C.S. Lewis’s famous Liar/Lunatic/Lord trilemma has been criticized for leaving out a fourth option: Legend. There are historical and textual reasons to doubt the legend hypothesis, but I believe it fails even apart from that external evidence. It’s vanishingly unlikely to be true, based upon merely the New Testament documents themselves.
Lewis’s statement of the trilemma may be found in his classic Mere Christianity:
I am trying here 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 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 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
What a master of wording Lewis was! I’ve tried to echo some of his phrasing in what follows, and I’ve had to give up. Still, not all have founded this argument of his to be compelling. Criticisms have been raised especially against Lewis’s assumption here that Jesus existed, and that he said what the New Testament (NT) claims he did. What if there was no Jesus, or what if he didn’t say what was ascribed to him?
The complaint is misdirected in the first place, since the trilemma is specifically aimed at shutting out the possibility that Jesus was just a great moral teacher. Of course it assumes that the NT record of Jesus’ teachings is generally accurate: it is addressed to an audience that shares that assumption, and was intended to address an objection specific to that group.
So it seems the possibility remains that Jesus’ life and words were legendary. Or does it? There’s a growing body of research leading scholars to consensus not only that Jesus lived but that he was a teacher and miracle worker. No less a skeptic than Jesus Seminar leader John Dominic Crossan has said,
I hold, in summary, that Jesus, as a magician and miracle worker, was a very problematic and controversial phenomenon not only for his enemies but even for his friends.
Of course Crossan would not see Jesus’ miracles as evidence of deity, but as “some kind of socioreligious phenomenon.”
The Legend hypothesis asks us to believe that a beleaguered faith community invented Jesus, either in whole or in part. Perhaps there was a great man of that name, perhaps he spoke inspiring words and did great deeds, and perhaps a band of followers gathered around him; or perhaps not. All we can surmise is that there sprang up in the first or second centuries a faith community in his name. This brave band persisted in spite of the pressure of Jewish and Roman persecution, holding on even more tightly to their hope in Jesus (whatever that meant to them at the time) even after it had been proved futile.
Such things have been observed in modern times. What has never been observed, however, is any such group inventing someone like Jesus Christ.
Here’s what I mean by that. Christ is portrayed as a man of highest ethical standards, the epitome of grace and truth (John 1:14), the great teacher of love, the protector of the oppressed, the righteous warrior against abuse of power. He came not to be served but to serve, he said, and to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:35). Bonhoeffer called him “the man for others,” and there could hardly be any disagreement with his assessment of the way Jesus is portrayed. Suppose the Legend hypothesis were true. Whoever this troubled community of faith might have been, they must have included men and women of unparalleled moral genius.
But that’s hardly half of it, for the account we have of Jesus also shows him having unimaginable power. He walked on water. He stilled the storm with just a word. He healed many, and raised some who had been dead, even up to four days (John 11). He fed 5,000 with just a few loaves and fish. He could do whatever he wanted.
I have worked with men of great temporal and political power. I have never met one, nor have I heard of one or even read of one in any fictional account, who used his power entirely for the good of others, without exception. It is beyond human nature to do so. Lord Acton put it well: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Yet Jesus with his absolute power showed absolutely no sign of being corrupted by it. When tempted to turn stones into bread, to satisfy a normal human hunger following a long period of fasting, he refused to take that shortcut. He didn’t fly, he walked. When he got tired he was tired, until he rested. When he was on trial for his life, he had legions of angels at his disposal, but he accepted the court’s sentence of death. He didn’t heal himself of the wounds of his flogging. He gave himself up to the pain and to death instead. Even when he rose from the dead, when he could have rounded up his killers and knocked their heads together, he went instead to places where his presence would bring joy.
If this was fiction, it was fiction of an order all its own.
Think about it: if this was the product of a community in trouble, then what genius inspired them to create it? What caused these persons of historically unmatched literary and moral brilliance to remain nameless? What reason did they have to leave their own story so far in the background as to be virtually undetectable? Did these crafters of a false Messiah intend their story to be believed? Every sign points to that, both in the NT documents and in the external testimony of early Christian leaders. But if they intended it to be believed, and they knew it was false, were they not crafting a deceit? Or if they did not realize it was false, were they not delusional?
So it seems we have another trilemma. Whoever wrote the Gospel accounts were either witnesses to the greatest moral genius of all the ages, or were the creators of the greatest falsely portrayed moral genius of all literary history. So then we must ask, were they fraudulent moral geniuses? The very question fails for self-contradiction. Were they deluded moral geniuses? This seems hardly more likely. To accept either of these options is to fly in the face of all that we know about human nature. It would require a prodigy greater, more mysterious, less comprehensibly explained, and far less comprehensively situated in revelational history than Jesus Christ himself.
