The Criterion of Embarrassment
If a story makes your own side look bad, you probably didn't make it up.
Grounded in the research on the criterion of embarrassment
1. Start with the tool
It's a rule historians use to test old texts: a detail that embarrasses the author's own movement is unlikely to be invented. Nobody fabricates a story that undercuts their cause. So when an awkward detail survives anyway, the simplest explanation is that it actually happened and the writers were stuck with it. They reported it because they couldn't credibly delete it.
2. Name the people
John P. Meier popularized the phrase in A Marginal Jew (1991), crediting Edward Schillebeeckx, with roots back to Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel in 1899. The form critics, Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Kasemann, Gunther Bornkamm, built it into the mid-century quest for the historical Jesus. Meier called it closely allied to the criterion of dissimilarity, but not the same tool.