C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books and himself an atheist before turning to Christianity, criticized the idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but not divine, with the following trilemma:
- Jesus was lying and knew it, so he was a liar.
- Jesus was lying but believed what he was saying, so he was a lunatic.
- Jesus was telling the truth, so he was divine.
Thus, according to Lewis, Jesus could only be a great moral teacher if he was telling the truth and was the son of God. Later, this argument was used as a logical proof that Jesus was in fact the son of God. Point 1 couldn’t be true, or so the argument goes, because then Jesus wouldn’t be willing to die for it. Point 2 couldn’t be true, because Jesus for some reason couldn’t be a lunatic. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Jesus was divine.
The point was raised in the comments to my previous post that there is a fourth option – Jesus never claimed to be the son of God. This could be something that the early Christians misunderstood or decided for themselves. The Gospels were written long after Jesus lived; the first was forty years after his death. That is a long time for the stories to change slightly in a time when technology was much less advanced than ours. The fact that many elements of Christianity were also found in other contemporary religions suggests that early Christians borrowed from other traditions. It’s difficult to discern exactly what applies to Jesus the myth and what applies to Jesus the man.
I would argue that the Gospels aren’t very accurate. This, of course, is a view all atheists must take, because the Gospels contains many passages about miracles we believe never happened. In fact, I’d argue that any text about miracles should be looked on as less reliable than a text with no miracles, simply by virtue of the fact that they contain miracles. Through the years, there have been numerous accounts of miracles, but never has any one of those claims stood up to skeptical inquiry. Never has there been any evidence suggesting that these events couldn’t have happened by natural causes or that they were fake altogether. Given this simple, empirical observation, that no purported miracle has ever been proven to be genuine, we should be careful to trust sources that tell about such miracles.
But even if we accept the premise, that Jesus claimed he was divine, there argument isn’t solid. I agree that if Jesus didn’t believe in what he taught, and he did indeed teach that he was the son of God, then he wouldn’t have given his life for it. However, point 2 above is much more problematic. I have yet to hear a compelling argument that Jesus couldn’t have been what Lewis calls a lunatic.
Martyrdom is a bad argument for a sake. If people are willing to die for it, it must be true, right? Wrong. In 1997, the Heaven’s Gate cult commited mass suicide. 38 followers and the leader himself killed themselves so that they could take a ride with a spaceship they believed was hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Needless to say, the comet didn’t hide any spaceships and the members died in vain.
Why couldn’t Jesus have been under the (wrong) impression that he was divine? He would be far from the first, nor the last prophet charismatic enough to convince people he was not mentally ill and still claim the most fantastic things. The leader of the UFO sect mentioned above managed to convince 38 people that he was not some lunatic with a tin-foil hat, but rather a prophet who knew about the arrival of a spaceship. He is far from the only one to convince people.
In the comments to the previous post, Husky said:
If Jesus was only one of tens of thousands of Jesuses living in Palestine at the time, and if there were multiple other prophets as well, then why did Christianity flourish with time and the rest of them fade away? I feel the burden of proof lies with the atheists on this one. There must be some objective aspect of Christianity that allowed it to succeed. Or it must be conceded that Christianity’s rise to prominence was a highly, HIGHLY improbable development.
I can’t say how many Jesuses there were in Palestine at the time of Jesus, but he was certainly not the only prophet in the area at the time.
Christianity’s rise was mostly a result of luck. Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity by granting religious freedom. He also did much to prevent the old custom of worshipping the emperor, and held the First Council of Nicaea that helped settle disputes internal to the religion. Before this, Christians had been prosecuted and executed for their religion. After Constantine, Christianity grew from being allowed to being favored, and from then on it spread. It seems likely that without Constantite a combination of internal and external factors would have led to Christianity being much more obscure than it is today.
Unlike scientific ideas that generally become accepted once sufficient evidence for them is presented, religious ideas are much more dependent on social factors. No religion can provide objective evidence in favor of their position, so asking what objective ideas particular to Christianity that provided it with an advantage is missing the mark a bit. Rather, the popularity of any particular religion seems to be mostly based on luck and how good communicators the originators are. That Christianity would become the largest religion in the world is an improbable development.