To believe either of these, in other words, would take more faith than to recognize these early authors were what they claimed to be: witnesses to the great power and love of Jesus Christ himself.
Originally published at Thinking Christian
I’d like to point out some potential problems with your analysis, if I may.
1. You seem to assume that the “Legend” horn of the quadrilemma requires the gospel writers either to have flat out lied, or to have been delusional. However, I don’t think any serious supporter of the Legend hypothesis would make either assumption. Indeed, biblical scholars already know that, for example, the gospel of Luke borrows material from Mark and material from another source shared by Matthew. It is highly unlikely, then, that the gospels were invented out of whole cloth by the gospel authors. If much of Jesus’ life was legend, then, we’d expect the gospel authors to be passing on an existing, rather well-developed, legend. At most, they would be embellishing this narrative, and they would be passing on an existing legend that they sincerely believed just like you believe it today.
As for the gospel writers being deluded, in the simple non-pathological sense of believing something which, it turns out, was false, I don’t see how this can be discounted. Consider that on the Christian view, people like Mohammed are considered to have been deluded. If Mohammed, then why not the authors of the gospels?
2. You claim that there is a “growing body of research” supporting the idea that Jesus was a miracle worker, yet the very first entry in your link supporting such a consensus is a quote by Bart Ehrman saying that Jesus was *reputed* to be a miracle worker. Well, obviously he was, that is no surprise. But this is not support for Bart Ehrman *himself* thinking that Jesus was a miracle worker, which he obviously does not, given his writings on the topic. This gets your link off to a very bad start. Points 3 and 5 on the list, just to pick a couple at random, say the same thing. You’re confusing Jesus’ reputation among his own people as a miracle worker with the belief by today’s biblical scholars that he is a miracle worker. Where is your support for the latter?
Interestingly, the only scholar you’re willing to quote explicitly (John Dominic Crossan) doesn’t appear to believe that Jesus’ miracles were genuine miracles in the usual sense of the word.
It should also be noted that there is a “growing body of research” supporting many positions on Jesus, including the mythicist position that Jesus never existed (Richard Carrier, for instance, is coming out with a new book on the topic in a few months’ time).
3. You make the rather strange claim that it must have taken a moral genius to come up with the idea of a person of “highest ethical standards, the epitome of grace and truth, …” I’m afraid I don’t understand why it would take genius to invent such a person, or at least to exaggerate the character of a real person to such an extent that they came to resemble Jesus. What exactly is so intellectually challenging about creating such a character? Fictional literature is filled to overflowing with people of exceptional moral qualities. People can be extremely inventive. Furthermore, themes in the Christian narrative, from miracle-working to self-sacrifice, to resurrection, all existed in various mythologies before Jesus was even born. Jesus’ story is not, in fact, unique.
4. You then move on to claim that Jesus was portrayed as having immense power. I don’t see how this supports your argument. Wouldn’t the whole point of a legend be to bestow Jesus with superhuman power? Shouldn’t great power, then, be evidence *for* legend, not against it? You then say that you’ve never met someone with great power who used it purely for the good of others, yet Jesus did. But surely, once again, this supports the idea that Jesus’ power must have been a legend, since a real person would not have behaved the way he did?
5. Finally, your claim that the biblical authors displayed “historically unmatched literary and moral brilliance” is not a matter of undisputed fact, but is simply your opinion. Many people who have read the Bible would disagree, claiming that while the writing is pretty good in places, you can find much better by looking at Shakespeare or Dickens. Even the Koran has its moments.
Let me summarize by providing a more realistic picture of the Legend hypothesis which does not require deceptive moral geniuses: Much of the legend surrounding Jesus probably developed while Christianity was still being spread orally. The model of today’s urban legend is a good one: it is very easy for fantastical stories to blossom around some kernel of truth. And once these stories get repeated often enough, over even a short time period (a few years, say), they can become accepted as conventional wisdom (for example, the idea that we use only 10% of our brains, which is utter bunk!). And none of this requires a single deceptive person who’s deliberately making things up. Once you take into account the highly superstitious* nature of the culture of the time, it seems difficult to *avoid* developing a legend.
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* Consider Acts 8:5-13 and Acts 14:8-13.
Thank you for writing this article. It puts my own thoughts into focus by framing the issue of the apostles and writers into their own trilemma.