Why Did Jesus Come Into The World? Our articles on the Gospels, Jesus’ divinity, death and resurrection

Street Theologian

5 min readDec 17, 2023

Lord, Liar, Lunatic or Legend?

Will you go through life without assessing your views of the most influential person in history?

Did Jesus claim to be God?
Life’s pains, love and the Gospel
Did Jesus rise from the dead?
Jesus and fulfilled prophecy
Are the Gospels based on eyewitness accounts?
What about the lost gospels like the Gospel of Thomas?

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Time Magazine considers Jesus the most influential person who ever lived. Jesus plays a prominent, though very different role, in the two largest religions on earth — Christianity and Islam. Many others consider Jesus a wise moral teacher or enlightened spiritual leader.

Nonetheless, the earliest sources we have on Jesus, point to Jesus thinking he was far more than a mere moral teacher. This leads to CS Lewis’ famous Lord, liar, lunatic trilemma from Mere Christianity.

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’ trilemma, has now through the influence of the likes of Bart Ehrman and various 20th century biblical critics, largely morphed into a quadrilemma (although the validity of the legend option is quite questionable).

Either:

Lord: Jesus expressed the truth in claiming to be God and the Saviour for humanity
Liar: Jesus deliberately lied about his identity
Lunatic: Jesus was deluded about his identity
Legend: Accounts where Jesus claims to be God are legendary or later embellishments and do not reflect historical statements of Jesus (if at all he existed!)

Here at Street Theologian, we contend Christ is indeed Lord- divine, crucified, resurrected Saviour. Moreover, this view is far more than merely consistent with history as the truth of Jesus offers goodness, beauty and life-changing implications which tap into the deep existential longings of every human being.

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