Lord,Liar or Lunatic

[sin_is_fun]

This is one question often asked by believers. "Either Jesus is lord,or liar or lunatic.Which view do you support?"

This question appears downright straight forward.It gives only 3 options.But the question is actually not straight forward and innocent as it appears.

The common man will hesitate a lot to say Jesus was a liar or lunatic..So then only the third alternative remains.

But I consider this question to be wrong.Why?

1.It doesnt include the other options.That is "Jesus never said those words"/"jesus never existed"/"He was misquoted"

Now these option changes the question to "Were the gospel writers liars,lunatics or true historians"?

There is no justification in asking the lord liar or lunatic question about jesus.Had he written a book we can ask that question.But he never wrote any book.What we have is "Reports on his words".So we have to question the genuineess of that report first before questioning the truthfulness of the speaker's words.

So the question should be "Were Matthew,mark,luke and john liars,true historians or lunatics?"

On further inspection we should still refine this question.Because this question implies that

1.Matthew,mark,luke and John existed
2.They wrote the supposed portions of Bible.
3.we have them exactly as they reported.

Bible passed on as oral traditions for some time.45- 95 A.D. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Pauline Epistles, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, and the book of Acts are all dated from 45-63 A.D. The Gospel of John and the Revelation may have been written as late as 95 A.D.

So now the question becomes

1.The people who heard bible,memorized it and passed it to others did so without any change in its text for many years.Yes or no?

The theory of chinese whispers comes to my mind.When 20 people are in a room and we say a sentence to one person and if he passes it to others secretly, the statement that emerges from the last person will be totally different from the initial statement.They will be totally different.

when one sentence changes like this what about a whole book?

So the "Liar,lord or lunatic" is a wrong question according to me.

What do you all think?

[The Nice Centurion]

This is one question often asked by believers. "Either Jesus is lord,or liar or lunatic.Which view do you support?"

This question appears downright straight forward.It gives only 3 options.But the question is actually not straight forward and innocent as it appears.

The common man will hesitate a lot to say Jesus was a liar or lunatic..So then only the third alternative remains.

But I consider this question to be wrong.Why?

1.It doesnt include the other options.That is "Jesus never said those words"/"jesus never existed"/"He was misquoted"

. . .

What do you all think?

What Do you all think Indeed.

Which, if any, possibilities should enrich Lewis Trilemma ?
I already made lots of proposals here:
viewtopic.php?t=41009&start=20 (post24)

[The Nice Centurion]

This is one question often asked by believers. "Either Jesus is lord,or liar or lunatic.Which view do you support?"

This question appears downright straight forward.It gives only 3 options.But the question is actually not straight forward and innocent as it appears.

The common man will hesitate a lot to say Jesus was a liar or lunatic..So then only the third alternative remains.

But I consider this question to be wrong.Why?

1.It doesnt include the other options.That is "Jesus never said those words"/"jesus never existed"/"He was misquoted"

Now these option changes the question to "Were the gospel writers liars,lunatics or true historians"?

There is no justification in asking the lord liar or lunatic question about jesus.Had he written a book we can ask that question.But he never wrote any book.What we have is "Reports on his words".So we have to question the genuineess of that report first before questioning the truthfulness of the speaker's words.

So the question should be "Were Matthew,mark,luke and john liars,true historians or lunatics?"

On further inspection we should still refine this question.Because this question implies that

1.Matthew,mark,luke and John existed
2.They wrote the supposed portions of Bible.
3.we have them exactly as they reported.

Bible passed on as oral traditions for some time.45- 95 A.D. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Pauline Epistles, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, and the book of Acts are all dated from 45-63 A.D. The Gospel of John and the Revelation may have been written as late as 95 A.D.

So now the question becomes

1.The people who heard bible,memorized it and passed it to others did so without any change in its text for many years.Yes or no?

The theory of chinese whispers comes to my mind.When 20 people are in a room and we say a sentence to one person and if he passes it to others secretly, the statement that emerges from the last person will be totally different from the initial statement.They will be totally different.

when one sentence changes like this what about a whole book?

So the "Liar,lord or lunatic" is a wrong question according to me.

What do you all think?

It is a wrong question
"Liar, Lord, Lunatic or Lewis Lazy Lunatic Lie" would be better suited!

BUT . . .

His Apologetic lie is based on false facts. To fight his false trichotomy we have to go along with them!

BECAUSE . . .

We should fight Lewis behind his enemy lines, not beyond them !!!

