Re: Beversluis: “Jesus: Who Was He?”
Beversluis seeks to diffuse the C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” trilemma.
The first argument our author makes is that the Bible and Gospels in particular are unreliable. Well, blow me down. If the New Testament narratives “incorporate later recollections, interpolations, embellishments, fictionalizations, and ascriptions of deity,” then the implications of this go far beyond the obscure fact of the failure of C.S. Lewis’s argument. Are we even sure that Jesus existed? Is Christianity “based on a myth, mass hallucination, and even outright lies”? Forget C.S. Lewis; given Beversluis’s argument we probably have an intellectual imperative to abandon the Christian faith altogether! In other words, that the Bible is not to be trusted is an immensely strong claim which lays waste to the religion of billions. To call it controversial is hardly to do justice to it. So, it is entirely reasonable to dismiss this argument as proving too much. We must evaluate C.S. Lewis’s trilemma on the condition that the Gospels are accurate. I mean, who can doubt that Lewis himself would agree that if the Gospels recount events that never took place, then he has no case?
Lewis claims to be an expert in literary criticism and asserts that the Gospels don’t feel to him like a myth. Beversluis dismisses Lewis’s statement by saying that his expertise is irrelevant: Lewis is deluded into falsely assuming that “wide reading in a particular genre necessarily makes one’s judgment more reliable than narrow intensive reading in the same genre.” Yet earlier he thinks nothing of referring to “the opinion of mainstream New Testament scholarship generally” and to psychiatric experts. Does our author remember what he says from one moment to the next? Is being an expert valuable or not?
Beversluis goes on to claim that Jesus may in fact have been insane, since he allegedly had moral failings. Jesus curses the fig, he orders the demons to enter and drown the pigs, he takes a colt without permission, he condemns the Pharisees, he claims that wanting to commit adultery is a sin (isn’t it?), etc. Now I think that there is a reasonable explanation of these behaviors, and it is certainly not madness. But I just don’t see how anyone who falsely claims to be the omnipotent immortal God, “the way and the truth and the life,” who created the universe could be any kind of teacher, let alone a great moral one.
In order to forgive sins, Beversluis argues, Jesus need not have been God; he only needed to have been something like a Catholic priest who had the authority to forgive sins. Now if Jesus had this authority, he must have received it directly from God, for no one else could ordain him — he was the first priest. But (1) the Bible does not relate to us any story of such ordination; on the contrary, Christ says he builds his Church, that is, the Church in which he, Jesus Christ is to be worshipped; and (2) God would not favor and empower a lunatic or a fiend to be the founder of what would later become a worldwide religion. There is a much more serious problem with this, however. The Incarnation has altered the relationship between men and God. It effected a genuine change in the cosmic order of things. It is only after Jesus’s mission was completed that forgiveness of sins became possible. The Law condemned the world of sin; nobody had the right to forgive except the Father, but He was not willing, and the Son had not yet taken ownership of the world from his Father. If Jesus was not God, then he could not have been a sin-forgiving priest either.
But Beversluis makes two good points. Jesus’s moral teachings are good regardless of who he is; they stand or fall on their own. Consider, however, that Jesus taught a lot of things that dealt with heavenly affairs and divine truths. If he was merely “a man who believed that he was God (or the Son of God), but was not,” then the articles of faith revealed by Jesus have no authority, because there was no way Jesus could know them — unless God revealed them to him, which He wouldn’t, because, again, He would not have chosen a crazy man or a fiend to deliver the revelations. Second, the key to Christianity is not moral teachings; moral teachers are a dime a dozen. Once again, it is the change in the relationship between mankind and God.
His second point is that numerous controversies on the nature of Jesus animated the Church Fathers. It was not immediately clear that Jesus had two natures, fully human and fully divine, in one person, etc. Many hypotheses were entertained, and these had to be settled by extensive discussion. It follows that concluding that Jesus was God was not so trivial a matter as C.S. Lewis would have us believe; otherwise why had so many people been confused before the official doctrine was finally promulgated? Ah, but you see, we don’t know the process of reasoning by which the early Church came to what are now orthodox doctrines. Perhaps it took them so long to arrive at the truth precisely because they did not have access to the C.S. Lewis’s argument. In other words, if C.S. Lewis had lived in those days, Adoptionism and Arianism and so forth might never have arisen, so cogent his argument would have seemed to the Church councils.
So, it seems that C.S. Lewis’s trilemma is alive and well.
See also: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord; The Argument for Christianity from “Martyrdom”.