Who is Jesus?
When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He is possessed by Beelzebul! ….’
Mark 3:21-22 (NIVUK)
Who is Jesus? This is probably the most important question any human being faces. Our header scripture gives rise to what has become known as C.S. Lewis’s Trilemma: he is either a liar, a lunatic or Lord. This is how Lewis framed his argument:
‘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 was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the 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 patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.’ 1
Some have added another ‘L’ that must be addressed: whether Jesus is a figure of history or a legend.2 This is Lewis’s response:
‘…as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are, they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there is no conversation that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence.’ 3
Lewis thinks it implausible that monotheistic Jews would have invented an incarnate messiah, and that the gospel’s genre bears none of the typical marks of legends. He concludes that the Jesus of the Bible is the Jesus of history, and if this Jesus were not Lord, he would be a liar or a lunatic.
Who is Jesus? Lewis said, ‘You must make your choice’. May you choose wisely.
Prayer
Loving Father, thank you for the work and legacy of Christian apologists who can help to strengthen our faith. As we stand on the shoulders of giants, may we too share the good news that Jesus is Lord with the world around us. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
Study by Barry Robinson
1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity P. 55-56.
2 Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, P. 22.
3 C.S. Lewis, What are we to make of Jesus? Essay 1950.
Barry Robinson is a minister in Grace Communion International and Regional Pastor for Southern England, the Midlands, and Wales
Local congregation:
Grace Communion West Hampstead
Sidings Community Centre
150 Brassey Road
West Hampstead
London
NW6 2BA
Meeting time:
Sunday 12.30 pm
Local congregational contact:
Gordon Brown
gordon.brown@gracecom.church
Word of Life contact:
wordoflife@gracecom.church