rodriguez builds directly on Hooker. His chapter opens with a passage from her 1972 lecture.²

Admirers can invent failures

The slogan "no one would invent this" is a universal claim, and one counterexample breaks it. The Acts of Peter is a Christian novel of the late second century. Christine Thomas dates its continuous Greek text to about the 170s, and notes that Jan Bremmer prefers the 180s or 190s.¹³ It has a talking dog and a herring, hung in a window, that is made to swim.³⁷ Near its end, Peter is warned of a plot. The text frames what follows gently:

And the rest of the brethren, together with Marcellus, besought him to depart. But Peter said unto them: Shall we be runaways, brethren? and they said to him: Nay, but that thou mayest yet be able to serve the Lord. And he obeyed the brethren’s voice and went forth alone³⁷

Outside the city he meets Jesus entering it: "Lord, whither goest thou thus (or here)? And the Lord said unto him: I go into Rome to be crucified." Peter "came to himself" and "returned to Rome, rejoicing."³⁷

Read alone, the departure is the brethren's counsel and the scene ends in willing martyrdom. Thomas reads it as a lapse all the same: "Peter’s cowardly flight from martyrdom is typical of his character as presented in the Acts of Peter." The same book has Peter recall his denial, and Thomas calls him "the patron saint of those with wavering faith"; "His flight from Rome is just the last in a series of lapses of faith from which he is graciously restored by Christ."¹³

This is a plausible case of admirers composing a failure of the chief apostle, once failure and restoration had become a valued pattern for teaching the wavering. Two limits apply. No other source reports the flight, so its falsehood is a judgment about a novelistic book, not a known fact. And it was written more than a century after the events. It gives a reason to reject the blanket rule against invention, rather than a logically decisive counterexample whose falsehood is independently known. It does not give a rate of false positives.

Awkward to whom, and when?

The criterion is easiest to misuse when a modern reaction is read back into the first century. Meier gives the example himself: the cry from the cross looks embarrassing to us, but "there is no reason for thinking that the earliest Christians (Jews who knew their Scriptures well) would have found the “cry of dereliction” at all embarrassing."³ The same caution applies to the women at the tomb. Allison, who accepts a version of that argument, could not find it before the nineteenth century: "Who first made this argument I do not know. It may have been a relatively modern writer."¹⁶

So four things must be kept apart.

A modern reader's discomfort is weak evidence. It may point to a real ancient problem, but it counts for little until an ancient text shows the same reaction.
An ancient audience's discomfort is evidence, if a text shows it.
A later copyist's or writer's discomfort shows how a story was received in his time. The scribe who changed "forsaken" to "reproached" in Mark 15:34 tells us about his own time.¹⁷
The originator's discomfort is what the criterion needs, and it is the hardest to show, because the first tellers left no separate record.

Part 3: Jesus' baptism by John

What each source says

Mark, usually dated about AD 65-75 (see When Were the Gospels Written?), describes John's rite as "the baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins," with crowds "confessing their sins." Then: "Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan."⁸ The baptism itself takes one verb. The rest is the opened heavens, the dove and the voice: "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."⁸ Before the baptism, John has already said that "he who is mightier than I" is coming.
Matthew adds a dialogue before the baptism. John objects: "I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?" Jesus answers: "Allow it now, for this is the fitting way for us to fulfill all righteousness."⁸
Luke reports Herod's imprisonment of John before the baptism scene, then says that "when all the people were baptized, Jesus also had been baptized and was praying."⁸ The Greek is a passive participle with no agent, so Luke never says who baptized Jesus. The order of telling is not a claim about the order of events, and Luke does not say Jesus was baptized after John's arrest.
John's Gospel never narrates a baptism of Jesus. The Baptist testifies, "I have seen the Spirit descending like a dove out of heaven, and it remained on him," and calls Jesus "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"⁸ Later he says, "He must increase, but I must decrease."⁸ Whether John's Gospel knew Mark is disputed, so whether its silence is a choice to leave the baptism out is an inference, not an observation.
Acts dates Jesus' ministry "from the baptism of John."⁸
Second- and third-century writers. The handling did not stop with Matthew. Ignatius of Antioch, about 110, lists the baptism among the facts of a creed-like summary and repeats Matthew's reason: Jesus "was baptized by John, in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled."³⁸ Justin Martyr, about 155-160, denies outright that the rite met a need: "we know that he did not go to the river because He stood in need of baptism, or of the descent of the Spirit like a dove."³² An anonymous Latin treatise of about 255 attacks a book called The Preaching of Paul, in which "you will find both Christ confessing His own sin" and Christ "almost compelled by His mother Mary unwillingly to receive John's baptism." The treatise protests that "He alone did no sin at all."³⁹ So by the third century one book drew the question of sin out of the scene and another writer resisted it. The contrast with other "low" sayings is telling. Justin quotes "Why do you call me good?" without unease, and Irenaeus does the same with "nor the Son" (Parts 2 and 7), but Justin felt the baptism needed explaining. All of these are later than Mark. They show how the scene was received, not what Mark felt.
Later gospels. Jerome, writing in about 415, quotes a gospel used by the Nazarenes in which Jesus' mother and brothers urge him to be baptized, and Jesus replies, "what sin have I committed that I should go and be baptized by him?"⁹ M. R. James judged that gospel "a secondary document" related to Matthew.³⁷ The quotation shows the saying existed by Jerome's time. It does not fix when the gospel or this saying was composed, although the motif of Jesus' mother pressing him toward John's baptism was already in The Preaching of Paul by about 255. In the Gospel of the Ebionites, known from Epiphanius, "a great light illumines the scene, John calls Jesus “Lord,” and the divine voice speaks not once but twice."¹⁶
Josephus, writing about AD 94, confirms that John "surnamed the Baptist" was a preacher who baptized and was executed by Herod Antipas.⁴⁰ This account of John does not mention Jesus. He also describes John's baptism differently from Mark: converts "must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body."⁴⁰

The case for the baptism

The cost is not a modern feeling. Paul, before Mark, calls Jesus "him who knew no sin," and a rite "for forgiveness of sins" at another prophet's hands sits awkwardly with that.⁸ Meier states the point that matters most: "in this case we are not simply projecting the embarrassment we may feel back onto the early church ... As a matter of plain fact, the Gospels do evince embarrassment at the story of Jesus’ baptism and try to “control the damage” as best they can."¹¹ Allison reads the same trail: the baptism "raised uncomfortable questions. The tradition rose to the challenge."¹⁶ Meier concludes that "the invention of the incident by the early church seems nigh impossible."¹¹

Meier does not rest on embarrassment alone. He opens by conceding that the narrative "is directly available to us in only one independent source, Mark’s Gospel (followed by Matthew and Luke). At first glance, therefore, the criterion of multiple attestation does not apply."¹¹ He then builds three further arguments, each depending on a source theory.

The source Q. Most scholars hold that Matthew and Luke shared a lost source of sayings, called Q. Meier notes four small agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark in a verse and a half of the baptism. More weight falls on the order of Q: it begins with John's preaching of a "stronger one" who will baptize with the Spirit and goes on to a temptation story in which the Spirit leads Jesus and the devil says "If you are God’s Son." Meier asks whether nothing stood between them. He admits that "such arguments are not strictly probative and leave much room for doubt," but concludes: "if forced to choose between probabilities, I think it more likely that some form of a baptismal story stood in Q."¹¹ This argument assumes that Q existed and that Matthew and Luke did not use each other.
John's Gospel and 1 John. Meier argues that the Fourth Evangelist knew the baptism and left it out: traces remain in the Spirit that "remained on him" and in "this is the Son of God." He reads 1 John 5:6, "not with the water only, but with the water and the blood," as pointing to Jesus' baptism and death.¹¹⁸ This assumes that John's tradition was independent of Mark, and it adopts one reading of a verse that, Meier says, "has generated many different interpretations."
Discontinuity. Meier notes that "no NT author ever directly and explicitly links Christian baptism with Jesus’ baptism." That link first appears in Ignatius, about 110, and then spreads widely in the church fathers. If Christian baptism had produced the story, Meier says, the link would have vanished from the whole New Testament and then reappeared at once, "a very contorted tradition history."¹¹

His summary: "Hence I think there are some grounds for claiming that the historicity of Jesus’ baptism is also supported by the criterion of multiple attestation, with the Q and Johannine traditions independently alluding to what the Marcan tradition directly narrates."¹¹ On p. 129 he calls the baptism "one of the most historically certain events ascertainable by any reconstruction of the historical Jesus," adding that multiple attestation "probably" supports it as well.¹¹

He also answers the proposal that the church invented the scene to claim John's followers. That would explain a John who announces and testifies, but not "why the church was not content with a strategy of co-option that made John the forerunner, prophet, and witness to Christ and why it created the only story in the NT that clearly subordinates Jesus to John."¹¹

The case against

The critics' arguments deserve their full force.

One independent explicit narrative under Markan priority. Mark, Matthew and Luke tell the baptism, but Matthew and Luke depend on Mark; their changes are evidence of reception, not separate witnesses. Meier's other arguments are indirect and depend on the existence of Q and on independent Johannine knowledge of the baptism. Goodacre's 2025 book argues "that John knew and used the narratives of Matthew, Mark, and Luke."⁴¹ That challenges an assumption of John's independence. It would not by itself show that every Johannine detail came from them: a writer can use an earlier book and also know other traditions. Only the book's thesis was available for this article, so its arguments about particular passages are not weighed here.
A useful association. Rodriguez reports that William Arnal "suggests that the scandal of Jesus’ baptism only became a problem at a later date (certainly by the time Matthew was written)," and quotes him: "there may indeed have been a time when Christians would have had something to gain by inventing the story of the baptism."² Rodriguez sums up: "The association of the lesser-known Jesus with the prestigious prophetic figure, John, enhanced the former’s reputation, at least until it didn’t anymore."² Arnal's article itself could not be obtained, so this article knows his argument only as Rodriguez reports it.
Theology in the scene. Meier himself states this objection: "the narrative in Mark is obviously laden with Christian theological interpretation."¹¹ Leif Vaage treats the opening words of Mark 1:9 and 1:10 as Mark's own composition.²
Not that embarrassing. Goodacre: Matthew and Luke "are attempting to mitigate potential concerns that the story might throw up, but that is not the same thing as being “embarrassed” by the tradition. The very prominence given to the story by the evangelists suggests that they did not find it all that embarrassing."²⁸
Not embarrassing to Mark, and useful to him. Carrier gives the strongest version, and it rests on Mark's text. He argues that the earliest Christians did not think of Jesus as "superior" until God exalted him at the resurrection: "There is nothing in Mark’s depiction of Jesus submitting to John that conflicts with this view. Only later Christians had a problem with it." On his reading Mark "has full reason to invent Jesus’ baptism by John specifically to create his sinless state, so Jesus can be adopted by God."¹⁰ Mark also needed an Elijah to come before the Messiah, and Mark's Jesus says that "Elijah has come."⁸ "Having John prepare Jesus by cleansing him of sin and establishing his divine parentage, and then endorsing Jesus as his successor, is actually far too convenient for Mark. That is not a statement against interest!"¹⁰ Carrier does not need the later Gospels to misread Mark. He says Matthew "is still just responding to a criticism that Mark had not foreseen would result from his story," and that Luke "concedes the baptism without blush."¹⁰ He concludes that the baptism "looks quite dubious."¹⁰

Assessment

The critics show that Meier's "nigh impossible" goes too far. No one has measured how often early Christians composed costly scenes, and Part 2 shows that admirers could compose a failure. Carrier is right that later handling, which begins with Matthew, does not show what Mark felt. Mark's theophany, Spirit and sonship are textual benefits, not imagined ones. Mark 10:18, "Why do you call me good?", shows that Mark could keep material later writers found too low, which supports Carrier's point that Mark's own sensitivity may have been lower than Matthew's.⁸

So the question is which account better explains the texts. Several points favor a received tradition over Markan composition.

A sinlessness belief predates Mark. Paul's "him who knew no sin" shows such a belief written about AD 55, ten to twenty years before Mark. Carrier's argument needs the qualifier that Jesus was not thought sinless "from birth," and Paul's phrase does not settle when. Paul's belief also does not establish Mark's. This point makes a cost in some early Christian circles plausible; it does not show that Mark himself felt it.
The early link to Christian baptism is not explicit. Carrier says Mark meant Jesus' baptism as the model of Christian rebirth, citing Romans 6 and Galatians.¹⁰ But Romans 6 ties Christian baptism to Christ's death, "baptized into his death," not to his baptism.⁸ Meier observes that the explicit link between Jesus' baptism and Christian baptism first appears in Ignatius.¹¹ That weighs against reading a widely stated early baptismal explanation back into the story. It adds little against Carrier's narrower proposal about Mark's implicit narrative theology: Mark could compose such a scene without other New Testament writers making its symbolism explicit. The adoption and Elijah arguments are not touched by this point.
A cheaper route existed. If the aim was to tie Jesus to John, John's testimony did that without a rite "for forgiveness of sins," as Meier argues and as the Fourth Gospel shows.¹¹ Carrier's answer is that the cleansing itself was the point. That answer is coherent, but nothing outside Mark 1 shows that any early Christian thought Jesus needed cleansing.
Indirect attestation, if the source theories hold. If a source Q independently contained a baptism story before Mark, Markan invention is excluded, though invention before Mark is not. The Q argument is, by Meier's own account, not strictly probative. The Johannine argument adds weight only insofar as the relevant Gospel or epistle passages reflect knowledge independent of the Synoptics. Establishing John's use of those books would not settle that question for every passage.
Independent setting. Josephus independently attests a famous baptizer in Antipas's territory, which gives the scene a real setting. He does not attest the baptism of Jesus.

Against these, Carrier's model explains with one hypothesis why the baptism, the voice and John's role as Elijah appear together in Mark. That is a real merit.

Verdict: that John baptized Jesus is probable, with qualifications. The criterion contributes the documented trail of handling from Matthew on and a plausible early cost whose force for Mark remains uncertain. Together with the less costly testimony route and the conditional indirect attestation, this favors a received baptism tradition. Carrier's account remains a serious alternative, and the missing explicit link to Christian baptism does little to exclude it. Under Markan priority there is one independent explicit narrative. Matthew's dialogue and Luke's arrangement are later handling of Mark; the source of the Fourth Gospel's testimony scene remains disputed. What the baptism meant to Jesus is beyond the criterion.

Part 4: Peter's denial

What each source says

Mark has Jesus predict that "All of you will be made to stumble," and Peter answer, "Although all will be offended, yet I will not." At the arrest, "They all left him, and fled." Peter follows "from a distance" into the high priest's courtyard, denies Jesus three times, and the third time "began to curse and to swear, “I don’t know this man of whom you speak!”" Then "he wept."⁸ Mark gives the curse no object. Brown judges it "very dubious" that Peter is simply calling a curse down on himself, and reports that many scholars "argue forcefully that “curse” should be taken transitively with “Jesus” understood as the object."¹² Earlier, Mark's Jesus calls Peter "Satan."⁸ At the tomb the young man says, "tell his disciples and Peter."⁸
Matthew keeps the scene and sharpens it: Peter "denied it with an oath," then cursed and swore, and "went out and wept bitterly." He also keeps "Get behind me, Satan!"⁸
Luke softens it at several points. Before the arrest Jesus says, "I prayed for you, that your faith wouldn’t fail. You, when once you have turned again, establish your brothers." Peter denies three times without cursing, and "The Lord turned and looked at Peter."⁸ Luke never says the disciples fled, and he places "all his acquaintances" at the cross.⁸ He drops the "Satan" rebuke.⁸
John tells three denials ("I am not") and adds a second disciple "known to the high priest." After the resurrection Jesus asks Peter three times, "do you love me?" and three times gives him a charge: "Feed my sheep."⁸
Paul never mentions the denial. He does say that the risen Jesus "appeared to Cephas," which is Peter, first in his list.⁸ And he records a different failure in his own words: at Antioch Peter withdrew from eating with Gentiles, "fearing those who were of the circumcision," and Paul "resisted him to his face."⁸

The case for a factual core

Brown, in his commentary on the passion narratives, reports that most scholars accept a factual basis, and states their main argument: "Christians would scarcely have invented a story that brought disgrace on one of their most prominent leaders."¹² He adds that all four evangelists, writing freely and after Peter's death as a martyr, kept it, which suggests it was "ineradicably established as tradition." Brown notes that some church fathers tried to explain it away, saying Peter denied only "the man," not the Son of God.¹² Celsus used the story against Christians: the disciples "denied even that they were his disciples, whereas now you die along with him."¹

Brown gives three reasons beyond the general argument.

