The three L argument is aimed only at people who believe in the historicity of Jesus, as well as that he was a great spiritual leader, but who belief that there are also other paths to spiritual enlightenment or salvation. It obviously carries no weight to people who don't believe Jesus was a historical figure, or who believe he was a liar or a lunatic.
Among historians it is generally believed that there was a preacher called (something like) Jesus which was crucified by the Romans. But looking at the only available sources (the Gospels) it is not even clear that he claimed to be the Messiah. The gospels are clearly written by people who believed him to be the Messiah, but the quotations directly attributed to Jesus are quite ambiguous regarding the "divinity" of Jesus himself. Notably be appears much more "divine" in the latest gospel than in the earliest, so the divinity seem have been a development over time among his followers. Even if he did himself claim to be the Messiah, it is very different from claiming to be the Lord, since the Jewish concept of Messiah is a (blessed) human king, not a divine being. The concept of the trinity where Jesus IS God is a later concept, not even present in the Bible. And the "Son of God" thing is basically a cultural misunderstanding, because it means something different among Jews (where basically everybody are Gods children) and Greeks (where Gods like Zeus literally had half-human children with superpowers).
So apart from the Liar/Lunatic/Lord trilemma, there is the option "A cult leader that didn't really claim the be the Lord, but his followers came to believe that he was".
> "A cult leader that didn't really claim the be the Lord, but his followers came to believe that he was"
I'm curious, what are this position's ideas on how his followers came to believe this? One common response to the general argument is that most of Jesus' disciples were martyred and would have had no motivation to die for a lie.
This is a really interesting question! There is a development through the gospels, where the oldest focus on the actions, saying and prophecies of Jesus, while the newest (John) is much more focused on the divinity of the person Jesus. Paul seem quite uninterested in the words of Jesus and totally focused on the importance of the resurrection. So the transformation from teacher or prophet (a normal human speaking the words of God) into a some kind of divine being happened quite soon. To put is crudely, Jesus start out as a priest talking about the Gods plans, but over time, in the minds of his followers, turns into a God himself. But the full transformation into "God" was only finalized with the Nicene Creed in 325. Even now there are Christian denomination which do not believe that Jesus is God, most notable Jehovas Witnesses (which holds that Jesus was created by God, and therefore not God himself).
An important transformation is that the title of Messiah (or Christ in Greek translation) has a very specific meaning in a Jewish context, as a human king or savior of the Hebrew people. When early Christianity spread beyond Jews, this context disappeared, and the title "son of God" got reinterpreted in a Greek context, where gods could literally have children.
> "the full transformation into "God" was only finalized with the Nicene Creed in 325."
The Nicene Creed is one of the clearest statements of the "Jesus is God" hypothesis, but (as I said elsewhere in this thread) there are plenty of strong claims made in the gospels themselves. There are also similar claims made in many of the earlier writings of the church (if you're honestly interested, there are 10 pre-Nicene volumes at http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html .)
Study the history of other cults, such as Mormonism.
Not how the "witnesses" changed their beliefs and how they talked about what happened over time. Even though some of them came to distrust Joseph Smith or consider him on a wrong path, once they had convinced themselves they had seen something miraculous happen they had a hard time letting go.
They later made comments that suggested they had seen the things "in a vision" (yet most people assume an actual witnessing), the important consideration is to them it was real, and just as valid as actually seeing it. In their mind there was no difference - so they had no problem claiming they saw it first hand.
Faith is a type of insanity, so naturally you can't use the assumption of faithful people acting rationally (no motivation to die for a lie) to find truth.
As to how they came to believe it, again look at other religions, spiritual practices etc. It's quite common for followers/believers to come to believe something the leader is not saying - it has to be so, that's HOW IT WORKS.
It's similar to snake oil salespeople today like Deepak Chopra - you just make a lot of hand wavy claims about energy and quantum physics and people inject their own meaning.
Put these in a time period when education and access to information was low and et voila.
I don't know, he seems pretty obviously divine in all the gospels. As for him claiming to be divine, I don't really understand the argument, because if we would assume that a report that he claimed to be divine is accurate, why wouldn't we assume that a report of clearly divine actions and attributes is accurate?
I wouldn't say "obviously divine". He certainly performs healings, exorcisms and miracles - but his disciples are also granted these powers, and they are not considered part of the trinity. So more like blessed with some supernatural powers, which is quite different from being God himself. In Acts there is even a guy walking around healing people which is not related to the disciples. So it seems in the universe where the Gospels takes place, you dont have to be a God to perform miracles.
Yeah, agreed. I just wanted to make clear that you could believe in the historicity of Jesus without having to accept the Liar/Lunatic/Lord dilemma, since Jesus never claimed to be "Lord" in the first place.
