Why Jesus Can Not Be Just a Good Man

Very few people today deny Jesus was an actual person who lived in the first century (and those that do are far outside the mainstream - there are many logical arguments and historical documents, both Biblical and non-Biblical, that point to the fact that Jesus did exist).

So the question becomes, was Jesus God?

Some people try to take the easy way out and say, "I don't believe Jesus was God, but I do believe Jesus was a good man of high morals and a good teacher".

But is that even a valid possibility for who Jesus could be? Could Jesus be just a good, moral teacher?

C.S. Lewis formalized his "trilemmia" this way:

"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 patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."

Being a "moral man" is not an option. Being a "good teacher" is not an option. Here's why.

First, contrary to some (arguably outside-the-mainstream) scholars, the New Testament (NT), as a historical document, is very reliable. Josh McDowell, Bruce Metzger, F.F. Bruce and others have amply documented the reasons why the NT can be considered a reliable historical document (note, this is not to say they have proven the NT is "the Word of God" - that is a faith claim, which is entirely different from being able to call the NT a reliable historical document). If you do not believe that the NT is historically accurate (that is, the NT was written truthfully by disciples and eyewitnesses of the time and whose core doctrinal messages come to us relatively unaltered over time), stop reading now - for if you do not see the NT documents as accurate, nothing you read about Christianity will ring convincing to you, and you could refute every Christian argument with "it's all a myth - legendary stories concocted centuries after the fact". I happen to believe those "myth" arguments can be debunked, but it is up to you to convince yourself either way.

Second, in the NT, Jesus clearly claims to be God. Some people argue that Jesus didn't actually claim to be God, but rather it was his disciples and later Christian followers that put that label onto Jesus, either mistakenly (they thought that's what he meant) or on purpose (they know he didn't claim to be God but labelled him God anyway). Of course, if that is the case, that immediately throws out the "Jesus was a good teacher" argument, because clearly, if he was such a good teacher, how could his disciples have gotten Jesus' message so wrong (or, if his followers did this knowing Jesus never claimed to be God, he still can't claimed to be a good teacher because they would clearly be going against Jesus' teachings - why lie to your neighbor that your teacher was God to get them to believe your message? That doesn't seem to be in line with Jesus' teachings) . But in any event, if Jesus never claimed to be God, you have to ask yourself why then did the Jewish Sanhedrin and a lot of the Jewish community in Jerusalem hate Jesus so much to want to put him to death? They apparently thought he claimed to be God. For further reading on this, and to get a good set of arguments on Jesus' claim of divinity, see "Contending with Christianity's Critics", Chapter 12, "Who Did Jesus Think He Was?".

Not only did Jesus claim to be God, he allowed his disciples to believe that he was God. He had his disciples believe in his message so deeply, all of them followed his instructions and evangelized his message throughout the region and most gave up their lives for him. By the mid-30s AD, all of his disciples were convinced that Jesus was God (the Gospels and Epistles clearly show this). If Jesus wasn't God, then how did his disciples get that message so wrong? Clearly, Jesus must not have been a very good teacher if such a core doctrine was so badly transferred from master to pupil!

If Jesus wasn't God and he knew he wasn't God, he was a flat out liar. He left his disciples to live a poor, humbling lifestyle, instructed them to leave their homes and families to deliver a false message to a public that was, at best, sceptical and, at worse, deadly violent to that message, and in the end sent them to their deaths for a lie. This is not the mark of a good or moral man, it is the sign of a cunning and evil man.

What if Jesus wasn't God but he thought he was God? In this case, Jesus was a mentally unstable man who managed to convince everyone close to him that he was God (note that there is no strong evidence of mental instability in Jesus found within the NT texts; on the contrary, he comes across as a calm, stable, intelligent and wise individual). Can someone who is so mentally unfit that he convinced himself and his followers to die for this lie, be a good man of high moral standing? Possibly. But, then again, "good" would be a relative term. This mentally unstable man did end up wrongly convincing his followers to die for his (false) cause - he may have been a proficient teacher to pull that off, but it is arguable that he could be considered good and moral for doing so. Put it into perspective - if someone as mentally unstable as this lived today - would you label him as a good moral man and a good teacher?

It is hard to claim that Jesus was merely a good, moral teacher if he also wasn't God. He could have been a cunning liar and deceiver or he could have been a highly motivated but mentally unstable man. But he couldn't be those things and be a good, moral man and teacher.

You must either deny Jesus' message entirely, or you must accept his claim as the Son of God. He can't have been just a good man. As C.S. Lewis puts it, "He has not left that open to us.".