Cross-cultural philosophers often wish to treat Jesus of Nazareth as a great philosopher, whose life and thought we can learn from – but one who is fully human, no more divine than the rest of us.
C.S. Lewis hated this move, thought it was intellectually sloppy. He famously told us:
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 a man who says he is a poached egg – or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool 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.
Lewis’s argument here is frequently quoted, often summed up as “Lord, Liar or Lunatic.” But is Lewis right? He’s been refuted persuasively on the grounds of historical criticism, by the likes of Bart Ehrman. The argument here is, it’s really not clear that the historical Jesus claimed to be divine in the first place, especially since such claims appear only in the book of John, the last of the four gospels to be written. That’s the kind of criticism you see discussed in the Wikipedia entry on Lewis’s argument.
But let’s push things a bit further. Let’s assume, for a moment, that the historical Jesus really did claim to be the only begotten Son of God, in the way Lewis thinks he did. Does that really mean he couldn’t have been a great human teacher?
Consider, by way of comparison, the life of Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi. At age 36 he swore a vow of chastity while still being married. Later in life he regularly naked beside naked young women in order to test his own chastity, including his own grandniece. Before that, while fighting for the right of Indians in apartheid South Africa, he did nothing for its blacks and even viewed their oppression as proper. And he starved himself almost to death in protest against government measures to boost the status of India’s untouchables.
This man comes across, it seems to me, as at least a little unhinged and arrogant – rather in the manner of one who proclaimed himself the only Son of God without actually being such. And yet, the same man gave us incredible new possibilities for being human and for changing the world, inspiring people from Martin Luther King to the Dalai Lama. If anyone counts as a “great moral teacher,” surely it is Gandhi – even though in many respects we could call him a madman. We might even come to think that, in ethics as in art, a little bit of insanity makes one a better teacher. Nietzsche, at least, would approve of such a claim – and if you know anything about Nietzsche’s life, you can see why.
Well, we didn’t need Ehrman (who strikes me, in what little of his I’ve read, as a rather sloppy thinker) to refute Lewis’ argument — its pretty plain that John isn’t historically reliable (in the purely epistemic sense, at least, that even if every word attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John were something that Jesus actually said, we don’t have good historical-critical reasons to think so), and so I’ve long been surprised that people continue to go with Lewis’ argument as a piece of apologetics.
I’m strongly inclined to resist your comparison with Ghandi, though. Even if Ghandi was a fairly insane, arrogant guy — even if, say, he had also cultivated other, nastier habits — those sorts of character flaws are perfectly compatible with being a great moral teacher. Claiming to be the incarnation of God, however, and making that claim central to your teaching, is really very weird and goes beyond arrogance; its pretty much either true or insane. There’s nothing strange about saying that such a person also had espoused great ethical ideas, but I don’t think a person so insane could be too reliable a guide to moral teaching.
As it happens, I don’t think that much of Jesus’ distinctively *ethical* teaching is all that new, revolutionary, or anything. Everything new and revolutionary about Christianity is tied up with his being the incarnation of God — which, even if John is the only evangelist who makes Jesus *say* this of himself, is, in some form or another, clearly an idea behind all of the documents of the New Testament with the very barely possible exception of Mark. As a strictly ethical teacher, Jesus pretty much just presents a very emphatic, dramatic form of what Hebrew prophets and near-contemporary Jewish teachers had and were saying. If, however, Jesus has the very special relationship with God that the Gospels and epistles say that he has (again, even though John is the only evangelist who makes him come out and say, “Hey, I’m the incarnation of the divine logos, how’s it goin’? Need some bread of life? Look no further.”), then we get a drastically different picture, because we get a drastically different view of God himself and the relationship between human beings and God.
Take none of this as a defense of the New Testament or any kind of apologetic. I think atheists of all stripes could agree with what I say here; but it does entail acknowledging that non-Christians can only have a little bit of what Jesus has to offer. Of course, that may not be so bad — if all that other stuff isn’t true, then we shouldn’t want it anyway, and it’s perfectly possible to agree and still think that the purely ethical teachings that are left over are good stuff, even if they were attached to a whole bunch of nonsense about the divine logos becoming human in order to overcome the alienation of the human from the divine. But that still leaves the guy crazy and not too original.
Thanks for a very thoughtful comment. It’s rare that I see Lewis’s position get seriously defended (as opposed to just restated).
Still, I have my doubts. On the claim that it is either true or insane – this will probably hinge on how we define insanity. On many definitions – probably even most standard definitions – one could call it insane even if true. Just on the Wikipedia definition of mental illness, we find “a clinically significant behavioral or psychological pattern that occurs in an individual and is usually associated with distress, disability or increased risk of suffering.” Dude suffered and died on the cross for his belief and behaviour – that seems to follow such a definition exactly. Even if Jesus were everything that John says he claimed to be, he could count as clinically insane by most definitions: lord and lunatic. Presumably under such a circumstance we should still follow him. But that fits smoothly with the Nietzschean claim: the great artists and creators who have the most to teach us are always a little insane, and that would go more so for the greatest of all.
I mean there is an interesting epistemological question here too. Suppose you actually were the only begotten Son of God. How would you know? Whatever certainty you might have, whatever reasons you might have to justify the belief, couldn’t there also be someone who wasn’t the Son and had the same beliefs and certainty? Psychologically, from the inside, it would seem hard to tell the difference, unless there’s something I’m missing. The upshot of all this would seem to be: if Jesus the Christ can be relied on as a great moral teacher, then why can’t Jesus the mere human being? The core belief is true in one case and false in another, but it’s very difficult to tell which.
As for his teaching not being especially new – you may well be on to something. (I can’t say much here, knowing very little about the prophets.) On the other hand, the very emphasis and drama may help the teaching resonate with us in a way the previous prophets don’t – not to mention the ensuing two millennia of history. Jesus’s ethical teachings may well do more for most of us in the contemporary West than do, say, Jeremiah’s or Ezekiel’s.
P.S. Small pet peeve of mine: the H in Gandhi comes after the D, not the G.