John is the "in your face" gospel -- it leads with the conclusions. The other three are more like "come along for the journey" -- they walk you through the process of the disciples coming to understand Jesus. There are divinity claims all over those gospels, but they're more subtle.
For example, early in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus quotes the Old Testament saying "You are to worship the Lord your God and serve only him." At the very end of Matthew, Jesus meets the disciples, who worship him, and he does not criticize them or stop them (contrast with Peter in Acts 10.) Once that connection is made, it's an obvious divinity claim -- but it's one that might take time to realize is there.
A few other examples: Psalm 103 says the Lord "is the one who forgives all your sins"; Jesus does it in Mark 2. Both Isaiah 43 and Hosea 13 specify that God alone is Savior, and Luke 1:47 repeats it just prior to calling Jesus the Savior in Luke 2:11. Deuteronomy 10 establishes heaven as entirely God's property, but Jesus claims to be the one controlling entry to heaven in Matthew 7.
Given Jesus' obviously strong knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures, it's hard to get away from the conclusion that he was making intentional claims of being God.
Only if you already have decided that this is the conclusion you want to reach. Which is totally fair as a kind of religious meditation over the biblical texts, but it not likely to convince anybody not yet convinced. For example Jesus states that he hands Peter the keys to heaven, which following this logic then turns Peter into God. And in the Lords Prayer, Jesus instructs his followers to forgive sins, which according to your logic turns them all into God.
> "Only if you already have decided that this is the conclusion you want to reach"
That is not a very charitable interpretation of my comment.
I don't draw the conclusion because I want to. I draw the conclusion because I've studied the texts in great detail.
> "Jesus states that he hands Peter the keys to heaven, which following this logic then turns Peter into God."
Only if you haven't studied the texts in great detail. If you have, you'll recognize the parallel to Isaiah 22 -- Eliakim taking over Shebna's role, not as king, but as palace administrator. That's very different from the role Jesus claims in Matthew 7.
> "Jesus instructs his followers to forgive sins, which according to your logic turns them all into God."
Again, you're missing some nuance. The Lord's Prayer mentions forgiving sins "against us". I can forgive sins against me and you can forgive sins against you. In Mark 2, Jesus claims to forgive sins against God, which is why the crowd considers it blasphemous.
Again, these sorts of claims permeate all four gospels. They're things that, if you have a thorough grasp of the Old Testament, jump out of the text. But if you're not that interested in the details, you might totally miss it (and, to reverse your uncharitable take on my position: if you have already decided Jesus makes no divinity claims, you can surely rationalize it all away.)
I'm not convinced that Jesus didn't make any divinity claims. We have unreliable and contradictory accounts of what Jesus said, so I consider it an unsolved mystery if Jesus actually believed or claimed he was the Messiah and/or the Son of Man as prophesied in Daniel.
The ambiguity might very well be intentional on the part of Jesus, since outright claiming to be the Messiah would be extremely dangerous - this would be equivalent to announcing a rebellion against the Romans.
But I'm totally convinced that he didn't claim he was Yahweh himself, that would have been ridiculous!
The passages you refer to are also pretty ambiguous, for example saying "Son, your sins are forgiven" does not necessarily mean that Jesus is the one forgiving the sins, it could also mean he informs the person that his sins have been forgiven by God.
But he wasn't writing the gospels. So we don't know what he intended, only what the reporter wrote down. And they were in the storey. So the possibility of slant is clear.
sure -- but we know the reporter wrote down divinity claims, even in the earliest gospels.
Keep in mind the Lord-Liar-Lunatic argument is aimed at those who claim "Jesus is a great moral teacher" based on the things Jesus is quoted as saying. Jesus is quoted as making divinity claims, many of which are obvious if you have good knowledge of Hebrew scriptures and religious practices. The "Legend" option (Jesus didn't really say those things) is still open, but that makes it harder to claim anything about the value of Jesus' moral teachings.
Well the 'obvious' thing is what's at issue. Because he (apparently) didn't refute other's claim of his divinity isn't a sure bet that he was devine - that's a very indirect thing and nothing obvious about it.
From what I understand, 'legend' means there is a kernel of history there, but it's been so crusted over with stories that it's impossible to recover. The word 'myth' is used when it's all fiction.
So the 'legend' position would be "There was a heretical Judean Jew named Joshua son of Joseph who may well have given a sermon on some mount and was very likely crucified, but beyond that we are in no position to say anything. It's been too long, the records are too poor, and too many people with motivation to lie have had a chance to spread tales."
What was the motivation to lie? One common argument is that nearly all of Jesus' closest disciples were martyred and would have had no motivation to die for something they knew to be a lie.
