Investigating Christianity Part 1: Liar, Lunatic, Lord, Legend

Was Jesus God, a legend, a nutter, or a liar?

1 The Trilemma

Here I’ll begin a series in which I investigate Christianity. I don’t know exactly how long this series will go on for. I’ll try to see how good the main arguments are both for and against Christianity. Currently, my view is that Christianity is probably the most probable major religion but it’s probably false. Let’s see if investigating the arguments for and against Christianity changes that core conviction.

In this article, I’ll talk about the liar, lunatic, lord, legend argument for Jesus’s divinity. The basic claim is that Jesus claimed to be God or at least made certain lofty claims about his own status. Now there are a few possibilities:

1. He was crazy. He genuinely thought he was God but was deeply delusional.

2. He was a liar. He knew he wasn’t God yet pretended to be God in order to get material reward.

3. He never really claimed to be God.

4. He really was God.

These can be demonstrated to be the only options. Jesus either did or did not claim to be God. If he didn’t claim to be God then the legend option is right. If he did, either he was right or wrong. If he was right, then the lord option is confirmed. If he did claim to be God, then either he knew he wasn’t God or he didn’t. If he didn’t know he wasn’t God then the lunatic option is true—one who falsely believes themself to be God is a bit like one who falsely believes themself to be a poached egg, as Lewis says. If he did know, then he’s a liar.

2 Legend?

The legend option is the most plausible of the naturalistic explanations. Bart Ehrmann agues for it in his book How Jesus Became God. The basic argument seems to be that Jesus’s claims to divinity get more extravagant over time, but the earlier gospels don’t have him claiming to be God—only the gospel of John includes that claim. Thus, a reasonable inference is that Jesus never claimed to be God—if he had, one would expect that to show up in Mark, Luke, or Matthew.

Gavin Ortlund addresses this argument in his book Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn’t. He claims that Jesus’s claims to divinity are the best explanation of the following facts:

1. Philippians 2:6–11 is very early and says that Jesus is “in very nature God.” Paul also suggests that Jesus is God in various other epistles. So this means the belief probably developed very early and was had at least by Paul. This would be naturally explained by Jesus claiming to be God. Note this only shows that Paul thought Jesus was God, so it doesn’t mean that Jesus ever claimed to be God, but might be naturally explained by his claiming to be God.

2. Jesus claims to forgive sins (e.g. in Mark 2:5). This is taken to be a claim to divinity as Mark 2:7 says “He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus in response claims, in verse ten, “I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” This is a reference to Daniel 7:13-14 which says:

13 “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. 14 And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

Thus, Jesus is at least claiming to be the son of man who can forgive sins. I think I disagree with Ortlund’s reading of this passage: it looks like Jesus is claiming to be the son of man but denying that he’s God. He’s saying even though he isn’t God he can forgive sins because he’s the son of man. Ortlund says:

This little episode is a good example of how the Gospels (including John) reveal Jesus’s divine identity—through the exercise of divine authority. No one thinks that Jesus walked around announcing, “God is a Trinity, and I am the Second Member!” In fact, Jesus often concealed his identity, charging both his disciples and others not to reveal who he is (e.g., Mark 1:43–44; 8:30). Instead, Jesus’s divine self-understanding was revealed through what he did and said in the context of his ministry inaugurating the kingdom of God. Take the presentation of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, for example—his authoritative teaching (1:22), his power over demons (1:27), his ministry (11:28), his power to heal (1:41), his transfiguration (9:2–8), his requirement of absolute devotion to himself (8:34–38), and so forth. Think of the disciples’ terror after Jesus calms the storm: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (4:41; cf. Luke 8:25, and also the story in Matt. 14:22–33, where they worship Jesus as the Son of God after he walks on the water). Consider his claims to be the “lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28); his detailed predictions of future events (10:34; 14:30); and his equation of devotion to himself with devotion to the gospel (8:35; 10:29). One might quibble with this text or that, but the cumulative portrait conveys a particular kind of authority, an authority that goes well beyond the realm of any human prophet or teacher.

This is why Jesus’s ministry increasingly merits the charge of blasphemy from the Jewish leadership. This climaxes at the end of Mark’s Gospel in the high priest’s question just before his crucifixion, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus responds, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61–62; cf. the slightly different accounts in Matt. 26:64; Luke 22:67–69). In response, the chief priest tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy, just as the Jewish leaders do when Jesus makes comparable claims in John’s Gospel. The charge of blasphemy arises because Jesus is claiming not merely to be the Messiah but, in addition to this, to stand in the unique position of divine authority associated with future judgment.77

But I don’t think these represent Jesus claiming divinity. All this shows is that he had a heightened self-conception, at least of being the son of man, not necessarily that he claimed to be God. The Mark 2:28 passage is interesting, but when read in full context, it is merely a claim to be the son of man, not God himself. For it says:

²⁷ Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. ²⁸ So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

3. Ortlund notes that the gospel of John is pretty explicit that Jesus claimed to be God. But I think the Gospel of John is evidentially pretty useless because it was written so long after the events described. A later article in this series will investigate this claim more thoroughly.

