The Trilemma - Lord, Liar, or Lunatic? 1A. THE QUESTION: WHO IS JESUS OF NAZARETH? 2A. IS JESUS CHRIST GOD? 3A. WAS HE A LIAR? 4A. LUNATIC? 5A. LORD!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1A. THE QUESTION: WHO IS JESUS OF NAZARETH? McDowell asserts, "Jesus considered who men believed him to be of fundamental importance." He then quotes C.S. Lewis who wanted to "prevent" people from saying, "Jesus is a great moral teacher , but I don't accept His claim to be God." He quotes Lewis thus: "But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher . He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." McDowell then quotes F.J.A. Hort who said that Jesus was the primary subject of every statement in the gospels. And he quotes Kennetth Scott Latourette who said that the words of Jesus cannot be separated from the person of Jesus. McDowell then presents a diagram illustrating his "lord, liar, or lunatic" argument. Above the diagram McDowell states his assumption that "Jesus claims to be God ." 2A. IS JESUS CHRIST GOD? "Jesus claimed to be God" . He did not leave any other options . "Jesus' claim to be God must be either true or false and is something that should be given serious consideration." Jesus' question to His disciples, 'But who do you say that I am?' (Mark 8:29 ) is also asked of us today." "Jesus' claim to be God must either be true or false. If Jesus' claims are true, then He is the Lord, and we must either accept or reject His lordship. We are 'without excuse.'" "First, consider that His claim to be God was false. If it was false then we have two and only two alternatives. He either knew it was false or He did not know it was false. We will consider each one separately and examine the evidence." 3A. WAS HE A LIAR? "If, when Jesus made His claims He knew that He was not God, then He was lying. But, if He was a liar, then He was also a hypocrite because He told others to be honest, whatever the cost, while Himself teaching and living a colossal lie." "And, more than that. He was a demon, because He told others to trust Him for their eternal destiny. If He could not back up His claims and knew it, then He was unspeakably evil ." A response is available on this point . "Last, He would be a fool, because it was His claims to being God that led to His crucifixion." McDowell quotes J.S. Mill as admitting that we should live in a way that Christ would approve of our lifestyle. He also quotes William Lecky who described Christ as the "ideal character." He quotes Philip Schaff who argues that Jesus didn't lie , because of his 'moral purity and dignity." Finally, he concludes, "Someone who lived as Jesus lived, taught as Jesus taught, and died as Jesus died could not have been a liar." 4A. LUNATIC? "If it is inconceivable for Jesus to be a liar, then could not He actually have thought himself to be God, but been mistaken? After all, it is possible to be both sincere and wrong." A response is available on this point . "But we must remember that for someone to think that He is God, especially in a culture that is fiercely monotheistic, and then to tell others that their eternal destiny depends on believing in Him is no slight flight of fantasy but the thoughts of a lunatic in the fullest sense. Was Jesus Christ such a person?" A response is available on this point . McDowell then quotes C.S. Lewis who says that there can be no other explanation than "Jesus is God." He then quotes Napoleon who said that Jesus was not a man and that Jesus had no parallel in history. McDowell also quotes Channing and Philip Schaff who argue that Jesus was not a lunatic. A response is available on this point . 5A. LORD!! "Who you decide Jesus Christ is must not be an idle intellectual exercise. You cannot put Him on the shelf as a great moral teacher . That is not a valid option. He is either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord . You must make a choice. 'But,' as the apostle John wrote, 'these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God'; and more important, 'that believing you may have life in His Name' (John 20:31 )." "The evidence is clearly in favor of Jesus as Lord. However, some people reject the clear evidence because of moral implications involved. There needs to be a moral honesty in the above consideration of Jesus as either a liar, lunatic, or Lord and God." A response is available on this point . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" Christians use the "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" argument (LLL) when defending Christianity probably more than any other argument. It appears in two forms. The first form, promoted by such advocates as Josh McDowell and the Campus Crusade for Christ, presents it as "proof" for all of Christianity. The second form, used by C.S. Lewis, purports only to argue against the proposition "Jesus was a great moral teacher, but not God." Both forms are flawed. Jim Perry explains: "First, it makes considerable presuppositions about what it was that Jesus supposedly claimed, and the accuracy of the reporting and interpretation of those claims. It requires that one grant the truth of the gospels, particularly John, and furthermore requires an orthodox interpretation of the gospels. That is, the argument presupposes that we agree that Jesus existed, that he taught a new faith representing a considerable modification of the Judaism of his time, and that he claimed to literally be the incarnation on earth of God. None of these things need be granted (though some are more plausible than others). *I* don't grant them; I don't think a reading of the gospels as history support this (I find it reasonable to believe there probably was a person corresponding to Jesus, and he may have been a messiah claimant in the Jewish sense, but the God-incarnate claim doesn't seem