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This is an area I know something about, having studied academic literature on the Gospels in some detail. I am a Christian, but of the “Liberal Protestant” persuasion. (Meaning, in part, that I don’t believe the Bible is inerrant.)
Your comments on Lewis’s “trilemma” are reasonable to a point. If we assume that Jesus actually said the things attributed to him in the Gospels, Lewis’s three options might apply. And one might argue (as you have done) that Jesus was a lunatic.
But Lewis understood that. He was writing at a time when people wanted to have it both ways. Few would say that Jesus was a lunatic, because there was such profound respect for, in particular, the sublime ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. But they also wanted to escape the implication that Jesus is Lord. Lewis used their a priori admiration for Jesus as leverage to defend Jesus’ lordship. Hence the trilemma.
I emphatically disagree with your overall scepticism about the Gospels. In my view, the synoptic Gospels (ascribed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke) contain both myth and history.
I think it’s very helpful to compare the synoptic Gospels with the Fourth Gospel (John) and the apocryphal gospels (Thomas, Philip, Mary Magdalene, and many others).
On the one hand, we can see a clear tendency to inflate the story. Matthew and Luke supply a virgin birth, not found in Mark (or the epistles of Paul); John depicts Jesus emphatically claiming preexistence (”Before Abraham was, I AM”); the apocryphal Gospels have Jesus performing miracles as a kid, and supply a description of the moment of Jesus’ resurrection. In all these instances they set out to make the story “better”.
But the corollary to the above observation is that the synoptic Gospels are very conservative: particularly so in their handling of Jesus’ words.
Even problematic sayings are retained. For example, a would-be disciple tells Jesus that first he has to go bury his father. Jesus responds, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:60). Trust me, this would have been a profoundly offensive saying to first century Jews. No one would have invented it. The fact that it is there in the Gospels suggests that Jesus really said it, and the words made a deep impression on people. (He often spoke in hyperbolic or shocking language, no doubt to make his point memorable.) The saying also confirms the general impression of Jesus in the Gospels, that he considered one’s duty to the Kingdom of Heaven to come before any other duty.
As for the miracles, this much is clear: Jesus was remembered as a person who performed healings. You can claim, on a prior grounds, that the healings never happened; or you can argue that they were caused by psychosomatic forces; but it won’t do to just label them “unhistorical”. Everyone knew Jesus was a healer, and they crowded to him in hope of witnessing or receiving a healing — that’s a historical memory.
Did Jesus claim to be the Son of God? I think he did, but not in the full-blown terms of the Council of Nicaea. It is another clear, historical memory that Jesus addressed God as “Abba” in prayer. “Abba” is the Aramaic word for “Father”, and that Aramaic word is retained twice in the Greek New Testament. Again, this speaks to a distinctive trait of Jesus that was vividly remembered (and reenacted) in the early Churches.
The overall picture is of Jesus the charismatic: utterly dedicated to the cause of the Kingdom of God; experiencing an extraordinary degree of intimacy with his “Abba” Father; and travelling about the Holy Land, in the power of the Holy Spirit, healing the sick.
You can respond to that account with faith or unbelief. But in broad strokes, the historical Jesus has been preserved for us in the synoptic Gospels. This is the Jesus to whom we must respond, either respectfully or contemptuously.
My apologies for not responding more to this subject already.
Stephen has articulated well my defense of the Gospels account for Jesus (and added several insightful points). I think that the number of places where Jesus said something that would be so offensive and so hard for his opponents and his supporters to hear leads me to think that the Gospel writers were not trying to make Jesus out to be something that he did not claim to be. There would be very little incentive for them to create many of the aspects of Jesus’s teachings if Jesus was not one convincing them that he was who the Bible said he was. Also, many of the stories in the Gospels involve Jesus and one other person (other than the writer). Unless the writer just omitted themselves from being there or they just made it up, it was Jesus who provided the story for the writers to write (either directly or third hand). Jesus and the woman at the well, Jesus and Satan during the temptations, Jesus being alone talking with God before his arrest are all examples of this type of Gospel-inclusion. And while you can argue that the writers could have just made it up, I think that is a harder sale (to me anyway) than Jesus told them about it.
This post is not meant to convince anyone to believe Jesus was who the Bible says he was – it is more to convince that the Bible accurately depicts who Jesus thought he was – and therefore the lunatic or Lord argument must be dealt with, one way or the other.
