Liar, lunatic, or Lord

Many thoughtful people see Jesus this way, and you may be one of them. You admire what he taught: love your enemies, care for the poor, do to others what you would have them do to you. You doubt the miracles and the claims Christians make about him. Calling him a great moral teacher seems generous and fair. It respects him without asking you to believe more than the evidence supports.

C. S. Lewis, an Oxford scholar of medieval literature who had been an atheist, argued that this is the one view of Jesus that is not open to us. In Mere Christianity, drawn from radio talks he gave during the Second World War, he put it as a choice: a man who said what Jesus said would be either lying, or out of his mind, or what he claimed to be.

The argument is often reduced to a slogan, “liar, lunatic, or Lord,” and used to corner people. It should not be used that way, and the slogan leaves out a fourth option, which this page takes seriously. Stated carefully, it asks what kind of teacher Jesus was, according to the earliest sources.

The moral teaching is real, and running through it is teaching about Jesus himself. Mark’s Gospel, which most historians regard as the earliest, written around AD 65 to 75, shows this plainly.

In Mark 2, Jesus tells a paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The religious teachers object that only God can forgive sins. Jesus does not correct them. He heals the man “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:5-12). At his trial, asked whether he is the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One, he says, “I am,” and adds that they will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven, words drawn from Daniel 7 (Mark 14:61-62). The high priest calls it blasphemy.

Even the Sermon on the Mount has this edge. Jesus sets his own word beside the law of Moses: “You have heard that it was said… But I tell you” (Matthew 5:21-22). He says that on the last day people will call him “Lord, Lord,” and he will decide whom he knows (Matthew 7:21-23). He says that anyone who loves father or mother more than him is not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37). A teacher of ethics points away from himself, to the good; Jesus kept pointing to himself.

Suppose Jesus made these claims and they were not true. He may have known they were false. In that case he asked people to stake their lives and their loyalty on a claim he knew to be untrue, which is hard to square with the honesty of his teaching.

Or he may have believed them sincerely and been wrong. Lewis used the word “lunatic,” and it is better avoided, but the point stands without it. A man who sincerely believes he will judge the world, and that loyalty to him outranks loyalty to family, and is mistaken about all of it, is deeply wrong about himself. We may still admire some of what he said. We would not call him a reliable guide to how to live, since his teaching depends so heavily on who he says he is.

On this branch, “a great moral teacher and nothing more” means he made the claims, they were false, and he is called great anyway.

The strongest response to Lewis is that Jesus never said these things, and that his followers put them in his mouth later. Many critical scholars read John’s Gospel, with its “before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58), as a later and more developed portrait. That is a serious view, and if it were true of all the claims, the argument would not get started.

But the claims are not only in John. The examples above come from Mark and from teaching shared by Matthew and Luke, the sources historians regard as earliest. Paul’s letters, written in the AD 50s, go further still. In one of them Paul quotes what may be an early hymn about Jesus, who existed “in the form of God” and before whom “every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:6-11). He preserves an Aramaic prayer, maranatha, “Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22), which suggests that Aramaic-speaking followers in Judea were praying to Jesus.

The historian Larry Hurtado concluded that worship of Jesus began very early, among Jewish followers who believed there is one God, which is hard to explain if the claims grew up slowly over generations. The fuller case is set out in the reliability of the New Testament and Jesus is God.

Lewis’s argument does not prove that Jesus is Lord. It shows that the comfortable middle position is the least stable one. Once Jesus’ own claims are in view, three honest answers remain: the claims were false, they were invented, or they were true.

His first followers pointed to an event, not to his claims alone. Peter, speaking in Jerusalem weeks after the crucifixion, says that God raised Jesus and has “made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ!” (Acts 2:36). On their account, the resurrection was God’s answer to the question Jesus’ claims had raised.

Whether that happened is a historical question, and this page does not settle it. Scholars such as Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, who are Christians, have argued for it from facts that most scholars accept, beginning with his crucifixion. You may weigh that evidence and remain unconvinced. Even then, the question left is whether what he said about himself was false, misreported, or true, and not whether he is inspiring.