Liar, Lunatic, Legend - Why Not All Three?

This classic Christian argument only works if you're forced to go all-in on one option!

Pictured: a devastating critique of the fundamental assumptions of Lewis’ trilemma

One of the most popular arguments for Christianity today is something called Lewis’ trilemma. Here’s the titular Lewis - C. S. Lewis - explaining the basic idea in his book Mere Christianity:

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. ... 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.

So basically, the idea is that Jesus made a bunch of very specific (and dramatic) claims about his own divinity that are either true or false. If those claims are true, then he’s the Son of God and you should worship him, but if they aren’t true, then he was either totally insane or a calculating and hateful conman you should want nothing to do with. The “trilemma” for the atheist is deciding which explanation makes the most sense for the historical data we have in the Gospels, the epistles, and other documents from the early Christian community.

Lewis’ original point with this passage wasn’t really to prove that Jesus was God; he just wanted the intellectuals of his time to pick a side and drop the whole “he was just a brilliant moral teacher” routine. But since his time, the basic idea of the trilemma has shifted into more of an explicit argument, and a lot of apologists take it very seriously. We’ve also seen inflation add another “L” option to the list (thanks a lot, Biden!) so now you’re more likely to see the modern formulation that asks you to choose between liar, lunatic, legend, or lord.

There’s a reason this quadrilemma is still a staple of youth pastors and Youtube channels the world over today: If you absolutely have to choose one and only one option, ‘lord’ does hold its own against the other three. After all, it’s hard to read the consistent, profound teachings of the Gospels and come away thinking Jesus was literally insane, in the same way it’s hard to argue that the whole “son of man” thing was just a made-up bit he took a little too far. And unless you’re a naive teenager fighting on the atheism subreddit and/or Richard Carrier, you’ve got to admit that Jesus at least existed, which means dismissing the whole thing as a legend doesn’t work either. So does that mean assistant pastor Corey is right, and you should give your life to Christ today?

Unfortunately for assistant pastor Corey, the answer is no. There’s a big hole in the center of the entire quadrilemma: You don’t actually have to just pick one option! (Unless you’re picking ‘lord,’ in which case choosing a couple more for backup is probably a bad look.) Rather than being a straightforward example of pure delusion, pure deception, or pure development over time, it’s very likely that a combination of these three features best explains the historical data; Jesus could very well have been a bit of a liar, a bit of a lunatic, and a bit of a legend. In fact, this is the obvious default position to take! And once you’re allowed to start crafting explanations for the data that incorporate all of these features, dozens of plausible options present themselves. It’s only when Christians rhetorically restrict you to an all-or-nothing choice that the quadrilemma has any force.

To demonstrate this, you can imagine a sort of coordinate space where the three dimensions are (liar, lunatic, legend). Any “point” in this space with positive values for coordinates can indicate a potential appraisal of Jesus’ character on a scale from one to ten. The origin point (0, 0, 0) would be the view that Jesus was a perfectly honest and rational man who did everything the Gospels claim, while the point (10, 10, 10) would be the position that Jesus was a completely insane habitual liar whose life story was embellished beyond all recognition. Any point in between these extremes would have its own meaning, depending on where the different values fall; for example, the point (2, 5, 0) would be the position that Jesus was an occasionally deceptive (2) and significantly mentally unstable (5) man whose teachings were accurately recorded and preserved after his death (0).

It seems obvious to me that some regions of this space are tough for atheists to live in. The origin point is an obvious example; if you don’t think Jesus was even a little bit of a liar or lunatic or legend, then you’re basically a Christian already. But even points like (1, 2, 1) or (1, 1, 0) would leave a lot to be explained. To be safe, I’ll delineate this atheist danger zone as anywhere with a Euclidean norm less than 3, and I’ll mark it off with red.

On the other hand, there’s the equally problematic region you land in when any particular coordinate value gets unrealistically high. This would be where you find theories about Jesus being literally insane, or entirely cynical, or completely made up. These explanations are also implausible, or at the very least they’ll be unconvincing for Christians. I’ll delineate this second danger zone (again, generously) as the region with a Euclidean norm greater than 8, and I’ll mark its boundary with blue.

Christians who push the quadrilemma want you to 1) intuitively land somewhere in the blue zone, 2) realize it doesn’t work, and 3) immediately jump to the red zone instead. Don’t fall for it! As my extremely helpful diagram makes clear, there’s an entire region sandwiched between the two that’s tailor-made for the atheist. In fact, you can pick pretty much any point in this region and get a new, plausible explanation for the historical data presented in the Gospels. Let’s look at three example theories, assuming the values given relate to liar, lunatic, and legend, respectively:

• (4.5, 4.5, 4.5) - Jesus experienced legitimate religious delusions that he and his followers bolstered with consistent falsehoods, which were later embellished in many areas by the next few generations of Christians. This “all of the above” response is completely plausible! Plenty of influential and appealing religious figures that Christians reject, like Muhammad or Sai Sathya Baba, most likely developed their traditions in this way.

• (0, 3, 6) - Jesus was an honest but slightly unstable preacher whose enigmatic apocalyptic teachings were dramatically expanded upon by the rapidly growing Christian movement soon after his execution. This is also completely plausible, and aligns well with the trajectory of the early church’s Christology. Many other religious communities, like the various Adventist groups of the nineteenth century, have also radically reinterpreted and spiritualized previous teachings after experiencing a traumatic disruption of their faith.

• (7, 1, 2) - Jesus was a fraudulent and deceptive cult leader whose early death obscured his true intentions. Once again, completely plausible! It might be a theory that Christians find difficult to consider, but we have to remember that Jesus’ ministry was barely three years old when he was killed. Plenty of cult leaders have taken much, much longer to make their unsavory motivations clear; a few years into the ministry of Jim Jones, he was widely hailed as a civil rights hero!

The point here isn’t to say that any of these three theories (or any particular theory at all) must be correct. No atheist I’m aware of claims to know, with absolute certainty, exactly what was going on in that corner of Palestine two thousand years ago. Nevertheless, I hope these three possibilities make it clear that the classic quadrilemma isn’t some all-or-nothing gambit; atheists are perfectly free to rely on every possible option when trying to explain the historical data of the Gospels, the epistles, and the early Christian movement. And as long as some combination of values is even remotely plausible, we should immediately prefer it to explanations that hinge on a dead person coming back to life - which, let me remind you, is the least likely explanation imaginable.

So the next time a Christian asks you if Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or a legend, just remind them that he might be all three in one. And that seems fitting for Jesus, doesn’t it?