I just want to comment on what you said about that you thaugt that stories would change in those forty years.
The culture in Isreal at that time was not like it is in our days. Young jewish boys where sent to school at the age of 4-8 to memorize the entire Tora(the old testament). It was much more valued to remember things accuratley, than it was to have them written down. It is likley that Jesus (son of God or not), expected his disiples to remeber every word he said accuratlety, and that they did.
The problem with these arguments is that there is no “the Greek New Testament.” There are thousands of early manuscripts, which have millions of disagreements between them. Better oral memory skills couldn’t compensate for the lower level of literacy skills, especially in the earliest period of textual transmission before professional scribes. Finally, even if no one ever made a mistake, the early churches were divided even more strongly than modern Christian churches, and there is clear evidence of alterations made to counter early theologies that fell out of favor like Adoptionism.
So between Lord and lunatic, where do you place Jesus? Because I guess that’s what it really comes down to. If when reading the Gospels, you get the sense of Jesus as a good teacher, and an upstanding moral character, then it would be a bit of a contradiction to say that He was insane. Unless, of course, you believe that good character and good teaching are insane.
I guess even if you don’t believe in 100% accuracy of the Gospels, you probably believe some of the account somewhere along the line. The sermon on the mount? That would make Jesus a good teacher, no? Then the only dilemma we have is whether or not Jesus himself made the claim of being God.
So, to recap (since we can eliminate the liar idea, because I believe you agree that a liar wouldn’t die for what they knew to be false):
Jesus was either:
1. A good teacher that didn’t claim divinity.
2. Insane
3. Divine.
I would personally throw out the insanity option, because in all the readings of Jesus, he appeared to be of good and moral character. The things he said were able to silence crowds of detractors. He was wise. He was loving. Those don’t seem like the characteristics of an insane person to me. I’m open to debate on it though.
So really it comes down to whether or not Jesus claimed divinity, and if he did, then we must consider that he was telling the truth and is divine.
If he didn’t claim divinity, then the writers of the gospel knew this (because they were within the eyewitness generation), and knowingly spread the lie. And endured persecution knowing it was for a lie. Some even died in persecution, knowing it was a lie. This would therefore make them insane, because only an insane person would die for what they knew to be a lie (back to CS’ argument).
So again, I, personally, am left to the conclusion that Jesus claimed divinity, and is indeed God.
I’m open to more arguments though. See this is the problem with atheists and religious zealots alike: they’re both closed minded. They both have a set of beliefs that are foundationally unquestionable. This leads to only thinking within the boundaries that are drawn around them.
I personally believe in Christ as my Saviour, but only because of the reasoning I have found behind it. And I’m constantly open to criticisms and arguments that question the very foundation, because I would rather be miserable in truth than content in a lie. That, I believe, is true open-mindedness.
The gospels are written over forty years after Jesus’ death. I don’t think the gospel writers ever met Jesus. It seems kinda strange that they’d keep this secret for forty years before writing it down, eh?
That’s the silliest argument I’ve heard in a while. So whatever Jesus claims to be, we must accept? What kind of reasoning is that? See, I can make the exact same kind of argument:
I say there is no God.
If I was lying consciously, would I risk going to hell? I’m putting my soul at stake here. Therefore I cannot be lying consciously.
From reading my posts you can gather than I’m not insane.
Therefore, since I cannot be lying nor insane, I must be telling the truth.
Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
Do you see how silly this is?
The one thing we do know about (successful) prophets is that they have charisma. They know how to get people to follow them. Hitler was such a person. He was elected in a democratic election, by the people. Did they know he was insane? Few saw it, though it was lurking there all the time.
You create a false dichotomy between being good and being insane. A lot of people think they get answers to prayers. They find strength in their god and do good. But all of them can’t be right, because their religions are incompatible. Those who are wrong, I hope you’ll agree, must not be totally sane. But still, they do good.
You’re generalizing. Some atheists are close minded. Not all. On the other hand, religious zealots pretty much are closed minded by definition. By writing “atheists” like you do, you’re making it seem like it applies to all atheists. That is simply untrue. That’s like saying all theists are close minded. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am open, but to actual evidence, not an old, fallible, self-contradictory book.