well-supported to me)." "Second, even given all that, that Jesus taught a new religion and claimed the authority as God incarnate to do so, the LLL argument is fallacious. True, if Jesus said those things, then they were either completely and literally true, or they were not. If they were not true, then either he knew this, and was saying something he knew not to be literally and completely true, or he didn't know it, and taught them thinking them to be true. The basic fallacy is proceeding from that dichotomy to the extremes of raving lunatic and pathological liar -- as Lewis puts it: He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. One can be sincerely deluded about certain specific things, and yet in other regards be functionally rational; it's a classic feature of paranoia that aside from the object of one's delusion, one can be quite rational, and even the delusion itself can be quite reasoned. So Jesus could have sincerely believed he was God incarnate come to teach a new religion, and thus been technically insane, and yet not have been obviously raving (he kept his claim of divinity, if any, mostly to himself), and capable of perfectly good teaching and thinking on other subjects, such as morality. The McDowell form of the argument is implicitly using the cultural presumption that Jesus was indeed a sound moralist to argue that a lunatic would have been so obviously insane as not to be credible as a moralist, nor in fact capable of sound moral reasoning, thus he must have been telling the truth. The Lewis form is similar, but on the surface omits the last part -- he wants to discredit the claim that Jesus was morally good on the basis of a claim to be God (or, actually, the vaguer 'said the sort of things Jesus said'). There are good arguments to be made against the moral greatness of Jesus's supposed teachings, but the argument that some of his beliefs were based on delusion and therefore that his moral teachings can't be considered sound is simply wrong." "On the other hand, Jesus is said to have taught primarily through metaphor -- plucking out eyes, sheep and goats, light and darkness. What is to say that Son of God and the rest is not the same sort of thing? He might have invoked the authority -- even identity -- of God metaphorically. On the other hand, he might have thought his moral teachings about behavior so important that he considered a false claim of authority that would motivate such behavior to be justified. There are several scenarios where he might have said things knowing they weren't literally and completely true, and yet have had prefectly moral and decent motives in doing so." "Again, this latter discussion is all *granting* that Jesus said 'the sort of things Jesus said', orthodoxly interpreted. That is granting much more than most of us are willing to grant, but even granting those things, the LLL argument fails." Thus LLL attempts to prove that Jesus is God indirectly, by a process of elimination. It assumes that there are only 3 possibilties , that the 2 unorthodox alternatives are wrong, and therefore concludes that the orthodox option is correct. However, scholars have advocated other hypotheses besides the "Lord, Liar, and Lunatic" options: * Legend: Jesus never existed. McDowell never presented in chapter 5 any credible historical evidence for the existence of Jesus as decribed in the Bible. Also, Oxford historian G.A. Wells has developed strong arguments which cast doubt on the historical existence of Jesus, and McDowell never even mentions Wells in his book. * Lost: His words are lost. This is the view of most scholars today. Of course, Josh is already well familiar with these possibilities, but... Therefore, as James Lippard explains, if we were to eliminate the assumptions implicit in LLL, we would get a statement like the following: "He either said the words attributed to him, or he didn't. If he didn't, then they are legendary (or he was misquoted). (This is, in fact, a very common view among biblical scholars.) If he did, then he either meant what evangelical Christians think he did, or he didn't. (If he didn't, then he was misinterpreted or misunderstood.) If he meant what evangelical Christians think he did, then he was either a liar, a lunatic, or lord." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHO WAS JESUS? C.S. Lewis is simply wrong. A person can admire the moral teachings attributed to Jesus, while not regarding him as "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic." Of course, several writers have attacked the moral teachings of Jesus, but if someone simply wants to believe that he was a great moral teacher, Lewis' argument does not provide a valid reason for them to stop doing so. The question of Jesus' identity is an important one. Consider the following words from the Jesus Seminar in The Five Gospels (1): One focal point of the raging controversies [in gospel scholarship] was who Jesus was and what he had said. Jesus has always been a controversial figure. In the gospels he is represented as being at odds with his religious environment in matters like fasting and sabbath observance. He seems not to have gotten along with his own family. Even his disciples are pictured as stubborn, dense, and self- servng-- unable to fathom what he was about. Herod Antipas, in whose territory he ranged as a traveling sage, had him pegged as a trouble- maker, much like John the Baptist, and the Romans regarded him as a mild political threat. Yet much about him remains obscure. We do not even know for sure what language he usually spoke -- Aramaic or Greek -- when instructing his follower. It is not surprising that this enigmatic figure should be perpetually at the center of storms of controversy." Chuck Miller : "The gospels focus on Jesus just as any book focuses on it main character." "This is true of all fictional characters. They exist only in the minds of their creators and on the pages of their books." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Words of Jesus Dan Carvin <74263.65@COMPUSERVE.COM> : "JM quotes Kenneth Scott Latourette who said that the words of Jesus cannot be separated from the person of Jesus. Not true. In fact, to be intelligently honest, one can't confidently attach any words to Jesus." "JM's argument assumes that the Bible is an indisputably accurate record of what Jesus said. This is a great leap of faith." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Jesus Claimed to be God" Alan Morgan : "No he didn't. Not directly. The Bible wasn't written by Jesus so we do not have *anywhere* his statements FIRST HAND (unlike, say, the Koran). Memories are faulty and are colored by peoples desires. How do we know that the writers of the Bible didn't want Jesus to be Lord and thus believe that he said he was Lord? NOTE: The argument that the Bible is divinely inspired won't work here. That is what you are trying to *prove*." Suhail Farooqui : "There is no *unequivocal* statement from Jesus in the New Testament where he claims to be God or a fraction (a third) of divinity or someone who *shares* Divinity with 'God the Father.' It's strange that for every statement that anyone can adduce as amounting to Jesus' claim to divinity one can easily produce another statement of his which immedaitely makes it clearly that the previous assertion must mean something else in a more metaphorical sense. (eg. he is quoted as saying 'I and the father are one,' but another place he prays to 'the Father' asking Him to make him (Jesus) *and* the disciples one in Him (God). Thus, if someone uses the first statement to mean that Jesus meant he was a part of Godhood, then the disciples too must have become God now, -- thus providing counter-proof by reductio ad absurdum). This is true of *every* assertion anyone has every brought to me." "On the contrary, it amazes me that the same Jesus tries many times to show that he is not God and that God is someone outside of him, someone *greater* than him and that which had sent him (Jesus) (He asks 'why callest thou me good, when there is only One good - the Father in heaven' and many others)." "There was a time when I was honestly frustrated by this sophistry of those well-versed in the Bible who still believed in the divinity of Jesus. Now I am more cynically resigned into thinking that some people believe what they want to believe. It's a shame that they have the audacity to write books such as Josh McD does!!" Jawad Ali : "True, *if* indeed Jesus had claimed to be the son of God, then we who believe him to be a human teacher would have a problem. But he did not-- so we don't." R. Schroeder : "But did Jesus in fact claim to be God? If the Gospels are not reliable witnesses, then we have no way of ascertaining what it was that Jesus claimed." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Did Jesus Lie? Josh has already stated that Jesus was either "lord, liar, or lunatic"; he is now trying to show that Jesus was not liar. However, he never provides any evidence of this. He quotes John Stuart Mill who apparently agreed with the teachings of Jesus recorded in the gospels. And he quotes Lecky who thought that Jesus was an ideal character. However, the opinions of people who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries do not constitute evidence for the honesty of a person who supposedly lived in the 1st century. The title of Josh's book is Evidence That Demands a Verdict , so where is his evidence? Where is Josh's evidence that Jesus did not lie? If Josh wants to show that Jesus was not a liar, then he needs to prove that Jesus did not commit evil acts that are not reported in the gospels. It is possible that Jesus did some things that the gospel writers did not know of. How is he going to disprove that? Furthermore, I am curious how Josh and his fans deal with the fact that Jesus thought that his second coming would occur during the lifetime of his followers. This clearly did not happen. Does that make him a liar or a lunatic? R. Schroeder : "I think this is also fraught with false dichotomies. Most humans are mixtures of lies and truth, foolish and wisdom, hypocrisy and earnestness--why should Jesus be different? (You can't assume that Jesus is God to prove that he is God. Why shouldn't we believe that Jesus had the same human foibles as the rest of us?)" Alan Morgan : "Summary: I find the prospect morally repugnant so I'll assume it never happened. Wow." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unspeakably Evil? Alan Morgan : "Unspeakably evil? I dunno. Maybe he had to tell people he was the lord to get them to believe in him. Since he preached good things I hardly think he qualifies as "unspeakably evil". He convinced people the only way he could." "OTOH - Maybe he *was* unspeakably evil. Can you provide any proof that he wasn't? Other than the fact that you don't like the idea?" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Was Jesus a Lunatic? Alan Morgan : "Like Mohammed for example? Short time-out: Was Mohammed a liar or a lunatic?" "Don't want to tackle that one ay? Don't blame you." Alan Morgan : "There are lots of people who have believed lots of pretty wierd things." "Assumes that the NT clearly says that Jesus is God, but the Arians, who were native speakers of Greek did not come to the same conclusion. Perhaps the NT does not clearly violate Judaic monotheism in the fashion that Josh claims. If the interpretation was under dispute in the 4th Century, then why is it clear now?" R. Schroeder : "People can be mistaken without being lunatics. People can even be mistaken about major aspects of their lives without being lunatics." Alan Morgan : "When I want C.S. Lewis' freaking opinions I'll *ASK* for them. Here I thought this was an argument based on facts, not on the hopes of a second rate novelist/philosopher." "[Napoleon had no parallel in history], but I don't think *he's* God." "Well hell, that convinces me. A bunch of people who never met the guy and lived nearly 2000 years after him conclude that he isn't crazy based on some writings by somebody else. How can I argue with that?" Paul O. Bartlett : "Along the lines of Mc.'s 'trilemma,' I think one of the 'prongs' is weak and the whole argument is rotten, because it rests on a rotten foundation." "His weak prong is the 'lunatic' one. He claims that if Jesus (peace be upon Him) said those things sincerely, but they were false and he did not know they were false, then he was a lunatic. This is simply verbal sloppiness. What is a lunatic? As a person with a chronic mental disorder myself, perhaps I am more tuned into this sort of thing than most people." "McD. makes gratuitous statements about Jesus' monotheistic environment, as if that shoves everything into a black-white dichotomy of human experience. Well, I can testify from my own experience with mental illness that things are *not* so black and white. There is no such thing as a lunatic, whatever a dictionary definition might lead one to believe. There are only gradations of mental status which may come and go." "Although McD. does not actually say so, as I remember, he tends to set the scene for a 'lunatic' to be someone 'completely off his rocker.' But that is not so. As I said above, it is not either-or, but only gradations. However, certain things that a person does while off toward one end of the scale may be more attention-getting or may even be more memorable to those predisposed to believe certain things, so a person might say something which could even spark a whole movement without justifiably hanging a pejorative label on him." "McD. seems to be trying to push his case and thereby categorizing Jesus' social environment as somehow different. I consider the possibility that even in first-century Jewish Palestine a person might have made otherwise outrageous statements which were taken in course by his contemporaries because they knew he was having one of his bad episodes. At the same time a few who were predisposed might have taken his words as somehow of a different level." "Mind you, I am not saying this is what happened with Jesus. I am only saying that I see the possibilities of human experience differently from McD. It seems altogether likely that he chose 'lunatic' for its alliterative assonance with 'lord' and 'liar.'" "I said that I consider his whole trilemma argument to be rotten because of a rotten foundation. Simply, the whole thing is predicated on the assumption or argument that in the Four Gospels as we have them, Jesus is accurately reported. Challenge this predication, and the whole trilemma business falls to the ground forthwith. And frankly, I simply do NOT grant that Jesus was accurately reported in the documents that we now have. Without that accurate reportage, McD.'s trilemma argument is simply pointless and a waste of effort." "Now I know that early on in the book -- at least in the early edition I read -- McD. has a section or chapter entitled something like, "The Bible -- I Trust It." Well, I don't, and I didn't find his arguments convincing then and I don't find them convincing now -- less so, in fact. Unless and until Josh McDowell can convince me that the Four Gospels in the New Testament are accurate and reliable, then his whole lord-liar-lunatic schema is simply a waste of time." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is Jesus God? Alan Morgan : "Puhlease. To summarize: The argument says that there are just three possibilties. This is incorrect. It says that the liar possibility is false - and offers no proof of this fact. It says that the lunatic possibility is false - and offers no proof of this fact. It then concludes that Jesus must have been Lord. Be still my beating heart." Chuck Miller : "No, McDowell has not proven his case. Jesus cannot be proven to be what McDowell claims him to be with such scant "evidence". Reading between the lines, McDowell seems to be presenting the classic wrap-up to the evangelist's invitation to Christ. He is asking his reader to respond to a feeble argument by accepting an implausible conclusion." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis was a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University. He is still a favorite author of contemporary Christians. He is best known for his book Mere Christianity and for his Chronicles of Narnia. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Napoleon McDowell is using an appeal to authority to support his assertion that Jesus is God. Who cares if Napoleon said that Jesus was not man? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Moral Implications Jim Perry : "Just as with the quote the other day about professors, this is a clear ad-hominem/well-poisoning bash against anyone who might disagree with McDowell's brainwashing attempts. Not only do some people reject this 'clear evidence', but they do so because of 'moral implications'." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Josh's Bibliography Jim Merritt : "Among his unbiased, authoritative sources he lists an unpublished thesis from the Dallas Theological Seminary, a book from the Dallas Theological Seminary Press, a book from the Lutherin Book Concern, a book from the Bible Truth Depot, one from Scripture Press publications, Inc., one from The Christian Victory Publishing Co., one from the American Tract Society, an unpublished dissertation from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a lot from Moody Press." END**********************************************************