HERE ARE LEWIS FALSE FACTS:

( [Replying to bjs1 in post #25]

It was about Jesus as a moral teacher in light of the fact that he consistently claimed to be God throughout all four Gospels and built his ethical teaching on that foundation. 

I tend to agree with Lewis that Jesus could not simply have held an erroneous religious belief. If a man genuinely believed that he was God, and the belief was not true, then I would have to call him a lunatic. A man who believes himself to be a microwave oven is saner than a man who believes himself to be God.

That's the thing. The only place Jesus might have indicated that he believed himself to be God was in John 8:58, written c. 110 by a school with a high Christology for the 2nd Century.

This !!!

And all serious scholars today agree that Jesus never said to be God.

That he did is only a religious fundie perspective.

L.T. builds on that perspective!

So much to Jesus saying to be god.
(But for the sake of argument we shall go along with Lewis while debating his Emma, but nonetheless he got his base facts wrong!)
Son of god? Literary or metaphorically?*Barf*
Full Human and Full god? Really?In the Gospels?*Barf Blargh *

FACT 1 WRONG

Next Jesus was a moral teacher (Lewis assumes a lot) and built his teachinng on wrong fact 1.
You cant build on something that doesnt exist.

FACT 2 WRONG

LEWIS: Jesus teaching was sensational, godlike wise and original new!
(Yeah right. Who is delusional now?)

FACT 3 WRONG

LEWIS: Unless Jesus was a Liar or Lunatic. Then his teaching was criminal and old stuff and satans school!
(That Lion-story-writer speaks against himself here. He cant have it two ways.)

FACT 4 WRONG AND A LOGICAL FALLACY.


AND WITH ALL THAT HOGWASH WE HAVE TO GO ALONG IF WE EVEN BEGIN TO DEBATE LEWIS EMMA.

BUT WHATEVER; HERE WE GO.

Oh and the abrahamitic god in the first century was not necessarily as understood to be as today or just back in Lewis time! But Lewis just assumes. So he got a

FACT 5 WRONG

Lewis wants to SHOVEL THE READER TO :LORD!

Therefore he give this word at the end of his Trilemma.

That is not Wrong fact, but bad and dishonest Behaving.

LETS CALL IT ERROR 6

[TRANSPONDER]

It's interesting that Jesus seems to have chosen his words carefully regarding his divinity as much as if he'd prepared his speeches for later Christian writers who would have loved Jesus to say plainly "I am God incarnated! When you look at me, you see God the Father!".. Which John all but says, but then Jesus says he can do nothing without the father, which seems to suggest that Jesus was no more than a monkey suit worn by God while he did his stuff.

The synoptics are not so obvious as John who depicted Jesus as a sort of Glass homuncule with the glowing figure of the Father shining through. Jesus is secretive, moody, unpleasant at times, given to irrational outbursts. and does not have extra knowledge unless the father wants his to have it. It is frustrating if one treats it as how Jesus really acted. But if Jesus is a character reacting as the writers want, it makes sense.

Just one of many examples, take Jesus before the Sanhedrin. While the Son of man is not in itself blasphemy or even the idea that the spirit of Adam as a new messiah would come on the clouds would be valid charge by the Sanhedrin, in Christian thought, it was showing that Jesus was using Son of man as a sort of epithet for himself as the genetic offspring of God, which doesn't really mean, if one follows Paul

Matthew has Jesus underline the terms of the Sanhedrin as though endorsing them while pretending that absolves him of claiming to be God. But again, confuses the image of sitting next to .power' (which must mean God) when Abraham, David and a few others surely hobnob with Power and no blasphemy there.

Luke must tweak it a bit to suggest that from 'now on' (which could be taken to mean as soon and they killed him) he would be sawing up Pizza in heaven with the Father, and never mind coming on the clouds, as by Luke's time it was long overdue. But the killer (for Jesus, anyway ) is Jesus trying to evade saying it himself with the Sanhedrin demanding assent that he is Son of God which is Not Blasphemy to Judaism but IS blasphemy to Jews if used in the Christian sense, which tells you who wrote the gospels.

[Tcg]

Strangely it was the diffrences or 'mistakes' (as a non believer might put it) in the four Gospels, which actually got me to thinking that the four writer were in fact telling the truth.

I'm not expecting a response from a poster who hasn't been active since 2005, but the above is an astounding statement. It reveals that no matter the evidence some believers will reach conclusions that are exactly opposite of where the evidence leads.