An admirable quality.
Well, while trilemma may be interesting, for me it’s just an intellectual game: quite attention-catching, but also can become compulsive and spark the purely “academic” discussions (excuse me for any misunderstandings, but I am Polish and in Polish, “academic discussion” means “pointless discussion taking place in academia, but without any merit in the world outside”).
As for me, I think that Lewis didn’t take the most important thing into account:
1. THAT GOD MAY BE NON-EXISTENT AT ALL. if God does not exists, _NOBODY_
may be or become God (there is simply no such alternative), regardless of how moral he is and how great value do his teachings have to the moralty of humans. In such a case, if Jesus believed he was son of God, he would be neither a liar (a man who tells a thing knowing it’s untrue), nor an insane person (objective checking whether God exists or not is impossible for now, and it was even more in the biblical times; so the profound belief in something of such kind, that may be untrue, is justified and is neither lying, nor insanity)
Also, it’s highly subjective to tell that somebody is insane: in our times, the word insanity comes out of use, even in psychiatry; if we construe it as having a mental illness that distorts clear thinking and detaches one from reality (as schizophrenia), then nothing can be farther from the truth that telling that the mentally ill people can’t be genious! For example, the Nobel prize winner in economics, John Nash, had a serious form of schizophrenia (with hallucinations, delusions, etc), and still he was a brilliant mathematician. I’m sure that more examples could be found. Also, some schizophrenics (also lots of depressive people) are taking care of the poor and have much empathy, understanding and highly moral, non-harming attitude to other human beings; should one of them
Also, it’s subjective to tell that someone is a liar when we’re talking about faith and not facts; also, if someone lies one one occasion, he doesn’t necessarily have to lie all the time. Suppose I’m presenting myself as 29-years old Chinese dark-haired male computer programmer leaving in Krakow, Poland. Here I have told few truths and few lies:
1. it’s true that I’m dark-haired (my hair is almost black),
2. it’s true that I’m 29 years old (I will be 30 on March 4.),
3. it’s true that I’m a computer programmer (both as passionate and professional),
4. it’s true I live in Poland
5. it’s true that I’m male
However, it is NOT true, that:
1. I am Chinese (I am Polish since my birth),
2. I live in Krakow (I switch between Gdansk and Warsaw)
If you looked more closely (using fuzzy and not binary or trinary logic), you could also find some truth in the claim that I’m Chinese; my ancestors from my father’s side are Tatars, who descend from Mongols and Turks, and at least Mongols have invaded China in the medieval times; so, being aware about what happens during such conquests, it can’t be totally denied that I may have some Chinese blood in my veins. Ni-ha! (in Chinese it’s “hello” AFAIR).
Even more important thing is the verifiability of the facts. Let’s call it God-and-Dog hypothesis:
1. suppose that someone who is a human claims to be a dog; you can plainly tell from his behavior, that he is not one, even if he imitates a dog with barking, howling, crawling on the four limbs, etc.; it is because you:
(1) know , how a dog looks and behaves,
(2) know, how a human looks and behaves,
(3) know, how to tell a dog from a human and,
(4) being a dog and a human in the same time is impossible: they are two separate living beings (let’s not fear to call them both _animals_)
You can tell that someone is not a dog by the mere confrontation with the _facts_ that are:
(1) easily verifiable (even to the person without any scientific background),
(2) scientifically proven (biology, medicine, psychology, etc).
So, someone who claims to be a dog, must either:
(1) be insane (with restrictions on the term I provided before) or having other mental illness (eg. a narcisstic personality disorder or some other form of having a profound and sick need to concenrate attention of others on him/her)
(2) be a liar,
(3) be joking and playing pranks on you (and other audience).
On the other hand, if someone claims to be God, you don’t have any means to verify it, because:
(1) You haven’t seen God, even if you claim you have,
(2) existence of God can’t be verified, and thus can’t be anyone’s claims to be one,
(3) you don’t even know HOW the God YHWH (who Jesus claims to be the son of) would look like; for He has never shown himself and as we know from the Bible, if he exists, he’s probably a spiritual being without any physical shape or form,
(4) you would not know HOW to recognize God in a human that claims to be one; please don’t recall miracles, as even the magician David Copperfield can make lots of people to believe that the Statue of Liberty is vanishing; and in the ancient times people were more eager to believe in the supernatural powers (hence the numerous myths of gods and goddesses).
