human afterall

In the book Mere Christianity, Lewis famously criticized the idea that Jesus was merely a human being, albeit a great moral teacher:

"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 patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (Lewis 1952, pp. 43)

According to the argument, most people are willing to accept Jesus Christ as a great moral teacher, but the Gospels record that Jesus made many claims to divinity, either explicitly — ("I and the father are one." John 10:30; when asked by the High priest whether he was the Son of God, Jesus replied "It is as you said" Matthew 26:64) — or implicitly, by assuming authority only God could have ("the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" Matthew 9:6). Lewis said there are three options:

1. Jesus was telling falsehoods and knew it, and so he was a liar.
2. Jesus was telling falsehoods but believed he was telling the truth, and so he was insane.
3. Jesus was telling the truth, and so he was divine.

Lewis’s argument was later expanded by the Christian apologist Josh McDowell (in his book More Than a Carpenter). (McDowell 2001) The term "trilemma" (which Lewis did not use) is often used to refer to this argument. Although widely repeated in Christian apologetic literature, it has been largely ignored by professional theologians and biblical scholars.[1]

Lewis's trilemma appeared at a time when secular scholars, such as David Friedrich Strauss, had portrayed Jesus' miracles and resurrection as myths. The concept that Jesus was not God but a wise man had gained ground in academic circles. The trilemma opposes the idea that Jesus was not divine, without relying on miracles for proof. In accepting the premise that Jesus had claimed divinity, he contradicted a viewpoint, popularized by H. G. Wells in his Outline of History, that Jesus had made no such claim.