Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 10:07 am The criteria of Embarrassment (If X didn't happen no one would want to claim it did) is an important tool in study of the Historical Jesus. It has been claimed that this criteria is not used outside religious studies.

I came across recently a counter-example. In M. Manlius and the Geese by Horsfall there is a discussion of the traditions of the Gothic sack of Rome c 387 BCE.

In the standard account the Goths failed to take the Capitoline Hill and an attempt to do so was foiled by the warning given to the Roman sentries by geese. However there is a minority tradition that the Goths did seize the Capitoline Hill and hence held briefly all Rome. Horsfall argues in detail that this minority tradition is prima-facie credible and is found in Roman as well as Greek sources. He then argues that we should believe this tradition because if it didn't happen Roman sources would never have claimed it did, while if it did happen there would be a strong tendency for a less humiliating version of the sack too develop.

This is in effect a use of the criteria of Embarrassment .

Andrew Criddle

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 10:44 am I have the following quote from Meier in my notes, but I didn't have the reference unfortunately:

"Like all the criteria we will examine, however, the criterion of embarrassment has its limitations and must always be used in concert with the other criteria.

maryhelena wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:02 am I came across this interesting article:

THE EMBARRASSING TRUTH ABOUT JESUS: THE CRITERION OF EMBARRASSMENT AND THE FAILURE OF HISTORICAL AUTHENTICITY
Rafael Rodriguez

At present, the precise contours of the future of Jesus historiography
remain obscure. How will the Quest account for the dynamics of memory
and the reconceptualization of “the past” and “history” that memory
studies have provoked? What, ultimately, will it mean to appropriate the
Gospels as memorial artifacts of the historical (= real) Jesus? Only time
will tell. But one thing is increasingly clear: we cannot continue to scour
the Jesus tradition for individual, isolated facts that we can pull out of
their literary contexts and insert into any reconstructed historical context
that suits us. We might note, and not without some irony, that New
Testament scholarship in the postmodern period is beginning to disavow
the fragmentation of the Gospels that characterized twentieth-century
historical-critical praxis. 80. 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. 81

https://www.academia.edu/27267500/THE_E ... THENTICITY

footnote 80 and 81.

80. The disavowal is not universal; Tom Holmén (“Authenticity Criteria,” 45) has
recently proposed a three-step historiographical program that atomizes the Jesus
tradition and attempts to develop a picture of Jesus solely on the basis of material
whose probability of authenticity has already been determined.

81. I made this point in Structuring, 224–25. Indeed, in light of Morna Hooker’s
frank comments, both in the present volume and as far back as 1971–72, the time
seems to have long-since passed!

Historians of Jesus never should have turned to isolating histori-cal data apart from the larger historical representations of which those data are a part; the data simply do not survive the process of wrenching them out of their representations and forcing them into modern his-toriographical narratives

mlinssen wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:07 amand that the Church chose to tell these stories regardless of their embarrassment

neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:13 am

mlinssen wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:07 amand that the Church chose to tell these stories regardless of their embarrassment

Which is an entirely ad hoc process in actual practice. When a text does not mention X, it is because its author was too embarrassed to mention it and wanted to suppress it. But when a text does mention X, it is because its author was too embarrassed NOT to mention it and was forced against their will to say it out loud. It's a total con game. But in scholarly circles we are too polite to put it so bluntly.

mbuckley3 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 1:03 pm Gauls not Goths !
.............

neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 7:02 pm

andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 10:07 am The criteria of Embarrassment (If X didn't happen no one would want to claim it did) is an important tool in study of the Historical Jesus. It has been claimed that this criteria is not used outside religious studies.

I came across recently a counter-example. In M. Manlius and the Geese by Horsfall there is a discussion of the traditions of the Gothic sack of Rome c 387 BCE.

In the standard account the Goths failed to take the Capitoline Hill and an attempt to do so was foiled by the warning given to the Roman sentries by geese. However there is a minority tradition that the Goths did seize the Capitoline Hill and hence held briefly all Rome. Horsfall argues in detail that this minority tradition is prima-facie credible and is found in Roman as well as Greek sources. He then argues that we should believe this tradition because if it didn't happen Roman sources would never have claimed it did, while if it did happen there would be a strong tendency for a less humiliating version of the sack too develop.

This is in effect a use of the criteria of Embarrassment .

Andrew Criddle

I don't see Horsfall arguing "in detail" why we should accept the event as historical, though he does say that it would be without precedent for the Romans to turn a historical victory into a memory of a defeat. That's a classic illustration of begging the question, is it not?

