Jesus: QUADRILEMMA

Over the last 2000 years, Jesus has been a household figure in our modern society. He is clearly an important figure in our modern world that the reference for the modern day calendar is derived from Jesus’s life. The abbreviation A.D, a label used to number years stands for “Anno Domini” which is latin for “In the year of our Lord” (Lord refers to Jesus). If the modern world considers him this important, this begs the question : 

Who is Jesus and what did he claim about himself?

The following passage from the bible (John 8:57-59) reveals who Jesus claims to be.

“You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.

John 8:57-59

In this passage, Jesus claims to have preexisted Abraham (Abraham was a man who lived 2000 years ago). But more importantly he claims to be “I am”, a phrase well known to the Jews as referring to God. What an audacious claim!! I can imagine that most people were taken aback when such a claim is made. 

But, to be honest growing up in a christian household Jesus’s claim to be God seemed obvious(that was the only view I knew). However this was not trivial anymore when I met people who didn’t necessarily know/agree to Jesus’ claims. In addition to Jesus’s audacious claim, he sets a high bar for those who wish to believe that he is God and follow him. He says

” In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”

Luke 14:33

A radical calling such as this requires validating Jesus’ claims. 

In order to test Jesus’s claim, the question can be tackled as a quadrilemma as shown below.

According to the picture above, Jesus had to fit into one of the following categories. 

To verify Jesus’ claims, it would suffice to show that Jesus is not a legend, liar and  lunatic (process of elimination). 

Before I move forward, I am making a big assumption that the Bible is the inspired word of God i.e all the events recorded in the Bible are true and accurate. (Stay tuned for another blog post on it).

LEGEND:

This is possibly the weakest argument for Jesus. Most bible scholars, even those who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus agree that Jesus was indeed a real human who walked on earth. But, for the sake of completeness I am adding links [1] [2] to the account of two historians who write about Jesus as a part of their larger literary work. The reason I picked those two historians is that both of these historians are unbiased sources since both of them did not claim to be followers of Jesus.

LIAR:

The next possibility is Jesus was a big fat liar. I have intentionally prepended adjectives to liar because that is exactly how I would describe a liar who claims to be truthful and expects his followers to be men and women of integrity to the point of death. But why would Jesus lie? Liars who made claims like the one Jesus made do it for money, power, women etc. A complete view of Jesus’s life makes it clear that all the motives to hold on to lie was never achieved in his life. In fact, if it was indeed a lie, that lie got him crucified and put to death on a cross. If indeed Jesus was in it for the money or fame, I find it hard to believe that he would hold onto that lie even if it means losing his life. 

LUNATIC:

What if Jesus really believed that he was God and taught his followers the same when in actuality that was not the case. This would mean that he was either delusional or mad. Some of you might be surprised reading this, but even his own family members thought he was out of his mind during the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Unlikely as this claim sounds, Jesus did supernatural miracles and predicted events that seem to reinforce his claims. He walked on water, calmed a storm, healed diseases and predicted his own resurrection from the dead. This might not be very convincing, but all I am saying is that a man who claims to be God and backs up his claim through numerous events cannot be brushed aside that quickly. A logical next step would be to at least investigate what he says.

If Jesus being a legend, liar, lunatic does not seem very likely, this brings me to our last option i.e Jesus is indeed who he claims to be. Now I can go on and share more stories but I would merely be repeating the Bible. If you want to know more about Jesus, I would recommend reading the book of Mark from the Bible (A short and concise biography of Jesus). 

But before I finish, why go through the hassle of figuring who Jesus is?

The answer to that question in my opinion is best expressed in terms of opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of not investing a finite amount (~ 1 month) of time to figure out who Jesus is the possibility of losing eternal life and missing out on an opportunity to verify the TRUTH.

 Finally, I want to give credit to Christian apologist C.S Lewis whose writing was one of the sources of the above post. Also to my discussions with many disciples of Jesus whose thoughts are also ingrained in this post. Here is an excerpt from Lewis’s book in which he alludes to the above argument.

“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. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis