Criterion of embarrassment in the context of "Historicity of Jesus"

The historicity of Jesus is the debate "on the fringes of scholarship" and in popular culture regarding whether Jesus historically existed or was a purely mythological figure. Mainstream New Testament scholarship ignores the non-existence hypothesis and its arguments, as the question of historicity was generally settled in scholarship in the early 20th century, and the general consensus among modern scholars is that a Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth existed in the Herodian Kingdom of Judea and the subsequent Herodian tetrarchy in the 1st century AD, upon whose life and teachings Christianity was later constructed. However, scholars distinguish between the 'Christ of faith' as presented in the New Testament and the subsequent Christian theology, and a minimal 'Jesus of history', of whom almost nothing can be known.

There is no scholarly consensus concerning the historicity of most elements of Jesus's life as described in the Bible, and only two key events of the biblical story of Jesus's life are widely accepted as historical, based on the criterion of embarrassment, namely his baptism by John the Baptist and his crucifixion by the order of Pontius Pilate. Furthermore, the historicity of supernatural elements like his purported miracles and resurrection are deemed to be solely a matter of 'faith' or of 'theology', or lack thereof.