If that's an argument for historicity it is, of course, circular -- or at the very least an argument from lack of imagination. It assumes there was a historical event (a defeat) behind the late traditions in the first place and that that could be the only reason for the legends arising some hundred years after the event -- at least as far as the actual evidence tells us when it arose according even to Horsfall.

But ancient historians before and since Horsfall's article have noted the moral lessons of those legends that indicate the capture of Rome by the Gauls as opposed to its salvation by the honking geese. In other words, there were cultural-social reasons for inventing stories like that.

Mary Beard, for example, demonstrates in her 2015 book that Horsfall's passing opinion has had no serious effect on Roman historiography or constructions of early Roman history:

The story went that in 390 BCE a band of Gauls – possibly a tribe on the move looking for land or, more likely, a well-trained posse of mercenaries looking for work further south – routed a Roman army on the river Allia, not far from the city. The Romans apparently did little more than run away, and the Gauls marched on to take Rome. One apocryphal tale describes how a virtuous plebeian, the aptly named Marcus Caedicius (‘disaster teller’), heard the voice of some unknown god warning him that Gauls were approaching, but his report was ignored because of his lowly status. It turned out to be a lesson for the patricians – learned the hard way – that the gods communicated with plebeians too. Roman storytelling gave extravagant coverage to the capture of the city, with various acts of heroism mitigating the widespread destruction.

. . . . [more moralizing tales outlined here] . . . .

. . . A less honourable telling of the story has the Gauls triumphantly carrying off the ransom.

This is another case of Roman exaggeration. The various stories, which became commonplaces of Roman cultural memory, offered important patriotic lessons: in placing the claims of country above family, in bravery in the face of certain defeat, and in the dangers of measuring the worth of the city in terms of gold. The catastrophe became so much a part of the Roman popular imagination that some diehards were using it in 48 CE as an argument (or a desperate gambit) against the emperor Claudius’ proposals to admit Gauls into the senate. There is, however, no archaeological evidence for the kind of massive destruction that later Romans imagined . . .

Mary Beard. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Kindle Locations 2009-2014). Profile Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

In other words, Horsfall fails to consider the context in which the first myths and legends about the capture of Rome made their appearance in print and, through lack of imagination in this particular case, cannot imagine any explanation other than "it happened". (He could have been a theologian!)

It may have happened, of course. But it's not a secure historical datum. It is more commonly found in stories of Roman myths and legends than as part of certain historical reconstructions of history. Horsfall in the same article acknowledges that he is the odd man out in his view and that the general view is that the story is legendary.

As the renowned classicist Moses Finley wrote when he took up this problem with some of his classicist peers for their naivety in their approach to their sources -- published about 4 years after Horsfall's article appeared so one may wonder if H's article was part of the problem Finley was addressing:

Unfortunately, the two longest ancient accounts of Roman Republican history, the area in which the problems are currently the most acute and the most widely discussed, the histories of Livy and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were composed about 500 years (in very round numbers) later than the traditional date for the founding of the Republic, 200 years from the defeat of Hannibal. Try as we may, we cannot trace any of their written sources back beyond about 300 BC, and mostly not further than to the age of Marius and Sulla. Yet the early centuries of the Republic and the still earlier centuries that preceded it are narrated in detail in Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Where did they find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit – irrespective of possible reliability – we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention.

The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated.

Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. ACLS History E-Book Project, 1985. p. 9

22 1 On the third day after the battle, Brennus came up to the city with his army. Finding its gates open and its walls without defenders, at first he feared a treacherous ambush, being unable to believe that the Romans were in such utter despair. But when he realised the truth, he marched in by the Colline gate, and took Rome. This was a little more than three hundred and sixty years from her foundation, if one can believe that any accurate chronology has been preserved in this matter, when that of even later events is disputed, owing to the confusion caused by this very disaster. 2 However, it would seem that some vague tidings of the calamity and capture of the city made their way at once to Greece. For Heracleides Ponticus, who lived not long after that time, in his treatise "On the soul," says that out of the West a story prevailed, how an army of Hyperboreans had come from afar and captured a Greek city called Rome, situated somewhere on the shores p149 of the Great Sea. 3 Now I cannot wonder that so fabulous and fictitious a writer as Heracleides should deck out the true story of the capture of Rome with his "Hyperboreans" and his "Great Sea." But Aristotle the philosopher clearly had accurate tidings of the capture of the city by the Gauls, and yet he says that its saviour was Lucius, although the forename of Camillus was not Lucius, but Marcus. However, these details were matters of conjecture.