C.S. LEWIS' TRILEMMA

Much as I admire the writings of C.S. Lewis both for his memorable way of putting things and his impeccable logic, I must admit that I have always felt that his simple argument for the deity of Christ found in Mere Christianity (The trilemma: Jesus was either Lord, a liar, or a lunatic) was a bit lacking in persuasiveness. It failed to address a fourth option; namely, that the apostles and other New Testament writers simply made up the story or, at the least, stretched the truth concerning Jesus' life and teachings considerably.

I have dealt with that basic issue briefly in my post entitled “Answering Atheists: The Bible's Flawed Origin,” concentrating on the historical issues surrounding the writing and canonization of the NT writings. But actually, the best argument of all is simply to read some of the apocryphal Christian writings from the 2^nd century AD through the Middle Ages and compare them with the Gospels. You will find yourself transported from the straightforward, even dry, accounts of the Bible into a world of flowery, romantic writings and fairy tales.

But I was still concerned as to why Lewis did not realize the glaring blind spot in his argument. Therefore I was pleasantly surprised to read a recent interview on mereorthodoxy.com carried out by my friend David G. Moore with Randy Newman, Senior Fellow for Evangelism and Apologetics at the C.S. Lewis Institute in the Washington D.C. Area regarding Newman's book Mere Evangelism. Here is a brief excerpt from that interview, which I found very helpful.

Moore: In his famous “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?” argument, Lewis left out the Legend option. How big a blind spot is that omission?

Newman: I don’t think it was a blind spot. I think it was a matter of how much time he had for his 15-minute radio broadcasts that later became the book Mere Christianity. They had to edit his manuscripts rather drastically to meet time limitations as well as other factors. But we have accounts of how those broadcasts came to be and there’s evidence that he did want to include the “legend” component in that objection. In brilliant Lewis-style, he wanted to explore the argument, “Maybe Jesus never claimed to be God and his disciples made all that stuff up.” Lewis countered with this quip: “The theory only saddles you with twelve inexplicable lunatics instead of one.”

And actually, this was the one point that convinced the prolific classical historian Michael Grant in his book Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels to seriously consider that maybe the resurrection of Christ was factually true. Otherwise, he reasoned, why in the world would his closest followers who were obviously quite disillusioned and afraid for their lives suddenly make an about face and risk everything including their lives to spread the Gospel? And the same goes for the archenemy of the early Christians, Paul. These early followers were either reporting the historical truth in their writings or they were all lunatics.