For these reasons, I think that Jesus probably didn’t claim to be God, though did claim to have quite a heightened status of being the son of man who was “given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed,” and had various authorities including forgiving sins, mastering the weather, healing, being lord of the sabbath, and so on.

From this, we can reconstruct the liar, lunatic, lord, legend argument: Jesus claimed to be the son of man and the messiah. To do so, he either had to be crazy, lying, or, in fact, the son of man. Jesus claims to be the son of man in all the Gospels, yet in none of them does anyone else claim he is. This is pretty naturally explained by him, in fact, having claimed to be the son of man. Of course, we should allow for the possibility that through the process of oral tradition, his claims to be the son of man became embellished over time, such that his early proclamations were far more muted than the gospels portray.

Here, I think, that we must see whether it’s psychologically plausible that someone like Jesus could believe himself to be the messiah or the son of man without being barking mad. If he were just a completely crazy lunatic, ranting at trees, then clearly his movement wouldn’t have caught on, and he wouldn’t have gathered disciples. Rather, it’s much more plausible that he was quite deluded but didn’t appear outwardly crazy (a bit like illusionists about consciousness :P). So instead of talking about the lunatic possibility, I’ll talk about the mistaken possibility—that Jesus was mistaken in his claims to divinity.

I think the liar possibility is hard to believe. If Jesus was a liar, one would expect him to try to get a reward from his lies. Others, like Muhammed and Joseph Smith, claimed that God, rather curiously, was quite happy for them to have sex with lots of people, including other’s spouses. Furthermore, if Jesus was cynically lying, he would have backed down rather than get crucified.

3 Mistaken?

Could Jesus have been mistaken about being the son of man? There are lots of messiah claimants in history, though none, I know of, who claimed to be the son of man. For many of these, it’s hard to know much about them. But some, like Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who didn’t explicitly claim to be the Messiah, but was a bit coy about it, didn’t seem obviously barking mad. Same with Sabbatai Zebbi and many of the others on the list.

Cults can have charismatic leaders who attract many followers even if they are severely delusional: David Koresh, Charles Manson, Marshall Applewhite, and numerous others. The book Prophets, Cults and Madness describes various people who “suffered from a form of schizotypal personality disorder, maintaining bizarre beliefs but not sliding downhill into the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.” About 1% of the worldwide population has schizophrenia, so it’s not terribly initially unlikely that Jesus would have that. This is much more common among those in cults, and probably more common in the past when magic was more widely believed.

It doesn’t seem especially improbable that one could come to believe he was the son of man. Muhammed may have mistakenly believed that he was receiving revelation from God (he also may have been lying). It’s hard to see how one could mistakenly believe that he himself created the world, but easier to see how one could think that he would, at some future point, be part of the divine plan of judgment.

4 Conclusion

I think this is maybe a bit of evidence for Christianity but not much. Jesus made certain quite significant claims about himself. Unlike many who make claims like this, he didn’t seem to be lying and wasn’t outwardly crazy. Christianity predicts this with higher probability than naturalism, but I don’t think the naturalist is particularly hard-pressed to find an explanation. There are lots of people who don’t seem outwardly crazy but are deeply deluded, and the historical evidence alone is insufficient to support the claim that Jesus claimed to be God.

On its own, therefore, it’s pretty weak. But in combination with other facts, it can be part of a case for Christianity of roughly the following form:

Jesus comes to earth, lives a morally exemplary life where even his critics often admire his shocking benevolence, suffers alongside us in horrendous ways, provides teachings that he claims come from God, claims to be God incarnate despite gaining nothing from that, exhibits no signs of lying or being crazy (unlike all the other people who claim to be God in history), then his tomb is found empty, his skeptical brother becomes convinced he's God, many of his followers describe his appearing to them after his death, and one of the major persecutors of his religion becomes convinced of his divinity—a bit like if Hitler stopped persecuting Jews and became a prominent rabbi. Then, his followers go on to found the biggest and most significant religion in world history, which radically morally transforms the world leading to dramatically heightened benevolence. As part of this, many of his followers show definitive evidence of having been subject to miracles. Hundreds of eyewitnesses report that various of them fly, for instance, or that the sun moved when it was predicted it would. A picture of Jesus's mother appears on top of a Church for which, despite extensive investigation, no natural explanation has ever been uncovered leading to THE EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT declaring that it's a miracle. This is best explained by his divinity.

I don’t buy this case at this point, but in later sections, I’ll explore it in more detail.