The cost is shown inside the Gospels. Peter's denial "certainly was presented as such, for it is foretold in the context of Mark 14:27-29, which presents such failure of the disciples as scandal. In Matt how could it not be a problem in light of 10:33".¹² Matthew's Jesus says, "whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven."⁸ That is a cost written into the same Gospel that keeps the scene.
The prediction needs a fulfillment, on Brown's account. Against the view that the story grew from Jesus' prediction, Brown asks: "Why would such a prediction be preserved if it was not fulfilled?" The cockcrow saying "was too immediately linked to Jesus’ arrest to have any meaning ... without a basis in fact."¹² This depends on the prediction being an earlier saying whose preservation needs explaining. The narrative itself cannot establish that premise: a writer could compose prediction and fulfillment together, or build a fulfillment around an earlier saying.
Why give this incident a prediction? Brown asks: "It is not clear why a vaticinium ex eventu would have been created for Peter’s denials when so many other passion incidents were left without one." And if the aim was Peter's rehabilitation, an appearance like John 21 "would have made his rehabilitation clearer."¹² Brown does not say this was the only predicted incident. Mark also predicts Judas' betrayal and the disciples' abandonment (14:18, 27).⁸ Prediction fits Mark's theme that Jesus foresees his followers' failures, so its presence does not independently establish the denial.

Brown also answers the usefulness objection directly: "By analogy they learned how to draw parenetic value from the failure of Peter, but that does not mean they would have felt free to invent the scene."¹² And he reports Maurice Goguel's argument that a Peter who "had denied or cursed Jesus" could not have become a pillar of the church, and answers: "The history of Paul shows what is possible."¹²

The case against

A useful lesson. The denial is followed in every Gospel by tears or restoration, and in a church facing arrest the lesson that a lapsed believer could return had obvious value. Brown cites Robert Herron's reading of Mark 16:7: "If the possibility [to be reconciled] exists for him [Peter], it exists for all before the parousia."¹² This use is documented. Brown notes that Peter's forgiveness was later used against the rigorist Novatianists and Donatists.¹² The Acts of Peter, in the late second century, makes Peter the type of the restored waverer.¹³
An attack on Peter. Weeden read Mark as a polemic against the disciples, and Werner Kelber summed up the effect: "to follow the twelve, or the three, or Peter, is to court disaster."² If Mark meant to discredit Peter, the denial is not an admission against interest.
A story grown from a saying. Goguel and Eta Linnemann proposed that Jesus' prediction produced the story. Brown takes the point partly seriously: "one wonders whether the prediction is not a major factor in why the story was formulated and preserved."¹²
Fewer sources than it looks. Matthew and Luke follow Mark. John may preserve independent knowledge of the denial. Goodacre challenges John's independence from the Synoptics, but knowing those books would not exclude another source for this episode.⁴¹ Four accounts therefore do not establish four independent witnesses; whether there are two lines of narrative evidence remains disputed.

Assessment

Two claims must be kept apart. First, the core: that Peter, after the arrest, disowned Jesus in some way. Second, the scene: three questions, a cockcrow, a curse and a look.

For the core, the comparison runs as follows.

Inheritance explains why a movement that honored Peter kept a story of him failing the very test of loyalty he had claimed to pass. Mark presents this as failure while still directing a resurrection message to Peter (16:7). That combination gives a modest reason to think an awkward memory was being preserved and interpreted. But the same contrast supplies a writer with a lesson, so a cost shown within the story is not automatically a cost to its author. Luke's softening shows his handling of Mark, not where Mark got the story.
The lesson for the lapsed can explain origin as well as retention. Mark's failure followed by continued belonging supplies evidence of that purpose in the earliest account, not just in later use. Later writers' different restoration motifs fit their adaptation of either a historical or a composed Markan core. They do not decide between those origins. Neither usefulness nor awkwardness settles the comparison alone.
The anti-Petrine reading must explain Mark 16:7, "his disciples and Peter," and Peter's tears. Brown and Rodriguez both reject it.¹²² Rivalry over Peter's standing among Christians is not ruled out by this, but it is not shown to have produced the story.
Growth from a saying explains the scene's shape, and Brown accepts that much. Without separate evidence dating the prediction before its narrated fulfillment, the prediction cannot independently authenticate the event. Its specificity also gives the story a strong literary structure.

Paul's letters do not confirm the denial. That Peter was the first named witness of the risen Jesus, and that Paul later saw him give way under pressure at Antioch, fits a story of fall and restoration in a general way. It is weak contextual support and does not test the event.

The criterion also cannot show who told the story. Brown is explicit that Peter may have been "the ultimate source," but "others could have known and reported it."¹² Using the denial to prove that Mark drew on Peter, and then using Peter as a source to prove the denial, would be circular.

Verdict: that Peter disowned Jesus after the arrest is probable, held tentatively. Preserving a prominent leader's failure while continuing to honor him slightly favors an awkward historical core, but a composed lesson about failure and forgiveness can explain the same combination. The judgment carries low confidence. Neither the prediction nor the four Gospel accounts supplies fourfold independent confirmation. Brown's distinction remains useful: "a persuasive argument for a basis in fact does nothing to guarantee the total scene, which is clearly the product of development."¹² The number three, the cockcrow and the wording are not established by the criterion.

Part 5: The women at the tomb

This case is argued in full in The Empty Tomb. This part asks only what the criterion of embarrassment adds.

What each source says

Mark names women who watched the crucifixion "from afar" and saw where Jesus was laid. On Sunday Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome find the tomb open, hear a young man in white say "He has risen!," and are told to tell "his disciples and Peter." Mark ends: "They said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid."⁸
Matthew has the women leave "with fear and great joy" and meet Jesus on the way.⁸
Luke has the women report to the apostles, and "These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them." Peter then runs to check. Later two disciples report that "certain women of our company amazed us," and that "Some of us went to the tomb and found it just like the women had said."⁸
John names Mary Magdalene as going to the tomb and finding the stone moved. She runs to Peter and "the other disciple" and says, "we don’t know where they have laid him," which may imply companions. The two men inspect the tomb before Jesus appears to her.⁸
Paul's list of witnesses names Cephas, the Twelve, more than five hundred, James and the apostles, and no women.⁸

The ancient evidence on women's word

The popular argument says that in the first century a woman's testimony counted for little, so no one would invent female witnesses. One important ancient text is Josephus, who presents it as the law of Moses: "But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex."²⁹ Allison adds that this was a courtroom rule with a wider attitude behind it, and that Josephus "was far from alone."¹⁶

But the evidence is mixed and specific. Osiek points out that in the Mishnah, compiled about AD 200, "the inability of a woman to serve as witness in ancient Judaism is not so clear," and that "Women's testimony is valued and drawn upon in the sphere of private affairs, but not in public."¹⁴ Gerd Lüdemann goes further: "there is no universal ancient view that women are incompetent witnesses."¹⁶ Carrier adds that "Just because it was unseemly for a woman to appear in court does not mean her testimony wasn’t trusted."⁴² And Ehrman reminds readers that "we are not talking about a Jewish court of law in which witnesses are being called to testify. We’re talking about oral traditions about the man Jesus."¹⁵ Mark's readers were not judges.

Reasons women would be at a tomb in any story

The critics do not simply say "someone could have invented it." They give reasons.

Custom. Osiek: "it is women who prepare a body for burial, while men actually convey the body into the tomb."¹⁴ She draws this from comparison with traditional societies of the eastern Mediterranean. Kathleen Corley states, in the introduction to her book, that across Greek, Roman and Jewish practice "Women lamented the dead, composing elaborate narratives about the life and cause of death of the deceased, prepared and served funerary meals, and made offerings to the dead at tombs."⁴³ Her evidence is set out in later chapters that were not available for this article, so it cannot be said here which periods and places it covers. Mark and Luke send the women with spices. If women were the expected visitors to a grave, a storyteller would put women there.
Women storytellers. Ehrman: "who would invent women as witnesses to the empty tomb? Well, for openers, maybe women would." He adds that women "who found their newfound Christian communities personally liberating told stories about Jesus in light of their own situations."¹⁵
The men were gone. The earliest sources say the male disciples fled, so "who was left in the tradition to go to the tomb? It would have been the women."¹⁵
Mark's design. In Mark the insiders fail and outsiders see. "And so at the end of the Gospel, who learns that Jesus has not stayed dead but has been raised? The women. Not the male disciples."¹⁵

Allison answers each. The flight argument "limps," because legends ignore facts, and Luke shows that a teller could simply bring the men back.¹⁶ The Gospels place the disciples in or near Jerusalem that Sunday.¹⁶ On women storytellers his reply is narrower than it first looks. He writes that "We can hardly suppose that females invented the tale and then passed it on for years within their own circles until it was so firmly established that men had to adopt it," and that women, "as far as the evidence runs, did not form their own subgroups within the early churches."¹⁶ He grants in a note that ancient storytelling had gender spheres.¹⁶ What his reply reaches is this: in churches where men held most authority, a story told first by women had to be taken up by men, and Mark otherwise gives the women little to do. What it leaves open is Ehrman's actual proposal, which needs no separate circles. Women could tell such a story inside mixed communities, and it could be adopted because it suited them.

Note what even the critic grants. Ehrman, after offering a literary reason Mark might have invented the women, adds: "I personally don’t think he did; there is no way to know, of course, but my suspicion is that Mark inherited the story from his tradition."¹⁵

What the criterion adds

The signs of cost are real but ambiguous.

Disbelief. Luke's apostles call the women's report "nonsense." Martin Vahrenhorst argues that they doubt the content, not the sex of the speakers. Allison replies that "there is no antithesis here," since Luke's "some women" stresses who they were, and "The evangelist is playing on a familiar prejudice."¹⁶ Both readings fit the verse, which does not say why they disbelieved.
Men check the tomb. In Luke and John, Peter, and in John the beloved disciple too, go to look. This may show tellers uneasy with women alone. It may equally be confirmation by leaders, which is how stories commonly grow, with no doubt of the women implied.
Men come first. The Gospel of Peter, in the second century, has male soldiers and elders reach the tomb first.¹⁶
Hostile mockery. Celsus scoffed at a "half-frantic woman" as a witness.¹ His target was a woman who saw the risen Jesus, not the tomb, and he wrote more than a century after Mark. It is evidence of later reception.
Absence from preaching. Paul's list names only men. Allison asks: "Is it not significant that not a single speech in Acts refers to the women finding Jesus’ tomb empty?"¹⁶ Carrier puts it more strongly: "There is no evidence Christians ever used any female testimony to promote the Gospel."⁴² These are three different claims. The women are absent from Paul's short formula, and from the speeches narrated in Acts. That they were never used in any preaching is not shown, because almost no early preaching survives. The absence fits a cost. It cannot be made into proof that the story served no purpose.

Allison concludes that "Jesus’ followers were probably not abetting their public cause with a hard-to-credit story in which women ... are the featured eyewitnesses," and calls the case "not a bad argument."¹⁶ Osiek's verdict is stronger: "Its very persistence must indicate that something actually happened that Sunday morning at the tomb."¹⁴ That is her inference from the story's survival. The surviving texts establish the women's role by Mark's time. Their later persistence does not by itself place it before Mark or show why it originated.

Three further limits keep the weight small.

Christian practice complicates the proposed cost. Paul's letters show women among his coworkers. Ehrman notes Junia, "foremost among the apostles."¹⁵ This gives a reason not to transfer courtroom restrictions directly to Christian storytelling. It does not establish the attitudes of Mark's particular audience.
The argument is modern. Church fathers did treat the women's discovery as a problem to be discussed, and Allison lists studies of those texts.¹⁶ But he could not find anyone before the nineteenth century who turned it into a proof that the story was true.¹⁶ That does not make the argument wrong. It does mean that the slogan's confidence is a modern addition.
Women at a tomb are expected anyway. The custom and storytelling reasons above explain the women's presence without an event. What remains for the criterion is the question Allison presses: why churches led by men kept and built on a story that put women first.

Verdict: the criterion adds a little weight to the view that a report of women finding the tomb was part of the tradition Mark received, and less to the view that the event happened. The overall judgment on the women and the tomb belongs to The Empty Tomb, which calls the discovery more likely than not, held tentatively.

Part 6: The cry from the cross

What each source says

Mark: "At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”" Bystanders think he is "calling Elijah." Then "Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the spirit."⁸
Matthew has the same cry in a partly Hebrew form, "Eli, Eli," and a second loud cry without words.⁸
Luke has none of this. His Jesus says "Father, forgive them" (a saying missing from some early manuscripts), promises a criminal "today you will be with me in Paradise," and dies saying "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!"⁸ That last line quotes Psalm 31:5.⁸
John has Jesus entrust his mother to the beloved disciple, say "I am thirsty!" so "that the Scripture might be fulfilled," and die saying "It is finished!"⁸
Psalm 22, which Mark's cry quotes, opens in complaint, describes mockers who "shake their heads" and men who "divide my garments," and ends in praise: God "has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted ... when he cried to him, he heard."⁸ Mark's crucifixion scene echoes the mocking and the garments as well as the opening line.

The three traditions share no last words. Brown notes that "of these at most only one can represent the oldest discernible tradition."²⁰ That is a claim about the oldest tradition, not about what Jesus could have said. Two different hypotheses explain the differences. Each evangelist may have selected a different remembered utterance, which assumes that several were remembered. Or later evangelists may have replaced the earlier wording with other psalm lines, which assumes they knew it and felt free to change it. Brown, working with a stated scenario of Gospel development, takes the second view and thinks Mark's cry "seems to have been known by all the evangelists (even if two did not reproduce it)."²⁰ Combining all the sayings into "seven last words" assumes that every one is historical. Wholesale invention does not follow from the differences either.

Later discomfort is documented

Later readers did find the cry hard.

Codex Bezae, supported by a few other Western witnesses, changed "forsaken" to "reproached." Metzger judges that this reading "may have been substituted for the usual reading by someone who could not understand how God would have forsaken Jesus on the cross."¹⁷
The Gospel of Peter has: "And the Lord cried out, saying, My power, my power, you have forsaken me. And when he had said it he was taken up."¹⁸ Its one long manuscript, from Akhmim in Egypt, was copied centuries later. Paul Foster, its modern editor, dates the composition to "the period 150-190 CE," assuming the text is the one Bishop Serapion read in the 190s.¹⁹ M. R. James in 1924 thought the gospel "throws doubt on the reality of the Lord’s sufferings."³⁷ Foster rejects that reading. For him the cry "is the author’s attempt to modify the problematic sense of God forsakenness communicated by Jesus in the form of the cry of dereliction as it is presented in the Matthean and Markan accounts," and the case for calling the text docetic is not sustained.¹⁹
Brown reports that "from the early Church Fathers to contemporary scholars and preachers many have resisted the surface import that would have Jesus expressing the sentiment of being forsaken by God."²⁰

Schmiedel counted the cry among his nine "foundation-pillars."²¹

Why Meier and Brown do not use it here

Meier rejects this case. The passion stories were told in the words of the lament psalms from the start, and those psalms "regularly direct forceful complaints to God" without implying despair. So "there is no reason for thinking that the earliest Christians (Jews who knew their Scriptures well) would have found the “cry of dereliction” at all embarrassing. Whether or not Jesus actually spoke Ps 22:1 on the cross, the criterion of embarrassment, taken in isolation, cannot establish the historicity of those words."³

Brown weighs the case in detail and reaches the same place. The Aramaic does not prove Jesus said it, because "an Aramaic-speaking Christian community did compose prayers in Aramaic, e.g., Maranatha (I Cor 16:22)."²⁰ The "no Christian would dare" argument fails, because the cry "is not an expression of despair in the strict sense ... and early Christians would scarcely think it blasphemous or unworthy to portray Jesus as praying a psalm."²⁰ Luke and John "felt free to change Jesus’ last words ... to other psalm citations or allusions." On Brown's view, that is easier if the first wording was itself a Christian choice.²⁰ His conclusion: when the arguments are weighed, "no one can say that the case for" the cry "as the ipsissima verba of Jesus is established."²⁰ The Latin phrase means "his very words." Brown does not say the words are invented. He thinks it "not inconceivable" that a dying Jesus prayed this psalm.²⁰

Two errors must be avoided here.

