Narrator criticism is a human scholarly practice, so the possibility of personal bias, rivalry, or disputes between contemporaries cannot be ignored. Mere doctrinal disagreement, personal animosity, or unsupported severity should not automatically count as decisive technical discrediting.
This caution does not imply distrust of the discipline as a whole. It calls for fair evaluation of each particular claim and its context. Sometimes severe criticism is well founded; at other times the background reduces its evidential weight.
Method: evaluate the reason given, the critic’s habits, other qualified assessments, and the narrator’s actual body of transmissions, not just the prominence of a name or the harshness of a phrase.