The Jesus of the New Testament

“One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to.  I mean, the claim to forgive sins: any sins.”  It’s one thing, Lewis pointed out, if you step on my toe and I forgive you for it.  It’s quite another if you step on someone else’s toe and I forgive you for it.  I can plausibly forgive someone who steals my money, but most people would agree that I have no right to forgive someone who has stolen yours.

Yet this is just what Jesus did.  He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured.  He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses.  This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.  In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet, Lewis continues, nobody who reads the New Testament comes away with the impression of silliness and conceit in the Jesus depicted in the gospels.  When he speaks about his own humility and meekness, we are inclined to take him at his word, though claiming to forgive sins on behalf of God and all humanity seems to be about as far from humble meekness as anyone could imagine.  “I am trying here,” Lewis contended,

to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.”  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  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.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.

And, since Jesus appears to be neither a lunatic nor a devilish fiend, Lewis concluded, “however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”[1]

But Lewis left out one possibility.  There might still be a way for skeptics to escape the dilemma he sketches.  Perhaps the New Testament gospels and the Bible in general are not reliable.  Perhaps the Jesus depicted in the gospels, attractive as he is, is largely or even purely a character in a fictional story.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 55-57.

More on that last issue in a bit.