Different last words do not prove suppression. Luke and John may have dropped the cry because they disliked it. They may have used other psalms that suited their accounts better. Or they may have drawn on other memories. Their silence alone does not tell which.
Scriptural fit does not prove invention. A dying Jew might well pray a psalm. That the words fit Psalm 22 explains why Christians would remember or use them; it does not show they were made up.

Three different claims

The case is usually blurred, so it helps to separate three claims, and then a fourth.

Jesus was crucified, a shameful death. This is certain, and not because of embarrassment. It is reported by Paul and by non-Christian writers, as Roman Law and Crucifixion sets out. The shame is documented in Christian and hostile sources alike. Paul calls it "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks," and cites the law that "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree."⁸⁸ Justin, about AD 155, reports that pagans called it "madness" that Christians "give to a crucified man a place second to the unchangeable and eternal God."⁴⁴ His Jewish character Trypho says, "But whether Christ should be so shamefully crucified, this we are in doubt about," and "For we cannot bring ourselves even to think of this."³²
Jesus died on the cross. This too rests on other evidence, weighed in The Swoon Theory.
Jesus cried out before he died. Mark reports a loud cry, and Matthew and Luke follow Mark. The Gospel of Peter, in M. R. James's judgment, "uses all four canonical Gospels."³⁷ So these are not independent reports. Brown lists scholars who think the earliest memory was "a loud wordless cry," and notes that "One could find support for the proposal in Heb 5:7," which speaks of "a strong clamor" but gives no words.²⁰ Hebrews says this happened "in the days of his flesh" and does not say at the cross.⁸ Brown also notes that a loud cry "has an apocalyptic tone, and so could be one of the signs of the last times."²⁰ So even a wordless cry may be partly theological.
Jesus spoke these words. Here the criterion gives little.

Why a shameful death could become the message

The crucifixion is the case Rodriguez uses against the whole method: a criterion that strains out "the historical gnats" ends up swallowing "even the camel of Jesus’ crucifixion!"² His point is that the most costly fact in the tradition was also its most productive.

That point is true, and it should be stated plainly. Paul made the cross the center of his preaching. Ehrman, in his debate with Craig, describes how it happened: Jesus' followers "turned to their scriptures to try and make sense of it," and "No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be crucified."²² He made the same point in 2012 against those who deny that Jesus existed: "prior to Christianity, there were no Jews at all, of any kind whatsoever, who thought that there would be a future crucified messiah."²⁵

Ehrman's words go beyond what the sources can show. No one knows what all Jews thought, and Hooker's warning applies: any claim that an idea was absent from Judaism "is inevitably an argument from silence, and should be treated as such."⁵ Several things need to be kept apart: a suffering righteous figure, an anointed person who dies, an expected end-time Messiah, and a crucified Messiah. Daniel 9:26 already says that "the Anointed One will be cut off," though who is meant is disputed.⁸ Second Temple Messianic Expectations examines the dated texts and finds none with a messiah who suffers, dies and atones. What is documented is the reaction: Paul's "stumbling block" and Trypho's "we cannot bring ourselves even to think of this."

Carrier goes further. He says that the castration of the god Attis, a shameful story at the heart of a cult, "alone refutes" the argument that a church would not create a scandal it then had to defend.¹⁰ That shows that religions can center on a shameful story. It does not show that worshipers invent such stories about a recent, public figure, because the Attis story is a myth about a god of the distant past, not a report about a man executed within living memory. Carrier concludes that for the crucifixion "The EC argument alone is simply insufficient."¹⁰ That is correct, and it is why the crucifixion rests on independent reports instead.

But the crucifixion is not a false positive. The method would have marked it as probably historical, and it is historical. What the case shows is that a costly fact can become useful afterwards, so finding a later use does not cancel an earlier cost. The order matters: on all the evidence, Christians did not choose the cross and then find meaning in it. They had a crucified leader and then found meaning in that.

Verdict: that Jesus was crucified is certain on other grounds. That he cried out before death is reported by one line of tradition, Mark's, and is plausible, but the reports are not independent. That he spoke the words of Psalm 22:1 is possible, but the criterion of embarrassment does not establish it. The later discomfort is real evidence of how the words were received, and nothing more.

Part 7: Two more cases that test the method

Jesus' family thought him out of his mind

Mark 3:21 says that "his friends" or, more likely, his own people "went out to seize him; for they said, “He is insane.”" The Greek, οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ, means "those from him," and Mark frames the scene with the arrival of "His mother and his brothers."⁸ Who "those from him" are, and who the "they" are who say it, are open questions; the framing makes the family the natural reading, not a certain one. John's Gospel says separately, "For even his brothers didn’t believe in him."⁸

This is one of the better cases by the criterion's own standard, because discomfort is documented at three levels. Matthew and Luke both keep the visit of the mother and brothers but drop the charge of insanity.⁸ Matthew keeps about nine-tenths of Mark's material, and here he keeps the Beelzebul dispute that follows the verse in Mark and the family's arrival after it, so his silence about the charge is not routine shortening.³³⁸ Some copyists changed the text so that "the scribes and the others" said it, a change Metzger explains by embarrassment.¹⁷ And Theissen and Winter, who are cautious about the criteria, make it their example: "This can not possibly have been invented! After Easter, members of Jesus’ family belonged to the early Christian community and were disciples of Jesus."⁴ Jesus' brother James led the Jerusalem church, which Paul confirms.⁸

Three limits apply. First, the discomfort is documented in Matthew, Luke and the copyists, all later than Mark. It shows the verse was hard for them. It does not by itself place the saying before Mark. Second, John 7:5 adds an independent report only if John is independent of Mark at this point, which is disputed. Third, Mark 3:21 names no one. Habermas uses the criterion for James's unbelief in particular.²³ The texts support unbelief among Jesus' brothers. They do not name James as one of those who said "He is insane."

The Son does not know the day

Mark 13:32 has Jesus say that "no one knows—not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."⁸ Meier calls it "highly unlikely that the Church would have taken pains to invent a saying that emphasized the ignorance of its risen Lord, only to turn around and seek to suppress it."³ The later handling of this verse can be dated, and it points both ways.

Luke stops at this verse. Luke follows Mark's chapter closely to its end. His "this generation will not pass away" and "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will by no means pass away" match Mark 13:30-31 almost word for word. Then, where Mark says that not even the Son knows the day, Luke turns to a warning against "carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life."⁸ Luke's nearest saying comes in Acts, where the risen Jesus says only, "It isn’t for you to know times or seasons which the Father has set within his own authority."⁸ The Father's authority over the date stays; the Son's ignorance goes. That Luke dropped it for this reason is an inference from what he kept and left out. He gives no reason.
Matthew kept it. In Matthew 24:36 most manuscripts lack "nor the Son," but Metzger reports that "the best representatives of the Alexandrian, the Western, and the Caesarean types of text contain the phrase," and judges the omission deliberate.¹⁷¹⁷ Matthew even adds "only" to "the Father."³⁰ So Matthew, who changed "Why do you call me good?", left this saying in place. The deletions are the copyists'.
Irenaeus was not troubled by it. About 180, Irenaeus turned the saying against teachers who claimed secret knowledge: "If, then, the Son was not ashamed to ascribe the knowledge of that day to the Father only, but declared what was true regarding the matter, neither let us be ashamed to reserve for God those greater questions which may occur to us."⁴⁵
The fourth century fought over it. In the controversy over whether the Son is fully God, Athanasius says his Arian opponents "think they have in them an important argument for their heresy." His answer is that Jesus spoke "according to the flesh," to show "that, as man, He knows not."⁴⁶

So the first-century sign of discomfort is Luke's omission alone. Open explanation belongs to the fourth century, and in between a bishop could quote the saying as a model of humility. Meier's "seek to suppress it" fits the copyists and the fourth-century theologians, not every early reader.

Theissen and Winter's caution applies with force. A saying could be a "relic" of an early stage of Christian belief rather than a word of Jesus.⁴ One proposal is that a church still expecting the end soon, and not yet calling Jesus all-knowing, could have said this of him. That is a proposal, not a measured stage of belief. The firm evidence is that Mark, about 65-75, has the saying, Luke left it out at the point where Mark has it, and later copyists of Matthew and fourth-century theologians found it hard. Irenaeus shows that it was not a problem for every reader in between, so the cost to a church that composed it may have been small. So the criterion gives good evidence that the saying is at least as old as Mark and was found difficult by some later tellers. It gives weaker evidence that Jesus said it.

What the controls show

The outside cases in Part 2, Chronicles, Josephus and Hezekiah's payment, and these two inside cases point the same way. Later tellers sometimes soften or drop an awkward older text. That is good evidence that the older text existed and was known. It cannot by itself tell whether the older text was right, or how far back it goes. For that, the historian needs to know who first told it and how close they stood, or, as with Hezekiah, to find an independent record.

Part 8: The four cases compared

Claim	Earliest attestation	Ancient evidence of awkwardness	Documented purposes it could serve	Independent sources	What embarrassment adds
John baptized Jesus	Mark 1:9, about AD 65-75	Matthew's dialogue; Luke's unnamed baptizer; no baptism narrated in John; Ignatius repeating Matthew's reason, about 110; Justin's denial that Jesus needed baptism, about 155-160; a sin-confessing Christ in The Preaching of Paul, reported about 255; the Nazarene gospel's "what sin have I committed?", attested about 415	Mark's sonship, Spirit and Elijah themes (Carrier); association with a famous prophet (Arnal, as reported by Rodriguez)	Mark as the one independent explicit narrative under Markan priority; Q and Johannine writings indirectly, if Meier's source theories hold; Josephus for John's baptizing	Some. A cost felt from Matthew on and plausible earlier, uncertain for Mark. With the other qualified arguments: probable.
Peter disowned Jesus	Mark 14:66-72; also John 18	Cost written into Mark 14:27-29 and Matthew 10:33; Luke's softening; church fathers' explanations; Celsus's use	A lesson for the lapsed, visible in Mark and in later use; polemic against Peter (Weeden, rejected by Brown and Rodriguez); a story grown from a prediction (Goguel, Linnemann)	Mark; John if independent for this episode; Paul confirms neither	Some for the core, little for the scene. Core probable, held tentatively with low confidence.
Women found the tomb	Mark 16:1-8	Luke's "nonsense," reason disputed; men check in Luke and John; men first in the Gospel of Peter; Celsus's later scorn of a woman who saw the risen Jesus	Mourning custom (Osiek, Corley); women storytellers, absent men, Mark's theme (Ehrman)	Mark; Luke 24 and John 20 possibly partly independent	Little. Role established by Mark's time; a pre-Markan tradition needs further inference. See The Empty Tomb.
Jesus cried Psalm 22:1	Mark 15:34	Bezae's "reproached"; the Gospel of Peter's "my power," a softening on Foster's reading; church fathers' resistance	Psalm 22 as the frame of the passion story (Meier, Brown)	Mark only; Matthew follows Mark	Little for the words; nothing needed for the crucifixion, which other sources establish.

The table's last column follows the reasons given in Parts 3 to 6, not a count of scholars. The verdicts would change if new evidence changed the sources' independence. If John's Gospel were shown to preserve independent knowledge of the denial, the case would rest on two narrative lines. If its relevant baptism material came from the Synoptics, that part of Meier's indirect attestation argument would fall. Showing that John used those books somewhere would not establish dependence for every episode or for 1 John 5:6.

Objections and responses

"The 2012 volume showed that the criterion is dead." The volume's title says "demise," but its contributors do not agree, as Hooker says in its foreword: "Contributors to this volume are divided between those who think that these “tools” still have a modest role, and those who are determined that they must be put aside altogether."⁷ Rodriguez's chapter on embarrassment argues that historians should stop pulling isolated facts out of the Gospels, and that "The time for dissolving the Jesus tradition into individual units and pushing those units through a battery of tests—including the criterion of embarrassment—has passed."² That is a claim about method, and it stands or falls on its own reasons. It is not weakened by the fact that he does not think the events invented: "I am not persuaded that Jesus’ later followers fabricated the Beelzebul controversy," and he rejects Weeden's reading of the disciples.²² Chris Keith, an editor, keeps "the category (not criterion) of “embarrassment”" as a way of reasoning about the past through early interpretations.²⁷ Keith also states the volume's central claim in his own words: "The assumption that scholars can establish “authentic” tradition as something in contrast to, and recovered from, early theological interpretation is the foundational basis of the criteria approach." And: "Once that foundation crumbles, the criteria approach is irreparably broken."²⁷ But he is careful about what follows. The claim "does not entail a further claim that scholars cannot posit, discuss, and propose a past entity (whether the oral Jesus tradition or the historical Jesus) behind the interpretations of the written Gospels." Some interpretations "have better claims to historical accuracy than others," and scholars must judge them "by explaining those interpretations, not casting them aside."²⁷ The narrow form used in this article does not peel an uninterpreted kernel away from Matthew's dialogue or Luke's silence. It treats those interpretations as the evidence and asks which account of the earliest tradition best explains them. That is the task Keith describes, though he would not call its result "authentic" tradition. A book's title is not a vote of a field, and a divided book does not settle the method either way.
"Morna Hooker refuted the criteria in 1972, and the field ignored her for forty years." Hooker's 1972 lecture does reach embarrassment: it answers Schmiedel's pillar sayings and the redaction-critical form directly, and both objections are taken into this article's account.⁵⁵ But "refuted" is not her word for what she did then. In 1972 she said a scholar "must, alas, use the tools we have been discussing, for there are no others," but "Neither must he use them negatively – to blackball a saying."⁵ Her position hardened later. In 2012 she wrote that "it is time to throw away the tools altogether."⁷ As for being ignored, she recalls that her criticisms "were dismissed or ignored by scholars who were wedded to the use of such criteria." But she adds that others "were feeling equally uneasy about the methods being used." Robin Barbour was one.⁷ Rodriguez and Keith both build on her.²²⁷ How widely the field heeded her between 1972 and 2012 is not measured here.
"Embarrassment is in the eye of the historian." Partly true, and Rodriguez shows it for several cases. The answer is to require ancient evidence of the cost, as condition 2 does. For the baptism that evidence begins with Matthew. For the cry it exists only in later reception, and Meier and Brown both decline to use it.
"Everything in the Gospels served the church, so nothing is against interest." Rodriguez argues this.² But a fact that serves later can still have cost at first. Paul's admission that he persecuted the church served his preaching of grace, and no one doubts that it happened.⁸ The order matters. A church that had a crucified leader could make the cross its message. A church choosing a message from scratch had far less reason to choose the cross.
"The criterion is apologetic special pleading." Origen used it as an apologist, but Schmiedel, a liberal scholar, made it a method to show skeptics that Jesus existed and was "a completely human being."²¹ Theissen and Winter derive it from ordinary source criticism, and Ehrman, an agnostic, uses its logic.⁴²²
"The Gospels admit so many failures that they must be honest throughout." This is a common apologetic list: the disciples' doubts, the family's unbelief, Peter's denial, the women, the shameful death. Each item has to be tested on its own, and several are weak, as Parts 5 and 6 show. Several weak cases can add up, but only as far as they bear on each other. Here the same writers and the same purposes lie behind many of them, so they are not independent tests, though that does not reduce their joint force to nothing. Frankness about one failure is a small point in a writer's favor elsewhere, not a guarantee. Luke, who keeps the denial, also softens it.
"No one would ever invent something shameful about their hero." The Acts of Peter has Peter, at his friends' urging, flee Rome until a vision turns him back, and a specialist reads it as his last lapse.¹³ It is a plausible literary counterexample, although the episode's falsehood is not independently established. A categorical rule against invention is unwarranted. What survives is the weaker hypothesis that a cost can make invention less likely, other things equal; neither the size of that effect nor the balance with a story's benefits is measured here.
"Since the Acts of Peter invented a failure, the denial was probably invented too." One later case does not give a rate, and its own falsehood is a judgment, not a known fact. The Acts of Peter was written more than a century after its setting, in a book full of wonders, by an author who already knew the canonical denial. The denial itself appears in the earliest passion narrative and carries the specific marks set out in Part 4. The cases are not alike enough to transfer a verdict.
"If the criterion fails for a case, the event did not happen." Merely failing to establish an event does not show that it did not happen. The crucifixion is certain without this criterion, and an event with no embarrassing features can be well attested by other sources. If the inquiry uncovers positive evidence of composition, that evidence must still be weighed against the report; it is not erased by saying that one criterion failed.
"Combining several criteria multiplies the probability." Multiplying separate marginal probabilities requires independence; dependent evidence can still be combined by weighing each line given the others. Here shared sources and purposes make a simple multiplication inappropriate. Goodacre, in a 2005 remark that Carrier quotes, thought the two can cancel: "If everyone, Q, an independent Thomas, Mark, Matthew, Luke all have this same material, who is embarrassed about it?"⁴⁷¹⁰ That overstates it in turn: a detail can be widely told because it could not be dropped. This article gives no numerical odds, because none of the inputs has been measured.
"The baptism was invented by Mark to make Jesus' adoption as Son of God possible." This is Carrier's proposal, and it is a coherent reading of Mark 1 with real textual support.¹⁰ Part 3 weighs an early sinlessness belief, the less costly testimony route, and the conditional Q and Johannine evidence for a received tradition. None is decisive alone. The missing explicit link between Jesus' baptism and Christian baptism adds little against Carrier's implicit narrative reading.
"Peter's denial shows that Mark's source was Peter." The criterion cannot show this. Brown notes that "others could have known and reported it."¹² An argument that assumes the traditional authors in order to explain the embarrassment, and then uses the embarrassment to prove the authors, is circular.
"Women's testimony was worthless, so no one would invent it." The evidence is mixed, as Part 5 shows, and Mark's audience was not a court.¹⁴⁴² A smaller form survives: later tellers added men, the women are absent from Paul's list and the speeches in Acts, and churches led by men kept a story that put women first. Each of these has another possible explanation, so the weight is small.
"Hooker's point about imagination cuts both ways, so the criterion is useless." It does cut both ways: a critic can imagine a purpose as easily as a defender can imagine a cost. That is why condition 3 gives more weight to purposes and costs that the texts themselves show. The remaining uncertainty is real, and it is why every verdict here is "probable" or weaker.

