C.S. Lewis’ trilemma, sometimes called “lunatic, liar or lord,” is a good example of bad apologetics. Like a lot of apologetics, it’s clever and sounds good on the surface. But the more thought you put into it, the more problems you can find.
It’s bad enough that Peter Breitbart (no relation to Andrew) has produced a movie using it as a jumping off point: Madman or Something Worse.
From the movie website:
Jesus of Nazareth was an awful moral philosopher. He compares badly to such modern greats such as Mill, Rawls or Ross and also to historical thinkers such as Aristotle, Diogenes or Plato. His moral contributions are not original, and his original contributions are not moral.
God is little more than a pleasant fable for adults, a pacifier for the mind that quells the nervous forebodings of death. And so Lewis is right. The Nazarene was a Madman or Something Worse.
From the site and the trailer, it looks like the movie uses Jesus as a starting point for a serious discussion of moral philosophy. I can’t decide if that’s a good hook, or whether it will prove to be too much of a distraction. Any thoughts?
The false trilemma, akin to a false dichotomy, here trichotomy, can be extended to be a quadrilemma: “lunatic, liar, lord or legend.” (Don’t credit me–someone came up with this some time ago.) I’ll opt for “legend.”
As far as I know it was Bart Ehrman who came up with the “legend” appendage, although it should be made clear that he meant it in the sense of legendary accretion on top of a historical Jesus’ actions and teachings rather than Jesus being an outright myth (which is itself a possibility that should be added).
I think its good to take a nice look at what Gospel Jesus actually said (who knows what historical Jesus said), because I think Jesus gets lauded and idealized to such a degree that people take it for granted that he was a good person, and that he was right in all his pronouncements. Yet, for a moral man, who claimed that we should love our enemies, he was pretty happy about damning those who didn’t love him to eternal torture, and seemed pretty clear that the world was coming to a very quick end. The image of Jesus today mischaracterizes even his own bastardized, second hand teachings, and I think its worth being critical about it.
Indeed, but I suppose we have to consider two more things:
First off, the bible was written by a lot of different people, and almost certainly modified by the Romans, biased/incorrect translators and more. It is impossible to tell which parts are ‘true’ and which are abridged.
And that, of course, assumes Jesus even existed. I heard somewhere that out of all the historians at the time, only one documented these ‘miraculous’ happenings: Josephus, whose writings have been proved fake. If that were true, the only evidence of Jesus’s existence is in the bible (and other holy texts of course) itself…
Josephus’s writings are not fake, but some of them are suspect for other reasons. There is some evidence for Jesus’s existence, but probably not conclusive evidence.
Not to start a historicity of Jesus war, but what is this evidence? I am unaware of evidence for even the MENTION of such a person(or any of his disciples for that matter) until at least 30+ years after the fact. Whenever I ask this question, people bring up the Josephus forgery(The Josephus passage in question is indisputably a forgery, incidentally. Earlier copies have been found that lack it, it is much too short for Josephus, who could easily expend thousands of words on the most minor of happenings, and makes no sense in the context of a person who was a believing Jew until the day he died. No modern apologist I am aware of is even willing to argue that is anything other then a fake), or they just make the most famous of arguments from authority:” Every scholar agrees he was real”. If there is evidence for such a person beyond the Bible, I would love to hear it. I’m not going to hold my breath though.
I think this discussion has been had several times before. I don’t recall anyone coming up with a better source than Josephus, which, as you point out, is not above suspicion.
A handy reference is the Historicity of Jesus summary:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/scott_oser/hojfaq.html
And, it’s always fun to muddy the waters with accounts of other Jesuses living in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE.
http://deusdiapente.blogspot.com/2009/10/will-real-jesus-please-stand-up.html