In the last article I wrote on this subject, I looked at two compelling lines of evidence from the gospels of Mark and Matthew which pose problems for the idea that Jesus was just a good moral teacher. There are more to come; this article will do the same for the gospels of Luke and John, and will cover some interesting ground. The intent here is to force us back into the realm of the Lewis trilemma, popularly expressed with the formula "liar, lunatic, or Lord"; at the end of the article I will give a summary of my thoughts on why the first two options don’t seem credible to me.

A hierarchy of love

Firstly, Luke’s Gospel. Jesus, having dined at a prominent Pharisees’s house and now accompanied by "great crowds", turns to them and offers a teaching:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:26

There are things which Jesus says which are easy to overlook, but I find that this one tends to catch the eye. Perhaps it’s the use of the word "hate". We don’t tend to associate that word with Jesus, loving and benign and forgiving as he’s supposed to be. What’s he saying here? Are we meant to hate our families? Is that a good thing? Of course not, any more than Jesus expects us to cut off our hands (Matt. 5:30). He’s saying that your love for your family must look like hate in comparison to your love for him.

The point should be clear by now: normal, sensible people do not say things like this. Consider, for a moment, how you would respond if you heard this from someone you know. "Unless you put me above your own family, you’re not worthy of me." Not to put too fine a point on it, but unless that person were literally God in the flesh, I would have to conclude that they’d lost their mind- or that they were out to start some kind of mind-control cult. While that latter suggestion sounds like something Dan Brown (ptuh) would write about, it conflicts with everything else we know about the historical Jesus.

So what, aside from sheer insanity, could drive a person to say something like this? The answer, I think, proceeds from the concept of rightly-ordered loves. The reader might already be familiar with the term "ordo amoris"- it caused something of a stir in the media earlier this year when the new Vice-President used it to defend his stance on illegal immigration (a subject I do not intend to address, ever). In its proper theological context, ordo amoris refers to the need for a hierarchy of loves. You are not, for example, to love the sojourner more than you love your son; that would be a disordered love. In this case, Christ is appealing to the need for properly ordered loves: he claims that in that hierarchy, his proper place is above that of your own parents.

Who might occupy that place? I think that even we as moderns should not have much difficulty understanding the implication here, but it is worth pointing out that in Judaism, your mother and father are second only to God; this is because they gave you life. We see this echoed in the Ten Commandments. The first four concern the holiness and supremacy of the Most High God, and then after that comes the injunction to honour your parents:

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12

With this in mind, consider what Jesus is asking of his followers. If he is merely a man, he is asking them to violate Torah by breaking the Fifth Commandment. That takes some chutzpah, to put it perfectly inadequately. I won’t belabour the point; by now it should be clear what Jesus is claiming. In this passage, he is saying that he occupies the place in the ordo amoris reserved for God alone. Is he lying, is he mad, or is he God?

The chain of being

And then we have perhaps the most overt of Jesus’s claims to divinity, which comes from the Gospel of John. Caught in a theological dispute with a band of Pharisees, Jesus says:

56 - "Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad."
57 - So the Jews said to him, "You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?"
58 - Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am."
John 8:56-58

I say "overt"; if you don’t know your Bible, this one may still pass you by. Here Jesus is referring to Exodus:

13 - Then Moses said to God, "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?"
14 - God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’"
Exodus 3:13-14

In this verse, God is making a claim to ontological necessity. If you’ve never come across this idea before, allow me to explain. Things, in our experience, can be explained only by reference to other things. If you want to explain the colour red, for instance, you might refer to the electromagnetic spectrum, or provide some examples of things which are red; but the concept of "red" does not explain itself. Similarly, actions which I take in the world require other explanations to contextualise them, forming a chain of causation going back beyond my point of origin. I do not cause my own existence; I was conceived by my parents, who were conceived themselves by their own parents, and so on and so forth. This is called "ontological contingency", a term which describes a state of being (ontology) which requires explanation to something other than itself (contingency).

This state of contingency extends out to the whole of physical reality: it is self-evident that the universe does not explain itself, otherwise we would not have spent so much time as a species wondering why it exists. Now an immediate problem arises: if all physical reality is part of a chain of causation, then obviously there must have been something which forged the very first link in that chain. If there were nothing that caused that chain to begin, then the chain would not exist; clearly the chain does exist, therefore there must be something which caused it to begin. Here is where things get interesting: whatever that is must not have a cause. If it has a cause, then you’re back in the chain of causation, and you haven’t yet reached whatever caused the first link. The only way you escape the infinite causal regress is by positing the existence of something uncaused. This is called "ontological necessity"- a state of being which fully explains itself, without reference to any other thing.