Issues and unanswered questions

No measured error rate. No test of the criterion against a set of cases where the truth is known was found. Single checked cases exist. Hezekiah's payment to Sennacherib (Part 2) was kept in Kings, dropped by Isaiah 36 and Chronicles, and confirmed by Sennacherib's annals within a year of the event. The crucifixion, whose cost Paul documents before the Gospels were written, is fixed by non-Christian writers (Part 6). In both, the pattern the criterion relies on pointed the right way. Two cases are not a rate, and they are biased: checkable cases are public events, kept in royal archives or reported by outsiders, which are the hardest to invent and the least like a private scene such as Peter's denial. A real test would gather every case where an ancient writer reports a cost to his own side and an independent source can check it, and count the misses with the hits. Without one, statements like "nigh impossible" and "cannot possibly have been invented" are judgments, not measurements. That does not bar reasoned judgments of the "probable" kind made here.
John's sources for particular episodes. Several verdicts would strengthen if John's Gospel told the denial or the women's visit independently of the Synoptics, and Meier's Johannine argument for the baptism needs independent knowledge of that event. Only the publisher's description of Goodacre's 2025 case that John used the Synoptics was available. A general dependence thesis does not settle each passage's source.
Sources read only at second hand. William Arnal's 1997 article, Leif Vaage's 1996 essay and Kelber's work are known here only through Rodriguez and Keith. Meier's 1997 article on the Twelve was not obtained. Corley's evidence for women's funeral practice is in chapters not read. Hooker's papers were read in their 2024 reprint, not in the original journals.
What Mark thought. Whether Mark himself felt the baptism as a problem is the crux between Meier and Carrier, and Mark never says.
The source Q. Meier's argument for a baptism story in Q depends on Q's existence and on Matthew and Luke not using each other. Scholars who doubt that Q existed would read the minor agreements differently. That debate is not entered here.
The Gospel of Peter. Foster's date rests on identifying the text with the gospel Serapion read. Theories that it preserves an early source, such as John Dominic Crossan's, were not examined.
Late attestations. The Nazarene gospel is known chiefly through Jerome, about 415. The baptism's trail between Matthew and Jerome is filled by Ignatius, Justin and the treatise of about 255 (Part 3), but all of them are later than Mark. The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions are a fourth-century work, preserved in a Syriac manuscript of 411 and in Rufinus's Latin.³⁶ Both show reception in their time. Neither shows what the first tellers felt, and neither fixes when its particular saying was composed.
Josephus's silence. Josephus omits the golden calf without explanation. The case shows an omission in a later teller, not his motive, and it is not evidence about the event.

Verdict

The criterion of embarrassment is old, much older than modern Jesus scholarship. Origen used it against Celsus, Schmiedel made it a method, and Meier made it his first criterion. Its critics, from Hooker in 1972 to Rodriguez and Carrier, give reasons to reject its popular form, "no one would invent this." Stories of admired figures' failures can serve a writer's purpose, and the Acts of Peter supplies a plausible case of literary invention. Embarrassment depends on the story a historian assumes and on knowledge of early communities that is thin. A tradition kept because it was useful is not thereby against interest.

What survives is narrower and still useful. When later ancient texts show tellers handling a detail as a problem, that shows how the detail was received. When the earliest writer also had reason to avoid it, and the account of it as received tradition explains the texts better than any purpose the writer is shown to have had, it probably came from tradition. That supports an event only to the degree that the first tellers were in a position to know.

On the four cases:

Jesus' baptism by John is probable, with qualifications. The criterion contributes a cost documented from Matthew on and plausible earlier, whose force for Mark is uncertain. The less costly testimony route and Meier's conditional indirect evidence favor a received tradition. Carrier's model remains a serious alternative. Under Markan priority there is one independent explicit narrative.
That Peter disowned Jesus is probable, held tentatively. Preserving an honored leader's failure slightly favors a historical core, but a lesson about failure and forgiveness can explain the same combination. Confidence is low. The prediction does not independently verify its fulfillment, and the scene's details are not established.
The women's discovery gains little from this criterion, more as an early tradition than as an event. The full judgment is in The Empty Tomb.
The wording of the cry is not established by the criterion. The crucifixion itself is certain on other grounds, and its shame is the clearest case of a cost that became the center of a message.

The criterion is evidence, not proof. It works best as one witness among several, and worst as a stamp of authenticity.