As far as the Lord Liar Lunatic nonsense, I was going to say it is the worst of all the arguments for Christianity, but that's not true. They are all equally horrible. Here we have an author creative enough to create fantasy stories, but one who ignores the fact that there aren't only three possibilities. I can't believe they didn't cross his mind. We can only guess why he ignored them although I have a pretty good guess what lead him to do so.


Tcg

[TRANSPONDER]

Thanks for giving the thread a nudge, even if the CS Lewis argument (fallacy of bifurcation or undistributed middle) is Done and we move on to 'witness error'.

I suspect that this is a handy apologetic that is used without checking. I suspect that is why we get 'the two angels' rather than 'Jesus appeared to Simon' because the trick is to put on a show of self assessment by picking an easily explained contradiction and pretending that all the others are equally easily explained.

I am still astounded,not only that endless serious discrepancies and contradiction are ignore by Bible experts and have been for near 2,000 years, but the skeptics don't raise them, either. Don't any of these people actually read the Bible?

[The Nice Centurion]

It is a very simple, easy to unnnerstand, argument! For believers that outweighs its badity.
See how the unbiblical deaths for not a lie of the poor apostles work!

[boatsnguitars]

Imagine if you will, four witnesses all stood in a different place who are witnesses to a car accident. if all four witness statements said exactly the same thing, then I would begin to feel very suspect that all the witnesses had somehow 'collaberated' and therefore, that their 'evidence' was suspect. In

So it must be very suspect that:
1. The Gospels aren't eyewitness accounts and don't claim to be. Lk 1:2
2. That they do, in fact, not only seem to agree on many facts, they use the exact same wording - as if they "collaberated"(sic).

An atheist shouldn't be pointing this out to you. You should have already been told this by your church leaders.

Matt 14:19-20
Taking the five loaves and the two fish (ichthus), looking up into heaven he blessed, and breaking, gave to the disciples the loaves, and the disciples to the crowds.
And all ate and were satisfied.

Mark 6:41-42
And taking the five loaves and the two fish (ichthus), looking up into heaven, he blessed and he broke up the bread, and was giving to the disciples in order that they set before them, and the two fish he distributed to all. And all ate and were satisfied.

Luke 9:16-17
But taking the five loaves and the two fish (ichthus), looking up into heaven, he blessed them and he broke up, and was giving to the disciples to set before the crowd.
And they ate and were satisfied.

https://philosophydungeon.weebly.com/sy ... oblem.html

https://synopticgospel.com/fivecolumn/

So, now, I imagine you will argue the opposite: "Well, of course they had exactly the same wording! Glory to Jesus!"

[boatsnguitars]

Strangely it was the diffrences or 'mistakes' (as a non believer might put it) in the four Gospels, which actually got me to thinking that the four writer were in fact telling the truth.

I'm not expecting a response from a poster who hasn't been active since 2005, but the above is an astounding statement. It reveals that no matter the evidence some believers will reach conclusions that are exactly opposite of where the evidence leads.

As far as the Lord Liar Lunatic nonsense, I was going to say it is the worst of all the arguments for Christianity, but that's not true. They are all equally horrible. Here we have an author creative enough to create fantasy stories, but one who ignores the fact that there aren't only three possibilities. I can't believe they didn't cross his mind. We can only guess why he ignored them although I have a pretty good guess what lead him to do so.


Tcg

It's exhausting, isn't it? It's the old, "Well, of course there's no evidence! - exactly what you'd expect from a conspiracy!"

It's why I have simply lost the ability to take religion - and all woo - seriously. They don't even take it seriously. It's all just a stupid, childish game.

[TRANSPONDER]

This is an old argument for eyewitness veracity. It could be a steelman. I'm not quite sure how they work, or whether they are for or against an apologetic.

But it is definitely trying to fool us. We have to be more subtle than this.

Sure, when we see signs of reciting the same material, we would suspect 'collusion' or rather copying, which is what we get in the synoptics and indeed 'Luke and Matthew based their gospels on Mark' is the view of scholarship, so I'm sure I have seen.

But to use that to excuse witnesses who tell conflicting tales is not correct. To cut to what I think would be the final argument, yes, witnesses can see the same event and describe it differently and even disagree on what they saw.

But somehow when it can be shown that the angel telling the message about Jesus has risen and gone to Galilee is not in John at all, and Mary Magdalene tells the disciples she hasn't a clue what happened to Jesus, seeing the same thing from a different view just will not do as an excuse.

That's without the other big contradictions, the evidence that if they copies an original source, anything added substantially to to that source looks like invention and, finally, but not least, solid examples of concocted stories elsewhere, and we really cannot credit these witnesses as being reliable.