Lunatic, Liar, Lord…or Legend?

In a 1940’s British radio address, respected literary critic C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) famously pointed out that, given the things Jesus taught about himself, he was either a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord. Since Jesus claimed to be the Lord, Lewis was saying that for Jesus to be wrong about that, he either didn’t know he was wrong (and therefore was a lunatic) or else he knowingly deceived people (and therefore was a liar). Lewis’ argument – called a “trilemma” because there were three alternatives instead of the normal two found in a dilemma – was preserved and spread widely when his radio essays were later compiled into a book titled Mere Christianity. I came across this trilemma in the late 1970’s when someone loaned me the book; Lewis’ logic hit me right between the eyes – not enough to convince me, but enough to motivate me to read the New Testament for myself. As a teenager and young adult, I had avoided Jesus like the plague, but reading the New Testament in my late 20’s at the prodding of C. S. Lewis ended up hooking me on Jesus for life.

I later came to find out that I was one of many people who had been moved by force of Lewis’ simple argument. Unfortunately, this Brit’s trilemma has lost some force in the ensuing decades – not because of any flaw in his logic, but because we Americans became dumber. When the silent generation remained silent, failing to put the baby boomers (of which I am one) in our place when we rebelled against their values in the 1960’s, America was set on a course of learning less and less about history. (How can you learn anything when you already know it all?) College education, with primary and secondary education following suit, became less and less substantive as they veered away from classical education to embrace progressive theories which criticized or ignored previously treasured sources of knowledge from the Western canon.

With this backdrop of increasingly arrogant ignorance in an increasingly secular culture, the Christian sub-culture was swept along in that decline. Here are some of the signposts of Christendom’s descent:

  • In the 1980’s, there was “The Jesus Seminar” – a controversial group of biblical scholars – who cast academic doubt on many of the most important facts about Jesus found in the New Testament. Among academics in general, there was already doubt about some of the things Jesus said and did, but this group pushed the envelope.
  • In the 1990’s, college professor Bart Ehrman began writing textbooks as well as bestsellers that spread among the general public the academic doubt about what Jesus had said and done. Ehrman didn’t invent academic doubt, but he was very effective at popularizing it with the masses.
  • In the 2000’s, The Da Vinci Code – as a bestselling novel and then as a blockbuster movie – managed to get tens of millions of people to believe that, or at least wonder if, the 4th-century Roman emperor Constantine had mandated to church leaders which books would make up the New Testament. This ridiculous conspiracy theory could take root only because, by this time, the American public had so little genuine knowledge about history – especially where Jesus and the flow of Western Civilization was concerned – that they were unable to distinguish fantasy from history. (Churches in the time of Constantine were not hierarchical enough to impose such a top-down approach even if they had wanted to; moreover, the New Testament’s contents were determined by authorial authenticity, not by some theological standard.)

These three developments I have identified for you didn’t result in people having the wrong ideas about Jesus. That is, the general public today doesn’t think that Jesus is a lunatic. Nor do most people believe he is a liar. What they do believe, however, is that no one is supposed to be sure about what Jesus said or did…so there’s no point bringing him into the discussion. This is why Lewis’ argument has lost some oomph with the current generation. They think there’s a fourth alternative: that Jesus is a legend (employing another “l”). That is, public opinion has bought into the left-leaning modern academic mindset that there’s no reliable history about Jesus because ancient manuscripts were handwritten, or because modern people shouldn’t trust ancient people to know who wrote which book of the Bible, or…just because. The point is that no one is supposed to know for sure what Jesus taught. Hmm. We have here the most famous teacher the human race has ever produced but people are not supposed to think that they can know what he taught! The whole reason churches were preserving the texts that came to be called the New Testament was because they wanted to be sure about what Jesus taught. After all, if there was a chance you were going to have to die for believing some teacher, wouldn’t you want to be sure about what he taught?

We have more ancient manuscripts of the New Testament than we do ancient manuscripts of any other ancient writing – secular or religious. This manuscript evidence for the New Testament demonstrates that there has been no “evolution” of its contents. The contents have not changed over time. The only variations between manuscripts are minor in nature. There are not, for example, two Gospels of Matthew vying for acceptance. There is a consistency of content in the manuscripts through the 20 centuries since they were first written. Therefore, we’ve known what Jesus taught all that time. It just needs to be brought back to light because it’s been buried over the last 50 years by the increasing resistance of our culture to historical reality – especially to any historical reality that might challenge the predominance of secularism.

I spend considerable time pointing out the strength of the history we have about Jesus because academia has left us so ignorant – not just of his history, but of all history. Jesus was by no means a legend; history makes that clear. Now, if a man doesn’t care about history – especially history that is personally relevant to his future – I don’t know how to help him. He’s decided to live his life as an Alzheimer’s patient.

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10/26/25

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