Sources

1.
Origen. “Against Celsus, book 2.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4. Translated by Frederick Crombie. c. 248 (edition of 1885). Origen's reply to a lost attack on Christianity by the second-century philosopher Celsus, which survives only in the passages Origen quotes. Book 2 contains Celsus's use of the disciples' failures and Origen's answer that the Gospels would not have recorded them if they were fictions.
1. 1a.
  Book 2, chapter 45: “neither died with him, nor for him, nor were even induced to regard punishment with contempt, but denied even that they were his disciples, whereas now you die along with him.” Celsus speaking through his imagined Jewish critic. Celsus drew his knowledge of the disciples from the Gospels, so he is a hostile reader, not an independent witness. ↩ ↩
2. 1b.
  Book 2, chapter 55: “who beheld this? A half-frantic woman, as you state”. Celsus is speaking of those who saw Jesus after his death, not of the empty tomb. ↩
3. 1c.
  Book 2, chapter 15: “Now if they had not been lovers of truth, but, as Celsus supposes, inventors of fictions, they would not have represented Peter as denying, nor His disciples as being offended. For although these events actually happened, who could have proved that they turned out in that manner? And yet, according to all probability, these were matters which ought to have been passed over in silence by men who wished to teach the readers of the Gospels to despise death for the sake of confessing Christianity.” ↩ ↩ ↩
2.
Rodriguez, Rafael. “The Embarrassing Truth about Jesus: The Criterion of Embarrassment and the Failure of Historical Authenticity.” Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, 132-151. London and New York: T&T Clark International. 2012. A critique of the criterion of embarrassment by a New Testament scholar who works on social memory. It states the case for the criterion, tests it on the baptism, the Beelzebul charge, the disciples and the crucifixion, and argues that embarrassment belongs to the historian's narrative rather than the data.
1. 2a.
  Pages 142-143: “Arnal suggests that the scandal of Jesus’ baptism only became a problem at a later date (certainly by the time Matthew was written), and that “there may indeed have been a time when Christians would have had something to gain by inventing the story of the baptism.”” Rodriguez quoting William Arnal, "Major Episodes in the Biography of Jesus," Toronto Journal of Theology 13 (1997). ↩
2. 2b.
  Page 143: “I am not persuaded that Jesus’ later followers fabricated the Beelzebul controversy as a whole and the charge of demonic possession/collusion with Beelzebul (= Satan) in particular.” ↩
3. 2c.
  Pages 147-148: “We intended the criterion of embarrassment to strain out the historical gnats (Jesus’ baptism, the underwhelming faith of the disciples, etc.), but we find that”. “with it we swallow even the camel of Jesus’ crucifixion! This seems an awfully messy way to do history.” ↩
4. 2d.
  Page 135, note 13: “the material identified by this criterion as historically authentic may simply result from the evangelist’s inconsistent redaction of his sources!” Rodriguez citing Mark Goodacre, "Fatigue in the Synoptics," New Testament Studies 44 (1998). ↩
5. 2e.
  Page 147: “Nothing was so difficult for early Christian theology as the crucifixion of Israel’s messiah. But nothing was so fruitful for early Christian theology as the crucifixion of Israel’s messiah.” ↩ ↩
6. 2f.
  Page 138, note 27: “especially when Jewish Christianity has mitigated or modified the received tradition, as having found it too bold for its taste.” Rodriguez quoting Ernst Käsemann, "The Problem of the Historical Jesus," in Essays on New Testament Themes (1964), p. 37; the German original appeared in 1954. ↩
7. 2g.
  Page 144: “to follow the twelve, or the three, or Peter, is to court disaster.” Rodriguez quoting Werner Kelber (1976). ↩
8. 2h.
  Page 145: “In the end I am not persuaded by any of these revisionist reconstructions. For example, regarding the portrayal of the disciples in Mark, I think Jack Kingsbury has the better argument”. ↩ ↩
9. 2i.
  Page 138: “So our criterion, at the broadest level, is one side of the criterion of double dissimilarity.” ↩
10. 2j.
  Page 146: “The facts become embarrassing when we place them into larger historical narratives.” “the criterion of embarrassment renders a historical datum embarrassing; it does not authenticate already-embarrassing historical data.” ↩ ↩
11. 2k.
  Page 143: “The association of the lesser-known Jesus with the prestigious prophetic figure, John, enhanced the former’s reputation, at least until it didn’t anymore.” ↩
12. 2l.
  Page 147: “Every word from or about Jesus made sense within and served post-crucifixion theological and ideological perspectives.” ↩
13. 2m.
  Page 135: “Immediately, then, this criterion is triply tentative.” “according to a particular source-critical hypothesis.” Rodriguez discussing Robert Stein's "criterion of divergent patterns from the redaction." ↩
14. 2n.
  Pages 141-142: “The bottom line, however, for Vaage’s rejection of the historical authenticity of Jesus’ baptism (Mark 1:9b) is that Mark 1:9a and 1:10a are both Markan “redactional creation[s].”” Rodriguez summarizing Leif Vaage, "Bird-watching at the Baptism of Jesus" (1996). ↩
15. 2o.
  Page 132: “Of course New Testament scholars recognize the inadequacy of their tools”. The chapter's epigraph, from Hooker's "On Using the Wrong Tool" (1972). ↩ ↩
16. 2p.
  Page 151: “The time for dissolving the Jesus tradition into individual units and pushing those units through a battery of tests—including the criterion of embarrassment—has passed.” ↩
3.
Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person. New York: Doubleday. 1991. The first volume of a multi-volume historical study of Jesus by a Catholic priest and New Testament scholar who limits himself to what historians of any belief could accept. Its sixth chapter defines the criteria and puts embarrassment first, with its limits.
1. 3a.
  Page 171: “there is no reason for thinking that the earliest Christians (Jews who knew their Scriptures well) would have found the “cry of dereliction” at all embarrassing. Whether or not Jesus actually spoke Ps 22:1 on the cross, the criterion of embarrassment, taken in isolation, cannot establish the historicity of those words.” “The OT psalms of lamentation regularly direct forceful complaints to God”. ↩ ↩ ↩
2. 3b.
  Page 171: “The point here is that the criterion of embarrassment—like any other criterion—must not be invoked facilely or in isolation.” ↩
3. 3c.
  Page 170: “One built-in limitation to the criterion of embarrassment is that clear-cut cases of such embarrassment are not numerous in the Gospel tradition”. “Another limitation stems from the fact that what we today might consider an embarrassment to the early Church was not necessarily an embarrassment in its own eyes.” ↩
4. 3d.
  Page 168: “The point of the criterion is that the early Church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator 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 Four Gospels.” ↩ ↩
5. 3e.
  Page 167: “the criteria of historicity will usually produce judgments that are only more or less probable; certainty is rarely to be had.” ↩
6. 3f.
  Page 170: “form-critical studies of the Passion Narrative show that the earliest stages of the passion tradition used the OT psalms of lamentation, especially the psalms of the suffering just man, as a primary tool for theological interpretation of the narrative.” ↩
7. 3g.
  Page 169: “The radical Fourth Evangelist, John, locked as he is in a struggle with latter-day disciples of the Baptist who refuse to recognize Jesus as the Messiah, takes the radical expedient of suppressing the baptism of Jesus by the Baptist altogether”. ↩
8. 3h.
  Page 169: “Once again, it is highly unlikely that the Church would have taken pains to invent a saying that emphasized the ignorance of its risen Lord, only to turn around and seek to suppress it.” ↩
4.
Theissen, Gerd, and Dagmar Winter. The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox. 2002. A history and critique of the criterion of dissimilarity by a Heidelberg New Testament scholar and his former doctoral student, who replace it with a criterion of historical plausibility. Their "opposition to traditional bias" is the criterion of embarrassment restated in the terms of source criticism.
1. 4a.
  Page 174: “That which contradicts such clearly demonstrable tendencies (or at least is in tension with them) has a claim to authenticity.” ↩
2. 4b.
  Page 175: “Contrary to this tendency, however, it preserved the memory of a conflict between Jesus and his family. According to Mark 3:21, Jesus’ “own” come to Jesus and want to seize him as though he were out of his mind. This can not possibly have been invented! After Easter, members of Jesus’ family belonged to the early Christian community and were disciples of Jesus.” ↩
3. 4c.
  Page 176: “we might find in these complexes of tradition elements in tension with the tradition that are not relics of the historical Jesus, but that represent the influence of some other stream of tradition.” ↩
4. 4d.
  Page 175: “could it be that elements in tension with or opposed to the tendencies of the tradition are not a reflection of the life of Jesus, but relics of one of the earliest phases of Christian history?” ↩ ↩
5. 4e.
  Page 174: “This corresponds to the line of argument practiced everywhere in source-critical historical scholarship: historical credibility belongs accordingly to the “remnants,” that is, to unintentional evidence that is not influenced by the tendency of the source.” “We thus suggest the criterion of “opposition to traditional bias” as the means of separating such elements in the tradition.” ↩ ↩ ↩
5.
Hooker, Morna D. “Old and New: Essays on Continuity and Discontinuity in the New Testament.” Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 516. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Edited by Ahreum Kim. 2024. A collection of Hooker's essays from more than fifty years, reprinted without updating. Essay 2, "Christology and Methodology" (pp. 29-37), is a seminar paper of 1970 first published in New Testament Studies 17 (1971); essay 3, "On Using the Wrong Tool" (pp. 38-49), is a lecture first published in Theology 75 (1972). They are the critique of the criteria that the 2012 volume looks back to, and the lecture answers Schmiedel's pillar sayings and the redaction-critical form of the embarrassment argument.
1. 5a.
  Page 4: “I have made no attempt to update the essays”. From the general introduction to the 2024 collection. ↩
2. 5b.
  Page 31: “Any comparison between the beliefs of Judaism and the teaching of Jesus which claims to find ideas in the latter unparalleled in the former is inevitably an argument from silence, and should be treated as such.” From "Christology and Methodology" (1970); the same sentence recurs in the 1972 lecture, p. 43. ↩
3. 5c.
  Page 34: “For we are being no more ‘cautious’ or ‘safe’ in our procedure if we discard doubtful material than if we retain it”. From "Christology and Methodology" (1970). ↩
4. 5d.
  Page 35: “in a positive way, to increase our confidence about a saying, and not in a negative way, to blackball one”. Page 48: “He must, alas, use the tools we have been discussing, for there are no others”. “Neither must he use them negatively – to blackball a saying.” Page 35 is from "Christology and Methodology" (1970), on the criterion of dissimilarity; page 48 is from "On Using the Wrong Tool" (1972). ↩ ↩
5. 5e.
  Page 35: “But most important, perhaps, is the demand that a saying must be given a reasonable ‘pedigree’, whether it is attributed to Jesus or the church.” From "Christology and Methodology" (1970). ↩
6. 5f.
  Page 46: “There were, for example, Schmiedel’s famous pillar sayings”. “sayings which the early community clearly could not have invented; but if we are to apply this rule, then we must first be sure that we have understood the saying; and then, when it comes to asking whether there could have been a situation at some stage in the community’s life to fit it, some commentators prove to have more lively imaginations than others; the force of the argument depends once again on our knowledge of the early community – and that is inadequate.” From "On Using the Wrong Tool" (1972). Her footnote identifies the pillar sayings from Schmiedel's Encyclopaedia Biblica article of 1901. ↩ ↩ ↩
7. 5g.
  Page 47: “It is suggested that anything which is incompatible with an evangelist’s plan and purpose could be regarded as authentic teaching of Jesus.” “Such incompatibility would, however, prove nothing – except that the author has included material which he found already existing in the tradition. And, of course, to establish even that we should first need to discover the plan and purpose of the evangelist, with which the material is said to be incompatible.” From "On Using the Wrong Tool" (1972). Her footnote attributes the suggestion, made tentatively, to D. G. A. Calvert in New Testament Studies 18 (1972). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
8. 5h.
  Page 48: “But the burden of proof, to prove or disprove authenticity, lies neither on one side nor on the other.” “for he is not entitled to assume, simply in the absence of contrary evidence, either that a saying is genuine or that it is not.” From "On Using the Wrong Tool" (1972). ↩
9. 5i.
  Page 49: “But I am not suggesting that we should assume that those which score so many blobs are authentic, and those at the bottom of the table are not. We are moving here only from the more to the less probable.” From "On Using the Wrong Tool" (1972). The "blobs" are the scores in the consumer magazine Which?, her analogy for adding up several criteria. ↩ ↩
6.
Allison, Dale C. “It Don't Come Easy: A History of Disillusionment.” Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne. London and New York: T&T Clark International. 2012. A historian of Jesus describes how, over thirty years, he lost confidence in the standard criteria, including embarrassment, and turned to recurring patterns in the tradition instead.
1. 6a.
  Page 191: “It criticizes the criterion of embarrassment, observing that this tool may not do justice to the pluralism of the early Church, and that all of the relevant items are embedded in the Jesus tradition, which means that they were not sufficiently embarrassing to be expurgated.” Allison describing his own 1998 book, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. ↩ ↩
7.
Hooker, Morna D. “Foreword: Forty Years On.” Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne. London and New York: T&T Clark International. 2012. A short foreword by the Cambridge scholar whose papers of 1970 and 1972 criticized the criteria. She looks back on that critique, recalls advising cautious use, names the criteria she considers discredited, and now proposes setting the tools aside.
1. 7a.
  Page xiv: “I myself concluded that scholars who were searching for the “authentic” material must continue to use them—though with great caution! In practice, I preferred not to make the attempt.” Her footnote here points to "On Using the Wrong Tool," Theology 75 (1972), pp. 580-581. ↩
2. 7b.
  Page xiv: “Contributors to this volume are divided between those who think that these “tools” still have a modest role, and those who are determined that they must be put aside altogether.” ↩ ↩
3. 7c.
  Page xiv: “Perhaps, however, the time has come to abandon the whole enterprise of trying to discover the “real historical Jesus.”” Page xvii: “I suggest that it is time to throw away the tools altogether, and to opt for plain common sense.” Pages xvi-xvii reject sorting isolated sayings into authentic and inauthentic piles and propose understanding Jesus in his Jewish context and through his impact on his followers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
4. 7d.
  Page xiii: “my criticisms were dismissed or ignored by scholars who were wedded to the use of such criteria. It soon became clear, however, that others were feeling equally uneasy about the methods being used. My own protest coincided, for example, with very similar criticisms from Robin Barbour.” ↩
8.
World English Bible. 2020. A public-domain modern English translation, quoted for every verse cited so that each can be checked. Where its Greek base differs from the SBL text in a way that matters, the footnote says so.
1. 8a.
  Verse Mark 1:4: “John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching the baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins.” Verse Mark 1:5: “All the country of Judea and all those of Jerusalem went out to him. They were baptized by him in the Jordan river, confessing their sins.” Verse Mark 1:7: “He preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and loosen.” Verse Mark 1:9: “In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” ↩ ↩
2. 8b.
  Verse Matthew 3:14: “But John would have hindered him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?”” Verse Matthew 3:15: “But Jesus, answering, said to him, “Allow it now, for this is the fitting way for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him.” Verse Luke 3:20: “added this also to them all, that he shut up John in prison.” Verse Luke 3:21: “Now when all the people were baptized, Jesus also had been baptized and was praying. The sky was opened,”. Verse John 1:32: “John testified, saying, “I have seen the Spirit descending like a dove out of heaven, and it remained on him.” ↩
3. 8c.
  Verse Matthew 3:14: “But John would have hindered him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?”” Verse Matthew 3:15: “But Jesus, answering, said to him, “Allow it now, for this is the fitting way for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him.” ↩
4. 8d.
  Verse Luke 3:19: “but Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodias, his brother’s wife, and for all the evil things which Herod had done,”. Verse Luke 3:20: “added this also to them all, that he shut up John in prison.” Verse Luke 3:21: “Now when all the people were baptized, Jesus also had been baptized and was praying. The sky was opened,”. ↩
5. 8e.
  Verse John 1:29: “The next day, he saw Jesus coming to him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” Verse John 1:32: “John testified, saying, “I have seen the Spirit descending like a dove out of heaven, and it remained on him.” Verse John 1:34: “I have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” ↩
6. 8f.
  Verse John 3:30: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” ↩
7. 8g.
  Verse Acts 1:21: ““Of the men therefore who have accompanied us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us,”. Verse Acts 1:22: “beginning from the baptism of John to the day that he was received up from us, of these one must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”” Verse Acts 10:37: “you yourselves know what happened, which was proclaimed throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached;”. ↩
8. 8h.
  Verse Acts 1:7: “He said to them, “It isn’t for you to know times or seasons which the Father has set within his own authority.” ↩
9. 8i.
  Verse Mark 14:71: “But he began to curse and to swear, “I don’t know this man of whom you speak!”” Verse Mark 14:72: “The rooster crowed the second time. Peter remembered the words that Jesus said to him, “Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.” When he thought about that, he wept.” Verse Matthew 26:72: “Again he denied it with an oath, “I don’t know the man.”” Verse Luke 22:57: “He denied Jesus, saying, “Woman, I don’t know him.”” Verse John 18:25: “Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They said therefore to him, “You aren’t also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.”” One verse from each Gospel's account of the denials: the third in Mark, the second in Matthew and John, the first in Luke. ↩
10. 8j.
  Verse Mark 14:18: “As they sat and were eating, Jesus said, “Most certainly I tell you, one of you will betray me—he who eats with me.”” Verse Mark 14:27: “Jesus said to them, “All of you will be made to stumble because of me tonight, for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’” Verse Mark 14:29: “But Peter said to him, “Although all will be offended, yet I will not.”” Verse Mark 14:50: “They all left him, and fled.” Verse Mark 14:54: “Peter had followed him from a distance, until he came into the court of the high priest. He was sitting with the officers, and warming himself in the light of the fire.” Verse Mark 14:71: “But he began to curse and to swear, “I don’t know this man of whom you speak!”” Verse Mark 14:72: “The rooster crowed the second time. Peter remembered the words that Jesus said to him, “Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.” When he thought about that, he wept.” ↩ ↩
11. 8k.