Therefore, it’s not easy to decide whether a person claiming to be God is a liar or tells the truth; it isn’t and can’t be objective and depends on how *you* perceive this, whether you believe him/her or not.
Also, Lewis hasn’t considerated, that there might have been many gods. In such a case, Jesus could be as real as lots of other gods and goddesses that are mentioned in human culture (eg. Thor, Ishtar, Sventovit, Lugh, Osiris, etc); of course none of them has been proved real, but it hasn’t been excluded either (some scientists think that these gods may have been the great and charizmatic human leaders, eg. chiefs, kings, queens, etc, that were commemorated as Divine beings). If these gods exists, Jesus Christ could be another one descending to the Earth; furthermore, even YHWH could be a local god, on of many gods that would exist in the Universe; so, Jesus Christ could really be a son of god, as his father would be of some divine family.
I know that it’s unrelated, but how do you think, WHY there isn’t any single religion that is REALLY monotheistic? How could Christianity be called monotheistic with Angels (semi-gods or gods of lower sort in many religions), Saints (and their patronage over human affairs, eg. farming or travelling, replacing the numerous gods of old “pagan” faiths), Mother Mary (based on Mother Goddess) and others? Even Judaism contains Angels and they are even more powerful beings that in Christianity. And in both there is also anti-God called Satan; not as powerful as YHWH, but also a strong one.
Zoroastrism was at least a dualist religion, with Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd) as God and Ariman (Angra Manju) as Satan; I don’t know much of Islam, and other religions are mostly openly polytheistic (many gods), pantheistic (universe as God) or henotheistic (one supreme God and lower gods).
I would be eager to discuss the problem further, but I don’t want to swamp you with my thoughts now; any suggestions??
PS. I am myself a declared theist (contrary to _atheist_), though not strictly Christian; rather I’m a self-religious man, who has his own religion based on many traditions; and who respects all faiths and beliefs including Christianity and the non-religious stances as atheism as well.
Critto, this is what I’ve been arguing. Assuming the biblical accounts of Jesus are correct, it does not automatically follow that Jesus doesn’t satisfy the “insane” crtieria. Lewis disregards completely the fact that many people have made remarkable contributions to society and still have been what he calls “insane”. Kurt Gõdel, whose incompleteness theorem is a landmark of 20th century mathematics, was so paranoid that when his wife died and so could no longer make him food, he refused to eat and died of malnutrition or some such.
Jesus could well have been a good moral teacher and still have been deluded into thinking he was a son of God while in truth he was not. There’s a fine line between genius and lunatic; many great thinkers have been balancing on that line and occasionally slipped over to the “lunatic” side. Still, their contributions are no less good.
I don’t know. I suppose it’s a remnant of the old polytheistic traditions. Humans have a tendency to project human qualities onto their deities, and only relatively recently has the idea that God is an abstract, non-humanoid transcendental being become popular. People have generally envisioned God as more of a human with supreme power than as as an abstract entity. This is a recent development. Christians still cludge the old Jewish traditions, which portray God as seeking revenge, being angry, being racistic (choosing one people over all others) and so on, while at the same time claiming that God is all-good and above such lowly human feelings.
I don’t agree that there are no real monotheistic religions. I agree that many of them still have some of the old polytheistic traditions in them.
I’m surprised that no-one has mentioned the other possible “L” word: legend.
It can’t be! The Bible says it’s not!
More seriously, that view is seen as just as stupid as ID. Lately I’ve been wondering more and more seriously about whether that label is undeserved.
D’oh!
You mean the “hero myth” idea of Jesus? I’d say that it’s certainly as feasable an explanation as the others and, given the evidence, can’t be ruled out so long as the other three possibilities are extant.
Any kind of Jesus-as-myth idea. At first it seems like a conspiracy theory, but then it’s not actually a conspiracy and it’s based on the lack of actual evidence, and similarity with other figures known to be myth.
Anyway, I think that it’s entirely possible to go for the “lunatic” solution. As recent events have highlighted, it’s entirely possible to be crazy and still not be considered mentally ill.