huckelberry wrote:honorentheos wrote:As a believer I thought this quote from Lewis was profound -
“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 a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must take your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else he was a madman or something worse.” [Mere Christianity]
Only after getting into the work of both faithful and skeptical text critics of the New Testament did it occur to me it had a fatal flaw. We don't know what Jesus actually said about himself, only what others claim he did and those all have views as to who he was that are what gets reflected in the New Testament. It's a poorly thought out bit of logic once reflected on in the light of the limits of our knowledge of the historical Jesus.
Honorentheos , I have conflicting thoughts about this. Lewis is a smart fellow and I have felt myself surprised by the weakness of this argument which you point out. No doubt this proposed choice, madman or messiah, is not a lock on the subject. I think that Lewis was likely aware of the ambiguity you point out. It is clear that there is uncertainty about specific things Jesus said. At the same time it is pretty clear that he said and did somethings that got him in deep trouble with the authorities and led his followers to consider he could be messiah.
The temple cleansing could qualify as action or communication which fits Lewis proposed choice of madman or trustworthy teacher.
I think the conflict presents something worth reflection. I can also think it is possible that in human life these opposing categories could mix in a particular person.
Setting Lewis' overly simple argument aside, I look at the claimed words and history of Jesus as I do any other record or claimed words of other wisdom teachers. I think I've said this before on the board, but I don't take lightly anything that has withstood the forces of time and cultural change that people seem to find valuable and therefore preserve and pass on to the next generation over centuries. If the teachings of and about Jesus as presented in the New Testament have contributed to making civilization possible, allowed various social groups to outcompete others with differing views, and more or less advance the course of civilization in some manner then whether or not they are historical, they do have something to offer us. For that reason the New Testament sits next to the Bhagavad Gita, the Analects of Confucius, the Tao, the Qur'an, the Talmud, a book of various Buddhist sutras, some odds and ends from various philosophers and biographies of historical figures on my book shelves for reading and consideration on various cycles of time. Ancient, proven wisdom matters and we ignore it at our peril, in my opinion.
But outside of that, I think any attempt to push any character in history to an extreme is a-historic and we should probably accept we can't know them as historical figures or admire them as heroes with our modern gaze without remaking them entirely into something other than who they were. I suspect by our modern sensibilities almost everyone who lived earlier than the late 19th century would be a barbarian in terms of what they would view as normal, acceptable violence, tribalism, and pragmatic necessities we would possibly view with horror. Was Jesus a zealot who, having gained local notoriety around the shores of Galilee, took his message of rebellion against Rome to Jerusalem and was turned over to Rome for political execution by the Jewish leadership there because having a fundamentalist tear up the temple and agitate for Israel to resist the authority of Rome with an eye to the imminent arrival of the Son of Man was asking for more trouble than they could allow? Possibly. But who knows.