  Verse Mark 8:33: “But he, turning around and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you have in mind not the things of God, but the things of men.”” ↩
12. 8l.
  Verse Mark 16:7: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He goes before you into Galilee. There you will see him, as he said to you.’”” ↩
13. 8m.
  Verse Matthew 26:72: “Again he denied it with an oath, “I don’t know the man.”” Verse Matthew 26:74: “Then he began to curse and to swear, “I don’t know the man!” Immediately the rooster crowed.” Verse Matthew 26:75: “Peter remembered the word which Jesus had said to him, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” Then he went out and wept bitterly.” Verse Matthew 16:23: “But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of men.”” ↩
14. 8n.
  Verse Luke 22:32: “but I prayed for you, that your faith wouldn’t fail. You, when once you have turned again, establish your brothers.”” Verse Luke 22:61: “The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the Lord’s word, how he said to him, “Before the rooster crows you will deny me three times.”” ↩
15. 8o.
  Verse Luke 23:49: “All his acquaintances and the women who followed with him from Galilee stood at a distance, watching these things.” ↩
16. 8p.
  Verse Luke 9:20: “He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Christ of God.”” Verse Luke 9:21: “But he warned them and commanded them to tell this to no one,”. Verse Luke 9:22: “saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up.”” Luke follows Peter's confession directly with Jesus' prediction of his death; Mark 8:32-33 (Peter rebukes Jesus, "Get behind me, Satan!") has no counterpart here. ↩
17. 8q.
  Verse John 18:15: “Simon Peter followed Jesus, as did another disciple. Now that disciple was known to the high priest, and entered in with Jesus into the court of the high priest;”. Verse John 18:17: “Then the maid who kept the door said to Peter, “Are you also one of this man’s disciples?” He said, “I am not.”” Verse John 21:17: “He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you have affection for me?” Peter was grieved because he asked him the third time, “Do you have affection for me?” He said to him, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I have affection for you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.” ↩
18. 8r.
  Verse 1 Corinthians 15:5: “and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” Verse 1 Corinthians 15:6: “Then he appeared to over five hundred brothers at once, most of whom remain until now, but some have also fallen asleep.” Verse 1 Corinthians 15:7: “Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,”. Verse 1 Corinthians 15:8: “and last of all, as to the child born at the wrong time, he appeared to me also.” ↩ ↩
19. 8s.
  Verse Galatians 2:11: “But when Peter came to Antioch, I resisted him to his face, because he stood condemned.” Verse Galatians 2:12: “For before some people came from James, he ate with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision.” ↩
20. 8t.
  Verse Mark 15:40: “There were also women watching from afar, among whom were both Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome;”. Verse Mark 15:47: “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses, saw where he was laid.” Verse Mark 16:6: “He said to them, “Don’t be amazed. You seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him!” Verse Mark 16:7: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He goes before you into Galilee. There you will see him, as he said to you.’”” Verse Mark 16:8: “They went out, and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come on them. They said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid.” ↩
21. 8u.
  Verse Matthew 28:8: “They departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to bring his disciples word.” Verse Matthew 28:9: “As they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, “Rejoice!” They came and took hold of his feet, and worshiped him.” ↩
22. 8v.
  Verse Luke 24:11: “These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them.” Verse Luke 24:22: “Also, certain women of our company amazed us, having arrived early at the tomb;”. Verse Luke 24:24: “Some of us went to the tomb and found it just like the women had said, but they didn’t see him.”” ↩ ↩
23. 8w.
  Verse John 20:1: “Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene went early, while it was still dark, to the tomb, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.” Verse John 20:2: “Therefore she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have laid him!”” ↩
24. 8x.
  Verse Mark 15:34: “At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” Verse Mark 15:35: “Some of those who stood by, when they heard it, said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.”” Verse Mark 15:37: “Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the spirit.” ↩
25. 8y.
  Verse Matthew 27:46: “About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” Verse Matthew 27:50: “Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit.” ↩
26. 8z.
  Verse Luke 23:34: “Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots.” Verse Luke 23:43: “Jesus said to him, “Assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”” Verse Luke 23:46: “Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” Having said this, he breathed his last.” The first saying, Luke 23:34a, is missing from several early manuscripts; the SBL edition prints it in double brackets. ↩
27. 8aa.
  Verse Psalm 31:5: “Into your hand I commend my spirit. You redeem me, Yahweh, God of truth.” ↩
28. 8ab.
  Verse John 19:28: “After this, Jesus, seeing that all things were now finished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, “I am thirsty!”” Verse John 19:30: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished!” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” ↩
29. 8ac.
  Verse Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?” Verse Psalm 22:7: “All those who see me mock me. They insult me with their lips. They shake their heads, saying,”. Verse Psalm 22:18: “They divide my garments among them. They cast lots for my clothing.” Verse Psalm 22:24: “For he has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried to him, he heard.” ↩
30. 8ad.
  Verse Mark 15:34: “At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” Verse Luke 23:46: “Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” Having said this, he breathed his last.” Verse John 19:30: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished!” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” The last words in Mark, Luke and John. ↩
31. 8ae.
  Verse 1 Corinthians 1:23: “but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks,”. ↩ ↩ ↩
32. 8af.
  Verse Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. For it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,””. ↩
33. 8ag.
  Verse 2 Samuel 11:1: “At the return of the year, at the time when kings go out, David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David stayed at Jerusalem.” Verse 2 Samuel 11:2: “At evening, David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king’s house. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful to look at.” Verse 2 Samuel 12:26: “Now Joab fought against Rabbah of the children of Ammon, and took the royal city.” Verse 1 Chronicles 20:1: “At the time of the return of the year, at the time when kings go out, Joab led out the army and wasted the country of the children of Ammon, and came and besieged Rabbah. But David stayed at Jerusalem. Joab struck Rabbah, and overthrew it.” 1 Chronicles 20:1 continues directly with the capture of Rabbah, which 2 Samuel tells only at 12:26-31, after the Bathsheba episode of 11:2-12:25. ↩
34. 8ah.
  Verse Mark 6:5: “He could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.” Verse Matthew 13:58: “He didn’t do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” ↩
35. 8ai.
  Verse Mark 10:18: “Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except one—God.” Luke 18:19 keeps this wording; Matthew 19:17 changes it (see the SBL Greek). ↩ ↩
36. 8aj.
  Verse Luke 18:19: “Jesus asked him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good, except one: God.” ↩
37. 8ak.
  Verse Luke 21:32: “Most certainly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things are accomplished.” Verse Luke 21:33: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will by no means pass away.” Verse Luke 21:34: ““So be careful, or your hearts will be loaded down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that day will come on you suddenly.” Luke 21:32-33 follow Mark 13:30-31; Luke has nothing at the place of Mark 13:32. ↩
38. 8al.
  Verse 2 Kings 18:5: “He trusted in Yahweh, the God of Israel, so that after him was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among them that were before him.” Verse 2 Kings 18:14: “Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria at Lachish, saying, “I have offended you. Withdraw from me. That which you put on me, I will bear.” The king of Assyria appointed to Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold.” Verse 2 Kings 18:16: “At that time, Hezekiah cut off the gold from the doors of Yahweh’s temple, and from the pillars which Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid, and gave it to the king of Assyria.” ↩
39. 8am.
  Verse Isaiah 36:1: “Now in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all of the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.” Verse Isaiah 36:2: “The king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem to King Hezekiah with a large army.” Verse 2 Chronicles 32:1: “After these things and this faithfulness, Sennacherib king of Assyria came, entered into Judah, encamped against the fortified cities, and intended to win them for himself.” Verse 2 Chronicles 32:23: “Many brought gifts to Yahweh to Jerusalem, and precious things to Hezekiah king of Judah, so that he was exalted in the sight of all nations from then on.” Isaiah 36:1-2 run parallel to 2 Kings 18:13 and 18:17; nothing in Isaiah corresponds to 2 Kings 18:14-16. ↩
40. 8an.
  Verse Mark 3:21: “When his friends heard it, they went out to seize him; for they said, “He is insane.”” Verse Mark 3:31: “His mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent to him, calling him.” Verse Matthew 12:46: “While he was yet speaking to the multitudes, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, seeking to speak to him.” Verse Luke 8:19: “His mother and brothers came to him, and they could not come near him for the crowd.” The Greek of Mark 3:21 is οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ, "those from him," which the WEB renders "his friends"; Mark 3:31 brings in his mother and brothers. Matthew 12:46 and Luke 8:19 keep the visit but have nothing corresponding to Mark 3:21. ↩ ↩ ↩
41. 8ao.
  Verse Mark 3:22: “The scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul,” and, “By the prince of the demons he casts out the demons.”” Verse Matthew 12:24: “But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, “This man does not cast out demons except by Beelzebul, the prince of the demons.”” Matthew keeps the dispute that follows Mark 3:21, and at 12:46 the family's arrival, but has nothing for Mark 3:20-21. ↩
42. 8ap.
  Verse John 7:5: “For even his brothers didn’t believe in him.” ↩
43. 8aq.
  Verse Galatians 1:19: “But of the other apostles I saw no one except James, the Lord’s brother.” Verse Galatians 2:9: “and when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, those who were reputed to be pillars, gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcision.” ↩
44. 8ar.
  Verse 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Verse 1 Peter 2:22: “who didn’t sin, “neither was deceit found in his mouth.”” Verse Mark 1:7: “He preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and loosen.” ↩ ↩ ↩
45. 8as.
  Verse Mark 13:32: ““But of that day or that hour no one knows—not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” ↩
46. 8at.
  Verse Galatians 1:13: “For you have heard of my way of living in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the assembly of God and ravaged it.” Verse 1 Corinthians 15:9: “For I am the least of the apostles, who is not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the assembly of God.” Verse 1 Corinthians 15:10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am. His grace which was given to me was not futile, but I worked more than all of them; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” ↩ ↩
47. 8au.
  Verse Mark 1:7: “He preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and loosen.” Verse Mark 1:11: “A voice came out of the sky, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”” ↩ ↩
48. 8av.
  Verse Mark 9:13: “But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they have also done to him whatever they wanted to, even as it is written about him.” ↩
49. 8aw.
  Verse Romans 6:3: “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” ↩
50. 8ax.
  Verse 1 John 5:6: “This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and the blood.” ↩
51. 8ay.
  Verse Matthew 10:33: “But whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven.” ↩
52. 8az.
  Verse Hebrews 5:7: “He, in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and petitions with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death”. ↩
53. 8ba.
  Verse Daniel 9:26: “After the sixty-two weeks the Anointed One will be cut off, and will have nothing.” Who this anointed one is, and when the verse was written, are argued in the article on Daniel 9. ↩
9.
Jerome. “Against the Pelagians, book 3.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 6. Translated by W. H. Fremantle. c. 415 (edition of 1893). A dialogue against the Pelagian view that people can live without sin. Jerome quotes a Hebrew-language gospel used by the Nazarenes, a lost text known only from such quotations.
1. 9a.
  Book 3, section 2: “Behold, the mother of our Lord and His brethren said to Him, John Baptist baptizes for the remission of sins; let us go and be baptized by him. But He said to them, what sin have I committed that I should go and be baptized by him?” Jerome introduces it as "the Gospel according to the Hebrews ... used by the Nazarenes to this day." ↩ ↩
10.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. 2012. A methodological book arguing that the criteria of authenticity fail and should be replaced by explicit probability reasoning. Its longest worked example, about twenty-five pages, is the criterion of embarrassment applied to the crucifixion, the baptism, Nazareth and Mark 13:32.
1. 10a.
  Page 139: “The example of the castration of Attis alone refutes it. Many religions contain scandalous claims they must work hard to defend, yet few of those claims are true.” ↩
2. 10b.
  Page 146: “Christians did not imagine Jesus as then “superior” until he was exalted by God—at his resurrection”. “There is nothing in Mark’s depiction of Jesus submitting to John that conflicts with this view. Only later Christians had a problem with it.” “Mark has full reason to invent Jesus’ baptism by John specifically to create his sinless state, so Jesus can be adopted by God, and then live sinlessly unto death.” ↩ ↩ ↩
3. 10c.
  Page 134: “If a statement was embarrassing, then why is it in the text at all? You have to explain why this author included something contrary to his supposed editorial tendency. Yet any such explanation will entail as much reason to invent it as record it. The EC thus becomes self-defeating.” "EC" is Carrier's abbreviation for the criterion of embarrassment. ↩
4. 10d.
  Page 124: “The EC (or Embarrassment Criterion) is based on the folk belief that if an author says something that would embarrass him, it must be true, because he wouldn’t embarrass himself with a lie.” ↩
5. 10e.
  Page 138: “If everyone, Q, an independent Thomas, Mark, Matthew, Luke all have this same material, who is embarrassed about it? The multiple attestation is itself an argument against embarrassment.” “Quite so.” Carrier quoting a 2005 blog post by Mark Goodacre, then agreeing. ↩
6. 10f.
  Page 141: “The EC argument alone is simply insufficient. The fact of the crucifixion being embarrassing would make no significant difference in the consequent probabilities”. ↩
7. 10g.
  Page 146: “Having John prepare Jesus by cleansing him of sin and establishing his divine parentage, and then endorsing Jesus as his successor, is actually far too convenient for Mark. That is not a statement against interest!” ↩
8. 10h.
  Page 147: “That it was intended as such cannot be doubted, given that it had been the Christian tradition for decades already that that’s what a baptism was: being reborn as an adopted son of God”. Carrier's references are Romans 6:3-4, 1 Corinthians 12:13 and Galatians 3:27-29 and 4:5-7. ↩
9. 10i.
  Page 147: “Luke concedes the baptism without blush”. “he is still just responding to a criticism that Mark had not foreseen would result from his story”. ↩
10. 10j.
  Page 148: “To the contrary, in the final analysis it looks quite dubious.” ↩
11.
Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles. New York: Doubleday. 1994. The second volume of Meier's study. Its chapter on Jesus and John the Baptist sets out the arguments against the historicity of the baptism, then defends it chiefly by embarrassment, with indirect arguments from Q, from John and 1 John, and from the absence of an early link to Christian baptism.
1. 11a.
  Page 129: “In my opinion, Jesus’ being baptized by John is one of the most historically certain events ascertainable by any reconstruction of the historical Jesus. The criterion of embarrassment strongly argues in favor of it; though less sturdy, the criterion of multiple attestation probably does as well.” ↩
2. 11b.
  Page 101: “There is another reason for doubting the historicity of Jesus’ baptism: the narrative in Mark is obviously laden with Christian theological interpretation.” ↩
3. 11c.
  Pages 102-103: “Granted, then, that all Four Gospels, and apparently the tradition before them, felt acute embarrassment over Jesus’ being baptized by John, the invention of the incident by the early church seems nigh impossible.” ↩
4. 11d.
  Page 100: “The narrative of Jesus’ baptism is directly available to us in only one independent source, Mark’s Gospel (followed by Matthew and Luke). At first glance, therefore, the criterion of multiple attestation does not apply—though certainly a lack of more than one witness does not prove that a narrated event did not take place.” ↩
5. 11e.
  Page 101: “Significantly, in this case we are not simply projecting the embarrassment we may feel back onto the early church, which in theory might have had different sensitivities on the subject. As a matter of plain fact, the Gospels do evince embarrassment at the story of Jesus’ baptism and try to “control the damage” as best they can.” ↩
6. 11f.
  Page 103: “the stronger one”. “If you are God’s Son”. “Granted, such arguments are not strictly probative and leave much room for doubt.” “Still, if forced to choose between probabilities, I think it more likely that some form of a baptismal story stood in Q”. Q is the hypothetical source of sayings shared by Matthew and Luke. Meier's note 8 adds that the minor agreements are not strictly probative because Matthew and Luke, as better writers of Greek, might have improved Mark in the same ways independently. ↩
7. 11g.
  Page 104: “Yet there is good reason to think that the Fourth Evangelist has purposely suppressed an action that existed in his Gospel tradition”. “This cryptic remark has generated many different interpretations in the course of Christian history.” The remark is 1 John 5:6. Meier reads "water" there as Jesus' baptism and "blood" as his death. ↩
8. 11h.
  Page 105: “no NT author ever directly and explicitly links Christian baptism with Jesus’ baptism”. “a very contorted tradition history”. ↩ ↩
9. 11i.
  Page 105: “Hence I think there are some grounds for claiming that the historicity of Jesus’ baptism is also supported by the criterion of multiple attestation, with the Q and Johannine traditions independently alluding to what the Marcan tradition directly narrates.” ↩ ↩
10. 11j.
  Page 183, note 3: “He never explains why the church was not content with a strategy of co-option that made John the forerunner, prophet, and witness to Christ and why it created the only story in the NT that clearly subordinates Jesus to John”. Meier answering Morton Enslin's proposal that the church invented the baptism to co-opt the followers of John. ↩ ↩ ↩
12.
Brown, Raymond E. “The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, volume 1.” Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday. 1994. A verse-by-verse commentary on the four passion narratives by a Catholic critical scholar. Its analysis of Peter's denials sets out the arguments for and against a factual core, naming the scholars on each side.
1. 12a.
