Jesus - Son of God? Just a Good Man? Lunatic? or Evil?

Jesus Christ was just a good man

Taken at face value, this is predominantly an objection against Christian doctrine rather than an objection against the existence of God. However, I believe that this objection often originates from the presumption that there is no God and that Jesus could therefore not have been the Son of God, but instead, merely a good man.

The life of Jesus is, however, an excellent place to start our search to find out whether or not God exists. The description of Jesus in the Bible is of a man who clearly considered himself to be the Son of God and who performed many supernatural acts. If this description is correct then Jesus’ life becomes a very significant piece of evidence.

A mere man who says he is the Son of God cannot be a great moral teacher

The four canonical gospels are the four books in the Bible that describe the events of Jesus’ life. In my topic, There is no natural explanation for Jesus’ miracles, I list Jesus’ references to himself as the Son of God within one of these gospels, the Gospel of John. There is no doubt that Jesus was convinced that he was the Son of God, something which is incompatible with the theory that Jesus was merely a good man. C. S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories and a Christian apologetic, demonstrated this using an argument, which is now known as ‘Lewis’ Trilemma’. He reasoned that the gospels describe how Jesus clearly saw himself to be the Son of God and that if he was anything other than the Son of God then he would have had to have instead been either a lunatic or an evil person capable of deceiving his followers. He certainly would not have been merely a good man or a great moral teacher. Here is a quote from Lewis’ 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 a 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.

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Written by Rick Parussel