What’s the relevance of all this? In the passage from Exodus cited above, God is claiming ontological necessity. Moses asks Him who He is; God responds by referring solely to Himself. "I AM WHO I AM." He is the sufficient explanation for His own being, and requires no referent. As an aside, I find it very interesting that this assertion is made without qualifying its philosophical import. Nowhere in Exodus (nor, indeed, anywhere in the Bible) do we find the contingency problem articulated; I would imagine that many people have read this verse without realising its ontological significance. When God responds to Moses with that "terrifying cosmic growl",¹ He offers no elaboration on what He means. The text gives us no explicit indication that "I AM WHO I AM" is actually a terse but elegant solution to a very old, very profound philosophical problem; you have to do a bit of reading around it in order to glimpse what it really signifies.

I would hope this makes clear what Jesus is claiming in John’s Gospel. The strange grammar of the phrase "before Abraham was, I am" now makes sense: Jesus is saying to the Pharisees that he is the God of Exodus 3:14. He predates Abraham because he has no beginning; he has a divine nature, which is infinite and eternal. Now, if I were whacked out of my gourd on the strongest dose of psychedelic mushrooms I could lay my hands on, maybe it might cross the expanded horizons of my mind to say something so utterly ridiculous; not, I fancy, otherwise. Call me a cynic, but I highly doubt Jesus was a first-century Terence McKenna; the claim to Godhood, in this case, came out of the mouth of a sober and sensible man. What are we to do with that?

Fording the river

I have looked at four dominical statements, one from each Gospel. Each one is designed to highlight the impossibility of considering Jesus a "good moral teacher". He did teach good morals, but that’s another issue entirely; the statements that he makes about himself prevent us from saying that that’s all he was. In Mark, he claims God’s authority to forgive sins; in Matthew, he claims to be the one who sends prophets to Israel, and punishes her for mistreating them; in Luke, he claims to be worthy of more love than the ones who gave you life; in John, he claims to be the uncaused cause, the uncreated creator, the one who forged the first link in the chain of being.

So which is he? Liar, lunatic, or Lord? As I have articulated before, I find it highly unlikely that Jesus of Nazareth set out to wilfully deceive people into thinking that he was God in the flesh. The thing most sorely lacking with this theory, for me, is a viable explanation for why Jesus, knowing that everything he said was untrue, acted the way he did. If you study the long, sordid history of cults throughout history, one thing becomes clear. Very often, the people at the heart of them claim to be prophets. They will attribute to themselves the role of the divine mouthpiece, and set about convincing their followers that they are revelators of special knowledge; but very, very rarely do they claim Godhood. If you have the presence of mind to know that you’re deceiving people, then presumably you’re clever enough to realise that "I am a prophet" is a more credible claim than "I am God", and much less likely to get you murdered. Yet somehow, on this hypothesis, Jesus chose the less credible option. I can think of no good reason for this. The problem is magnified by the fact that he failed to accumulate any of the rewards that typically form the aims of a personality cult; he was, by all accounts, impoverished, celibate, and absent of worldly political influence. More could be said about this, but I think it will suffice for now: it does not seem at all likely that Jesus was a liar.

Perhaps, then, he was insane. This theory has one major advantage over the "liar" hypothesis: that is, it better explains his claim to Godhood over prophethood. It is not hard to imagine this kind of claim coming from the lips of someone suffering from a psychotic illness; after all, they don’t know what they’re saying. Their minds move in strange and impenetrable ways. I would rate this as the more credible of the two, but that still leaves it very far from credibility. I have met people who suffer from delusions, and I know what madness sounds like when it speaks; it does not sound like the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus speaks, I hear clarity, wit, and an incisive intellect. His rejoinder to the Pharisees’ attempt to trap him with a question about taxes to Caesar, for example, is brilliant; with good reason did his hearers marvel at him.² Everywhere in the Gospels, we encounter a man of supreme rhetorical skill, and keen moral insight, and clear presence of mind. He was never confused, outwitted, or lost for words; I find that the words he did speak have a kind of megalithic weight to them. If he was mad, then I think his madness must have been of an utterly unprecedented kind, something which has never before or since appeared on this planet; but I think it far likelier that he was the very opposite. Not only was he sane, but he was what sanity is meant to look like; the mind of Christ is the archetypal mind.

The conclusion follows that if he was not a liar, and not a lunatic, then he was the Lord. I cannot do justice to the full implications of this; people have spent their whole lives delving into the theology of the incarnation, and this is meant to be the end of the article. The way that people usually try to escape from this conclusion is to posit that Jesus said none of these things, but his followers invented sayings which they attributed to Jesus to suit their beliefs; I will deal with that in the next article I write. While that is in the works, I invite the sceptical reader to consider what it might mean if Jesus really did say these things; after all, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

For further consideration

The (now controversial) concept of rightly ordered loves:
Wikipedia | Ordo amoris
Reformed Classicalist | Ordo Amoris

An excellent articulation of the contingency problem:
Peter Kreeft | The First Cause Argument

All Bible citations are from the English Standard Version unless specified otherwise.

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