  Page 617: “And, of course, if the tradition of the denials is preMarcan or if John had an independent account, this whole theory of Marcan antiPetrine invention falls to the ground.” Brown answering Kelber, Weeden and K. E. Dewey. ↩
2. 12b.
  Page 615: “Other Church Fathers, embarrassed by it, sought to interpret away the shame of Peter’s denials, e.g., Peter said he did not know the man; but that was a mental reservation, for he knew the Son of God!” ↩
3. 12c.
  Page 617: “If the possibility [to be reconciled] exists for him [Peter], it exists for all before the parousia.” Brown quoting Robert Herron's book on the history of interpretation of Peter's denials; the brackets are in Brown's text. ↩
4. 12d.
  Page 615: “The majority of scholarship attributes a factual basis to the denials”. “The dominant argument for this position is that Christians would scarcely have invented a story that brought disgrace on one of their most prominent leaders.” “unless it was ineradicably established as tradition.” ↩
5. 12e.
  Page 616: “By analogy they learned how to draw parenetic value from the failure of Peter, but that does not mean they would have felt free to invent the scene.” "Parenetic" means useful for moral exhortation. ↩
6. 12f.
  Page 619, note 56: “Unpersuasive too is the argument that if Peter had denied or cursed Jesus, he could not have become a pillar of the church (Goguel). The history of Paul shows what is possible.” ↩
7. 12g.
  Page 616: “Is the story so unfavorable to Peter? Is it not clearly suggested that he repented, and does it not then have a positive thrust, offering readers courage in their trials and failures?” Brown stating the objection of scholars who doubt the denial, among them Goguel, Bultmann and G. Klein. He goes on to reject it. ↩
8. 12h.
  Page 620: “When one studies the denials, one wonders whether the prediction is not a major factor in why the story was formulated and preserved.” ↩
9. 12i.
  Page 616: “In short, a persuasive argument for a basis in fact does nothing to guarantee the total scene, which is clearly the product of development as the denials became a parable about the failure of the chief disciple when challenged and his ultimate rehabilitation through repentance.” ↩ ↩
10. 12j.
  Page 615: “It is not implausible that Peter was the ultimate source of the tradition that he denied Jesus (if the tradition is factual), but others could have known and reported it.” ↩ ↩
11. 12k.
  Page 604: “In Mark 14:71 no object, reflexive or otherwise, is expressed for Peter’s cursing (the only biblical example of such a construction); and so it is very dubious that it should be read intransitively as simply “curse” or, more precisely, as “bound himself under a curse””. Page 605: “are among the many scholars who argue forcefully that “curse” should be taken transitively with “Jesus” understood as the object”. Brown names Lampe, Gerhardsson, Menestrina, Merkel and Seitz. ↩
12. 12l.
  Page 615, note 53: “That Peter was forgiven after denying Jesus was used as an argument against the rigorism of the Novatianists and Donatists.” ↩
13. 12m.
  Page 616: “As to whether Peter’s denying Jesus would have been seen as an embarrassing disgrace, it certainly was presented as such, for it is foretold in the context of Mark 14:27-29, which presents such failure of the disciples as scandal. In Matt how could it not be a problem in light of 10:33”. ↩
14. 12n.
  Page 619: “It is not clear why a vaticinium ex eventu would have been created for Peter’s denials when so many other passion incidents were left without one.” “would have made his rehabilitation clearer”. A vaticinium ex eventu is a prophecy written after the event it predicts. ↩
15. 12o.
  Page 620: “Why would such a prediction be preserved if it was not fulfilled?” “The cockcrow statement was too immediately linked to Jesus’ arrest to have any meaning, even as a specification of the failure of the disciples, without a basis in fact.” ↩
13.
Thomas, Christine M. The Acts of Peter, Gospel Literature, and the Ancient Novel: Rewriting the Past. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. A literary study of the Acts of Peter and its relation to the Gospels, the Acts of Paul and the ancient novel. It dates the continuous Greek text to about the 170s, argues that the Acts of Paul borrowed the "quo vadis" scene, and reads Peter's flight from Rome as the last of his lapses of faith.
1. 13a.
  Page 28: “The continuous Greek text is a second-century document.” “dates the Acts of Peter to the 180s or 190s”. “On balance, the 170s are a reasonable date for the continuous Greek text.” ↩
2. 13b.
  Page 38: “Yet Peter’s cowardly flight from martyrdom is typical of his character as presented in the Acts of Peter.” “He is thus the patron saint of those with wavering faith”. “His flight from Rome is just the last in a series of lapses of faith from which he is graciously restored by Christ.” Thomas cites Acts of Peter 7, where Peter recalls that he "denied the light of my hope." ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
14.
Osiek, Carolyn. “The women at the tomb: What are they doing there?” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 53(1-2). 1997. A study by a New Testament scholar of the women's role in the tomb stories, using redaction criticism, social history and feminist analysis. It argues that the rabbinic rules on women's testimony are less restrictive than commonly assumed. A reprint of an article first published in Ex Auditu 9 (1993).
1. 14a.
  Page 111: “In many traditional societies including those of the eastern Mediterranean, it is women who prepare a body for burial, while men actually convey the body into the tomb.” ↩ ↩
2. 14b.
  Page 112: “In fact, the inability of a woman to serve as witness in ancient Judaism is not so clear in Mishnaic law.” Page 113: “Women's testimony is valued and drawn upon in the sphere of private affairs, but not in public”. ↩ ↩
3. 14c.
  Page 116: “But they remained because the memory of their role was so persistent that it could not be removed. Its very persistence must indicate that something actually happened that Sunday morning at the tomb.” ↩
15.
Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. New York: HarperOne. 2014. A popular book by an agnostic New Testament scholar. Its chapter on the burial and tomb asks "Would Anyone Invent the Women at the Tomb?" and gives three reasons someone might, while judging that Mark probably inherited the story.
1. 15a.
  Page 166: “The first thing to point out is that we are not talking about a Jewish court of law in which witnesses are being called to testify. We’re talking about oral traditions about the man Jesus.” ↩
2. 15b.
  Pages 167-168: “Mark makes a special point throughout his narrative that the male disciples never understand who Jesus is.” “And so at the end of the Gospel, who learns that Jesus has not stayed dead but has been raised? The women. Not the male disciples.” ↩
3. 15c.
  Page 167: “If the men had scattered, or returned home, who was left in the tradition to go to the tomb? It would have been the women”. ↩
4. 15d.
  Page 167: “Let’s suppose that Mark invented the story. I personally don’t think he did; there is no way to know, of course, but my suspicion is that Mark inherited the story from his tradition.” ↩
5. 15e.
  Page 166: “Paul speaks of one woman in the Roman church as “foremost among the apostles” (Junia in Rom. 16:7).” ↩
6. 15f.
  Page 166: “But who would invent women as witnesses to the empty tomb? Well, for openers, maybe women would.” “there is nothing implausible in thinking that women who found their newfound Christian communities personally liberating told stories about Jesus in light of their own situations”. Under the heading "Would Anyone Invent the Women at the Tomb?" ↩ ↩
16.
Allison, Dale C. The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. London: T&T Clark. 2021. A detailed historical study of the resurrection traditions by a Princeton Theological Seminary New Testament scholar who sets out skeptical arguments at full strength. Its chapter on the tomb weighs the women as witnesses point by point and traces how later Gospels reshaped awkward details, including the baptism.
1. 16a.
  Page 157: “Even more importantly, while Josephus’ comment is about the court room, the implications of his remark are broader.” “Josephus was far from alone in his view that woman “is in every respect of less worth than a man.”” ↩
2. 16b.
  Page 153: “Matters are similar with Jesus’ baptism. That Jesus submitted to a ritual of repentance and forgiveness (Mk 1:4) under the Baptist’s supervision raised uncomfortable questions. The tradition rose to the challenge.” “In the Gospel of the Ebionites, a great light illumines the scene, John calls Jesus “Lord,” and the divine voice speaks not once but twice.” Allison's source for the Ebionite gospel is Epiphanius, Panarion 30.13.7-8. ↩ ↩
3. 16c.
  Page 159, note 249: “For patristic texts that view the discovery by women instead of apostles as a problem for discussion see Rosemarie Nüremberg”. ↩
4. 16d.
  Page 155: “The Gospel of Peter goes a step further: the women are not the first to arrive at the tomb and learn what has happened. This role goes to male soldiers and elders.” ↩
5. 16e.
  Page 160: “In other words, all five gospels have the disciples in or near Jerusalem on Sunday.” ↩
6. 16f.
  Page 159: “This response limps. It is the hallmark of legends—as those who argue against the historicity of the empty tomb insist—to disregard facts.” “Luke reveals that it was possible to omit the flight of the disciples and have them participate in the discovery of the empty tomb.” ↩
7. 16g.
  Page 156: “Lüdemann rejects this argument. He asserts that “there is no universal ancient view that women are incompetent witnesses.” Allison quoting Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 158, before arguing that the Jewish setting of Mark 16:1-8 makes Jewish attitudes the relevant ones. ↩
8. 16h.
  Page 154, note 221: “Who first made this argument I do not know. It may have been a relatively modern writer. I do not recall finding the point in works written prior to the nineteenth century”. "This argument" is the claim that the women's role marks the tomb story as history. The earliest instance Allison recalls is Edwin A. Abbott in 1887. ↩ ↩
9. 16i.
  Page 158: “Jesus’ followers were probably not abetting their public cause with a hard-to-credit story in which women—none of whom appear to have been elites or otherwise eminent—are the featured eyewitnesses.” “This is not a bad argument.” ↩
10. 16j.
  Page 155, note 225: “means that the disciples do not credit the report of the empty tomb because of its content, not because the messengers are women. But there is no antithesis here: the implausible content is all the more implausible given its source, and Luke’s”. “emphasizes gender. The evangelist is playing on a familiar prejudice.” Allison reporting Martin Vahrenhorst (1998) and answering him. Allison's note prints "22:11" for Luke 24:11; between the two quotations he gives the Greek for "some women." ↩ ↩
11. 16k.
  Page 156: “Is it not significant that not a single speech in Acts refers to the women finding Jesus’ tomb empty?” Allison stating the popular argument before weighing it. ↩
12. 16l.
  Page 161: “We can hardly suppose that females invented the tale and then passed it on for years within their own circles until it was so firmly established that men had to adopt it.” “Women, as far as the evidence runs, did not form their own subgroups within the early churches.” “This implies that, for the story about women to have become community tradition, men must, in effect, have authorized it.” Allison replying to Bart Ehrman's suggestion that women told stories that enlarged their own part. ↩ ↩
13. 16m.
  Page 161, note 267: “Although there certainly were gender spheres in connection with story-telling in antiquity”. Allison responding to Osiek's suggestion of a "private" female tradition, before asking whether early Christianity shows any evidence of one. ↩
17.
Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. London and New York: United Bible Societies. 1971. The committee's explanation of its choices among manuscript readings for the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. First edition; the 1994 second edition has different pages.
1. 17a.
  Pages 81-82: “The original reading of παρ’ αὐτοῦ (“his friends” or “his relatives”) apparently proved to be so embarrassing that D W al altered it to read, “When the scribes and the others had heard about him, they went out to seize him, for they said, ‘He is beside himself.’ ””. On Mark 3:21. "D W al" means Codex Bezae, Codex Washingtonianus and other manuscripts. ↩ ↩
2. 17b.
  Page 120: “may have been substituted for the usual reading by someone who could not understand how God would have forsaken Jesus on the cross.” On Mark 15:34, of the reading of Codex Bezae, ὠνείδισάς με, "Why hast thou reproached me?" ↩ ↩ ↩
3. 17c.
  Page 62: “The words “neither the Son” are lacking in the majority of the witnesses of Matthew, including the later Byzantine text.” “The omission of the words because of the doctrinal difficulty they present is more probable than their addition by assimilation to Mk 13.32.” On Matthew 24:36. The committee printed the words, rating its decision {C}. ↩ ↩
4. 17d.
  Page 62: “On the other hand, the best representatives of the Alexandrian, the Western, and the Caesarean types of text contain the phrase.” ↩
18.
“The Gospel of Peter.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, ed. Allan Menzies. Translated by J. Armitage Robinson. n.d. (edition of 1897). An English translation of the fragment of a passion gospel found at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886-87. It tells the crucifixion with a changed cry and with men, not women, first at the tomb.
1. 18a.
  Section 5: “And the Lord cried out, saying, My power, my power, you have forsaken me. And when he had said it he was taken up.” The ANF paragraph numbering; in the usual modern numbering this is Gospel of Peter 5.19. ↩ ↩
19.
Foster, Paul. “The Gospel of Peter: Introduction, Critical Edition and Commentary.” Texts and Editions for New Testament Study 4. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2010. A critical edition, translation and commentary on the Gospel of Peter fragment found at Akhmim. It dates the composition to 150-190, on the assumption that the text is the one Bishop Serapion knew, rejects the older view that the text is docetic, and reads its changed cry from the cross as a softening of Mark's and Matthew's.
1. 19a.
  Page 163: “is the author’s attempt to modify the problematic sense of God forsakenness communicated by Jesus in the form of the cry of dereliction as it is presented in the Matthean and Markan accounts”. Page 165: “cannot be seen as sustaining the categorization of the text as docetic”. Foster translates the cry "My power, the power, you have left me" (Gospel of Peter 5.19). ↩ ↩
2. 19b.
  Page 172: “Thus a date of composition during the period 150-190 CE seems the most sensible suggestion.” Page 171: “Scholars have usually favoured placing the reported visit to Rhossos during the last decade of the second century.” “shortly prior to the writing of the Akhmim manuscript perhaps as late as the seventh century”. The date rests on identifying the Akhmim text with the gospel that Serapion, bishop of Antioch, read at Rhossos, which Foster calls the most likely explanation but an assumption. The last quotation describes the alternative if that identification fails. ↩
20.
Brown, Raymond E. “The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, volume 2.” Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday. 1994. The second volume of Brown's commentary on the passion narratives. It weighs whether the cry of Psalm 22 goes back to Jesus, the oldest tradition, or Christian reflection, and how early readers resisted its plain sense.
1. 20a.
  Page 1085: “Yet an Aramaic-speaking Christian community did compose prayers in Aramaic, e.g., Maranatha (I Cor 16:22).” ↩
2. 20b.
  Page 1086: “An argument against attributing to Jesus himself the citation of Ps 22:2 is the fact that other evangelists (Luke and John) felt free to change Jesus’ last words (which should have had special solemnity) to other psalm citations or allusions.” Brown numbers Psalm 22 by the Hebrew verses, so his Ps 22:2 is the English 22:1. ↩
3. 20c.
  Page 1086: “No Christian would dare to put such a despairing cry on the Savior’s lips! That cry, however, is not an expression of despair in the strict sense (pp. 1048-49 above), and early Christians would scarcely think it blasphemous or unworthy to portray Jesus as praying a psalm.” The first sentence is the argument Brown reports; the second is his reply. ↩ ↩
4. 20d.
  Page 1086: “When the arguments pro and con are weighed, no one can say that the case for”. “as the ipsissima verba of Jesus is established.” Between the two parts Brown gives the Aramaic of the cry. ↩
5. 20e.
  Page 1085: “It is not inconceivable that historically a Jesus tortured by his sufferings gave voice to his desperation by using a psalm prayer describing the despondent condition of a suffering just one.” ↩
6. 20f.
  Page 1047: “from the early Church Fathers … to contemporary scholars and preachers many have resisted the surface import that would have Jesus expressing the sentiment of being forsaken by God.” The omission is a note number. ↩
7. 20g.
  Page 1085: “There are three different Gospel reports of Jesus’ last words (Mark/Matt, Luke, John); of these at most only one can represent the oldest discernible tradition.” ↩
8. 20h.
  Page 1087: “Jesus uttered a loud wordless cry”. “That Jesus screamed out a loud cry is attested in varying ways by the three Synoptics and GPet.” “One could find support for the proposal in Heb 5:7 that has Jesus utter “a strong clamor ... to the One having the power to save him from death,” but reports no words in that clamor.” Brown lists those who hold the wordless-cry view: Bacon, Bertram, Boman, Bultmann, Hauck, Loisy, Pallis, Strathmann, Wansbrough and J. Weiss. ↩
9. 20i.
  Page 1085: “Jesus’ citation of Ps 22:2 seems to have been known by all the evangelists (even if two did not reproduce it)”. “While I shall work with the scenario of Gospel development summarized in the two preceding paragraphs”. Psalm 22:2 in Brown's numbering is 22:1 in English Bibles. ↩
10. 20j.
  Page 1087: “has an apocalyptic tone, and so could be one of the signs of the last times”. ↩
21.
Schmiedel, Paul W. “Gospels.” Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. 2, ed. T. K. Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black. London: Adam and Charles Black. 1901. A long critical article by a Zurich New Testament scholar of the liberal school. Its sections 139 and 140 list the nine "foundation-pillars," passages a believing church would not have invented, which became the model for the criterion.
1. 21a.
  Section 139, column 1880: “These five passages, along with the four which will be spoken of in § 140, might be called the foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus.” The five passages of section 139 are Mark 10:17-18, Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:21, Mark 13:32 and Mark 15:34; section 140 adds Mark 8:12, Mark 6:5-6, Mark 8:14-21 and Matthew 11:5. ↩ ↩
2. 21b.
  Section 139, column 1880: “In reality, however, they prove not only that in the person of Jesus we have to do with a completely human being”. “If passages of this kind were wholly wanting in them it would be impossible to prove to a sceptic that any historical value whatever was to be assigned to the gospels”. ↩ ↩
22.
Craig, William Lane, and Bart D. Ehrman. Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus? A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman. Worcester, Mass.: College of the Holy Cross. Mar 28, 2006. Transcript of a public debate between a Christian philosopher and an agnostic New Testament scholar. Both men appeal to embarrassment: Craig for the women at the tomb, Ehrman against it there and for it in the case of a crucified Messiah.
1. 22a.
  Page 26: “My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.” Ehrman speaking. ↩
2. 22b.
  Page 29: “They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, but then he got crucified, and so he couldn’t be the Messiah. No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be crucified.” “The one thing we know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their scriptures to try and make sense of it.” Ehrman speaking, in his closing statement. ↩ ↩
3. 22c.
  Page 5: “Any later legendary account would certainly have made male disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb.” “the Gospel writers faithfully record what, for them, was an awkward and embarrassing fact.” Craig speaking. ↩
23.
Habermas, Gary R. “Experiences of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue in the Early Proclamation of the Resurrection.” Dialog 45(3):288-297. 2006. An essay by an evangelical philosopher who defends the resurrection, summarizing the historical arguments he thinks most scholars accept. It uses embarrassment for the unbelief of Jesus' brother James.
1. 23a.
  Paragraph point 5, on James: “Further, the criterion of embarrassment is probably the strongest consideration, since it would be highly unlikely that the early church would otherwise sponsor what would potentially be some "deeply offensive" statements regarding Jesus' brother, as well as a major leader.” ↩ ↩
24.
Holding, J. P. “The Impossible Faith.” Tekton Apologetics Ministries. n.d. A popular apologetic essay listing seventeen "factors" that would have made Christianity fail unless it was true, among them a crucified Lord, women witnesses and an ignorant deity. It later became a book of the same name.
1. 24a.
  Section Factor #11: “If Christianity wanted to succeed, it should never have admitted that women were the first to discover the empty tomb or the first to see the Risen Jesus.” ↩
25.
Ehrman, Bart D. “Did Jesus Exist?” The Huffington Post. Mar 20, 2012. A short essay by an agnostic New Testament scholar arguing against the view that Jesus never existed. One of its arguments is that no one inventing a Messiah would have made him crucified. Mirror: Archive.org
1. 25a.
  Paragraph the paragraph beginning "Moreover, aspects of the Jesus story": “Moreover, aspects of the Jesus story simply would not have been invented by anyone wanting to make up a new Savior. The earliest followers of Jesus declared that he was a crucified messiah.” “But prior to Christianity, there were no Jews at all, of any kind whatsoever, who thought that there would be a future crucified messiah.” ↩ ↩
26.
Winter, Dagmar. “Saving the Quest for Authenticity from the Criterion of Dissimilarity: History and Plausibility.” Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne. London and New York: T&T Clark International. 2012. Gerd Theissen's co-author defends a reformed criterion of dissimilarity and explains its basis in ordinary source criticism.
1. 26a.
  Page 118: “The criterion of dissimilarity to Christianity is based on the principles of historical source criticism: if what is found in the source appears dissimilar, that is, disadvantageous or embarrassing to the author or first readers, the only reason for it to be reported is its historical authenticity. The criterion is therefore also called the criterion of embarrassment”. ↩
27.
Keith, Chris. “The Indebtedness of the Criteria Approach to Form Criticism and Recent Attempts to Rehabilitate the Search for an Authentic Jesus.” Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne. London and New York: T&T Clark International. 2012. The co-editor's own chapter, arguing that the criteria inherited form criticism's belief that an authentic core can be separated from early interpretation, and that this belief fails. It keeps embarrassment as a way of reading early interpretations.
1. 27a.
  Pages 47-48: “I have elsewhere, for example, defended the usage of the category (not criterion) of “embarrassment” in”. “The problem is not with the notion that early Christians could have been embarrassed about an element of the Jesus tradition and that their interpretations of Jesus could reflect that embarrassment; the problem is assuming that identifying embarrassment allows scholars to bypass those interpretations in approaching the past.” ↩
2. 27b.
  Page 39: “the claim that scholars cannot detach tradition from interpretation does not entail a further claim that scholars cannot posit, discuss, and propose a past entity (whether the oral Jesus tradition or the historical Jesus) behind the interpretations of the written Gospels.” “Undoubtedly some of those interpretations have better claims to historical accuracy than others, and it is the job of critical scholarship to assess those claims. But scholars must carry out these tasks by explaining those interpretations, not casting them aside before the real historical work begins.” ↩
3. 27c.
  Page 40: “The assumption that scholars can establish “authentic” tradition as something in contrast to, and recovered from, early theological interpretation is the foundational basis of the criteria approach.” “Once that foundation crumbles, the criteria approach is irreparably broken. If there is no such thing as past-without-interpretation in gospel tradition, there is no such thing as “authentic tradition” as the criteria approach defines it, and therefore nothing for the criteria of authenticity to extricate.” ↩
4. 27d.
  Page 25: “In her articles “Christology and Methodology” (1970) and “On Using the Wrong Tool” (1972), M. D. Hooker raised significant questions about, and leveled heavy criticisms against, the criteria approach to the historical Jesus, especially the criterion of dissimilarity.” "Christology and Methodology" appeared in New Testament Studies 17 (1970-71), pp. 480-487; "On Using the Wrong Tool" in Theology 75 (1972), pp. 570-581. ↩ ↩
28.
Goodacre, Mark. “Criticizing the Criterion of Multiple Attestation: The Historical Jesus and the Question of Sources.” Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne. London and New York: T&T Clark International. 2012. A Duke University New Testament scholar argues that counting independent sources depends on contested source theories, and that multiple attestation and embarrassment pull against each other, using the baptism as his test case.
1. 28a.
  Page 166: “It certainly appears to be the case that Matthew, with his redactional addition of a conversation between John and Jesus (Matt 3:14-15), and Luke, with his re-setting of the narrative after John’s arrest (Luke 3:19-20), are attempting to mitigate potential concerns that the story might throw up, but that is not the same thing as being “embarrassed” by the tradition. The very prominence given to the story by the evangelists suggests that they did not find it all that embarrassing.” “Multiple attestation of a tradition should be taken as prima facie evidence against embarrassment”. ↩ ↩
29.
Josephus, Flavius. The Antiquities of the Jews. Translated by William Whiston. c. 94 (edition of 1737). Josephus's retelling of Israel's history for Greek-speaking readers, finished about AD 94. Cited by Whiston's book, chapter and section, with Niese's standard section numbers.
1. 29a.
  Book 3, chapter 5, section 8: “But when the forty days, and as many nights, were over, Moses came down, having tasted nothing of food usually appointed for the nourishment of men. His appearance filled the army with gladness”. Niese 3.99. Josephus's retelling passes from Moses' return with the tablets to the tabernacle; the word "calf" occurs in the whole Antiquities only for Abraham's meal in Genesis 18. ↩
2. 29b.
  Book 4, chapter 8, section 15: “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex”. Niese 4.219. ↩
30.
The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Bellingham: Logos Bible Software. Edited by Michael W. Holmes. 2010. A critical edition of the Greek New Testament, used here where the Greek wording matters. Mirror: Github.com
1. 30a.
  Verse Matthew 19:17: “Τί με ἐρωτᾷς περὶ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ; εἷς ἐστιν ὁ ἀγαθός”. "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is one who is good." The translation is this article's. The World English Bible follows later manuscripts that assimilate the question to Mark's "Why do you call me good?" ↩
2. 30b.
  Verse Matthew 24:36: “οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός, εἰ μὴ ὁ πατὴρ μόνος”. "Nor the Son, but the Father only." The translation is this article's. The World English Bible follows the later manuscripts that lack "nor the Son." ↩
31.
Grayson, A. Kirk, and Jamie Novotny. “Sennacherib 004 (the Rassam Cylinder).” The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704–681 BC), Part 1 (RINAP 3/1). Eisenbrauns. 2012. The standard edition and translation of the earliest surviving account of Sennacherib's campaign of 701 BC, a clay cylinder dated by its colophon to spring 700 BC. It is the enemy's own record of Hezekiah's submission, which lets the payment in 2 Kings 18:14 be checked against a source with every reason to boast and none to protect Hezekiah.
1. 31a.
  Line 49: “(As for) Hezekiah of the land Judah, I surrounded (and) conquered forty-six of his fortified walled cities”. Line 55: “As for him, Hezekiah, fear of my lordly brilliance overwhelmed him and, after my (departure), he had the auxiliary forces (and) his elite troops whom he had brought inside to strengthen the city Jerusalem, his royal city, thereby gaining reinforcements, (along with) 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver”. “brought into Nineveh, my capital city, and he sent a mounted messenger of his to me to deliver (this) payment and to do obeisance.” Line 95: “Ayyāru (II), eponymy of Mitūnu, governor of the city Isāna (700).” ↩
32.
Justin Martyr. “Dialogue with Trypho.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith. c. 155 (edition of 1885). A Christian argument written as a dialogue with a Jew named Trypho. Trypho is Justin's character, so his objections show what a Christian of the 150s took the Jewish case to be. In chapter 88 the same Christian denies that Jesus needed baptism.
1. 32a.
  Chapter 101: “but boasts not in accomplishing anything through His own will or might. For when on earth He acted in the very same manner, and answered to one who addressed Him as' Good Master:' Why callest thou me good? One is good, my Father who is in heaven.'” Justin is reading Psalm 22 as spoken by Christ. His wording matches no single Gospel: it keeps the question of Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19 and adds "my Father who is in heaven." ↩
2. 32b.
  Chapter 88: “Now, we know that he did not go to the river because He stood in need of baptism, or of the descent of the Spirit like a dove; even as He submitted to be born and to be crucified, not because He needed such things, but because of the human race”. Justin is answering Trypho's question in chapter 87: if Christ was pre-existent God, why would he need the Spirit's gifts? ↩
3. 32c.
  Chapter 89: “But whether Christ should be so shamefully crucified, this we are in doubt about.” Chapter 90: “For we cannot bring ourselves even to think of this.” ↩
33.
Streeter, Burnett Hillman. The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins. New York: Macmillan. 1925. The classic English case for Mark as the source of Matthew and Luke, with counts of how much of Mark each later Gospel reproduces. Its counts give a base line for judging whether a later Gospel's omission of a Markan verse is unusual.
1. 33a.
  Page 151: “Matthew reproduces 90 % of the subject matter of Mark in language very largely identical with that of Mark; Luke does the same for rather more than half of Mark”. Page 159: “The authentic text of Mark contains 661 verses. Matthew reproduced the substance of over 600 of these.” ↩ ↩
34.
Weeden, Theodore J. Mark: Traditions in Conflict. Philadelphia: Fortress. 1971. A redaction-critical study arguing that Mark wrote to discredit the disciples, whose view of Jesus he opposed. It is the classic statement of the view that the disciples' failures in Mark are polemic, not memory.
1. 34a.
  Page 50: “I conclude that Mark is assiduously involved in a vendetta against the disciples. He is intent on totally discrediting them.” ↩
35.
Pseudo-Clement. “Recognitions, book 1.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8. Translated by Thomas Smith. n.d. (edition of 1886). A Christian romance about Clement of Rome and Peter, a fourth-century work preserved in Rufinus's Latin translation and in Syriac. It reports a follower of John the Baptist who called John the Christ, late evidence of rival claims for John.
1. 35a.
  Chapter 1.60: “one of the disciples of John asserted that John was the Christ, and not Jesus”. ↩
36.
Childers, Jeff W. “Clement of Rome and Pseudo-Clementine literature.” Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, electronic edition. Beth Mardutho. 2011. A reference-work entry on Clement of Rome and the writings later attributed to him. It dates the Recognitions and Homilies to the fourth century, from a common third-century source, and notes a Syriac manuscript of the Recognitions dated 411.
1. 36a.
  Section Pseudo-Clementines: “The Pseudo-Clementines comprise the Homilies and the Recognitions, two interdependent 4th-cent. works that appear to go back to a common source from mid-3rd-cent. Syria.” “the very early ms. Brit. Libr. Add. 12,150 (dated 411) contains substantial portions of the Recognitions and the Homilies”. “They survive only in Rufinus’s Latin translation and in the Syriac version”. ↩ ↩
37.
The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Translated by M. R. James. 1924. An English collection of early Christian apocrypha, with introductions, by a Cambridge scholar of manuscripts. Used here for the Acts of Peter and for James's dating of the Gospel of Peter.
1. 37a.
  Page 313: “the dog received a man’s voice and said unto Peter”. Page 316: “he cast the herring into the bath, and it lived and began to swim.” ↩
2. 37b.
  Page 90: “I believe it is not safe to date the book much earlier than A.D. 150.” “It uses all four canonical Gospels, and is the earliest uncanonical account of the Passion that exists. It is not wholly orthodox: for it throws doubt on the reality of the Lord’s sufferings”. ↩ ↩
3. 37c.
  Page 333, chapter Acts of Peter 35: “And as he went forth of the city, he saw the Lord entering into Rome. And when he saw him, he said: Lord, whither goest thou thus (or here)? And the Lord said unto him: I go into Rome to be crucified.” “And Peter came to himself”. “he returned to Rome, rejoicing”. ↩
4. 37d.
  Page 333, chapter Acts of Peter 35: “And the rest of the brethren, together with Marcellus, besought him to depart. But Peter said unto them: Shall we be runaways, brethren? and they said to him: Nay, but that thou mayest yet be able to serve the Lord. And he obeyed the brethren’s voice and went forth alone”. ↩
5. 37e.
  Page 1: “It is generally, and I believe rightly, looked upon as a secondary document.” James on the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the gospel of the Nazarenes from which Jerome quotes. ↩
38.
Ignatius of Antioch. “Epistle to the Smyrnaeans.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. c. 107. A letter written on the way to martyrdom, about 107-110. Its opening lists the facts of Jesus' life in a creed-like sequence, and the baptism is given Matthew's reason.
1. 38a.
  Chapter 1: “that He was truly born of a virgin, was baptized by John, in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled”. The words echo Matthew 3:15. ↩
39.
Anonymous. “A Treatise on Re-Baptism.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5. Translated by Robert Ernest Wallis. c. 255 (edition of 1886). A Latin treatise from the third-century North African dispute over rebaptizing converts, once transmitted with Cyprian's works. Chapter 17 attacks an older heretical book, The Preaching of Paul, for making Christ confess his own sin at John's baptism, which shows the baptism raising the question of sin well before Jerome.
1. 39a.
  Chapter 17: “a book devised by these same heretics on behalf of this same error, which is inscribed The Preaching of Paul; in which book, contrary to all Scriptures, you will find both Christ confessing His own sin”. “although He alone did no sin at all”. “and almost compelled by His mother Mary unwillingly to receive John's baptism.” The same book, the treatise adds, said that fire was seen on the water at the baptism, a detail Justin also reports. ↩
40.
Josephus, Flavius. Jewish Antiquities, books 18-20 (Josephus, vol. 9, Loeb Classical Library 433). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Translated by Louis H. Feldman. c. 94 (edition of 1965). Josephus's history of the Jews, written in Rome about AD 94, in the Loeb translation. Book 18 has the only non-Christian account of John the Baptist, cited by section.
1. 40a.
  Section 18.116: “surnamed the Baptist. For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practise justice towards their fellows and piety towards God”. ↩
2. 40b.
  Section 18.117: “They must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body implying that the soul was already thoroughly cleansed by right behaviour.” ↩
41.
Goodacre, Mark. The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John's Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 2025. A book-length argument that John's Gospel was written with knowledge of the other three, which would reduce John's value as an independent witness.
1. 41a.
  Publisher's description: “Goodacre takes a systematic, step by step approach to showing that John knew and used the narratives of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.” ↩ ↩
42.
Carrier, Richard. Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed. Lulu.com. 2009. A point-by-point reply, by a historian of antiquity who doubts that Jesus existed, to J. P. Holding's argument that Christianity could not have succeeded without a resurrection. Its chapter on women gathers ancient evidence that women's testimony was often trusted.
1. 42a.
  Page 300: “Just because it was unseemly for a woman to appear in court does not mean her testimony wasn’t trusted.” ↩ ↩
2. 42b.
  Page 297: “There is no evidence Christians ever used any female testimony to promote the Gospel—as Holding himself admits when he cites 1 Corinthians 15: the only evidence Christians actually appealed to when winning converts was the eyewitness testimony of men.” ↩
43.
Corley, Kathleen E. Maranatha: Women's Funerary Rituals and Christian Origins. Minneapolis: Fortress. 2010. A study arguing that women's funeral laments and meals shaped the passion and resurrection traditions, with a non-supernatural account of Christian origins. Its evidence for funeral practice is set out in chapters after the introduction.
1. 43a.
  Page 2: “Women lamented the dead, composing elaborate narratives about the life and cause of death of the deceased, prepared and served funerary meals, and made offerings to the dead at tombs.” ↩
44.
Justin Martyr. “First Apology.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith. c. 155 (edition of 1885). A defense of Christianity addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius. It reports what pagans found most absurd in the faith.
1. 44a.
  Chapter 13: “For they proclaim our madness to consist in this, that we give to a crucified man a place second to the unchangeable and eternal God, the Creator of all”. ↩
45.
Irenaeus. “Against Heresies, book 2.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. c. 180 (edition of 1885). A bishop of Lyons's refutation of the Gnostic systems of his day. Book 2, chapter 28 argues that some questions belong to God alone, and holds up the Son's not knowing the day as the example to follow, which shows an orthodox reader of about 180 using the saying without any sign of discomfort.
1. 45a.
  Chapter 28, section 6: “while even the Lord, the very Son of God, allowed that the Father alone knows the very day and hour of judgment”. “If, then, the Son was not ashamed to ascribe the knowledge of that day to the Father only, but declared what was true regarding the matter, neither let us be ashamed to reserve for God those greater questions which may occur to us.” ↩
46.
Athanasius. “Four Discourses against the Arians, discourse 3.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 4. Translated by John Henry Newman and Archibald Robertson. c. 350 (edition of 1892). A bishop of Alexandria's answer to the Arians, who held that the Son is a creature and not fully God. Sections 42-50 answer their use of Mark 13:32, and show that by the mid-fourth century the saying had become a weapon in a dispute about the Son's divinity.
1. 46a.
  Section 42: “they think they have in them an important argument for their heresy”. Section 46: “suitably said He then, 'no, nor the Son,' according to the flesh because of the body; that He might show that, as man, He knows not; for ignorance is proper to man.” ↩
47.
Goodacre, Mark. “SBL Monday afternoon.” NT Blog. Nov 21, 2005. A blog report from a scholarly conference by a Duke University New Testament scholar. It records the question he put after a paper on Jesus' repudiation of family ties, about combining multiple attestation with embarrassment.
1. 47a.
  Paragraph the paragraph on the Historical Jesus section: “I asked a question at the end about the combination between multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment -- I can't help thinking that one cancels out the other. If everyone, Q, an independent Thomas, Mark, Matthew, Luke all have this same material, who is embarrassed about it? The multiple attestation is itself an argument against embarrassment.” The paper he was answering concerned Jesus' repudiation of family ties. ↩