lewis's trilemma and the short-circuiting of the evangelical mind

In his Mere Christianity C S Lewis has an argument that has proved extremely popular with evangelical apologists. It's commonly known as 'Lewis's trilemma', although other authors have proposed something similar. Here's Lewis describing a 'foolish' thing that people sometimes say about Jesus Christ:

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.

As a standard-issue Catholic I'm not going to dispute Lewis's conclusion: that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of / is God. But I often find myself feeling a much greater affinity for those who claim the 'foolish thing' Lewis discusses than for what I see as his own 'foolish' argument.

What's so 'foolish' about Lewis's argument? It's that it assumes that the person who thinks of Jesus of Nazareth as merely a great moral teacher, or a great if renegade rabbi, somehow thinks He must be utterly faithfully represented by scripture. But might not our 'foolish' challenger note the following: 

i) The gospels were written down decades after Jesus died. No amount of awesome oral tradition is going to preserve all of someone's words or deeds faithfully over decades - especially when that's anyways just not how oral cultures work. Our rabbi pundit may well think they'll inevitably contain: various additions of legendary material emphasising  the wishful fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, mistakes, self-serving embellishments, omissions, political and religious biases, etc.

ii) It's only in John's rather later gospel that Jesus directly and explicitly identifies as God. Lewis's argument rather takes in a single breath the idea of Jesus as both Son of God (i.e. like certain of the Roman emperors) and as (an aspect or part of) God Himself. So might not Lewis' 'foolish' interlocutor take the synoptics as only slightly embellishing the wonderful and authentic spiritual and moral teachings of this awesome Rabbi - i.e. the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, etc. - whilst seeing John's gospel as divinising Him in a way they can't recognise? Might it not even be that if anyone's to reasonably be charged with lunacy it's the synoptic authors for not even making properly explicit what the church soon enough came to see as the central claim of Christianity - namely the divine nature of Jesus Christ? 

iii) Finally, and least relevant to my main tack here: why couldn't it be that a truly great moral teacher also suffered moments of insanity? Many great philosophers and scientists who've had much to offer mankind have had such moments; this needn't be thought to invalidate their mainstay teachings. Lewis seems to be assuming that insanity comes only in all-or-nothing, now-and-for-all-time, forms. But just as there have been many wonderful saints and other believers who have had less-than-sane moments, why - our 'foolish' non-Christian wonders - couldn't Jesus have had the same?

As far as I can tell, there's nothing incoherent or foolish about the idea of Jesus of Nazareth as a great rabbi. In fact it is, from a non-Christian point of view, perhaps the most rational perspective one could take. For sure, if we're only interested in trying to achieve a maximal internal coherence in our reading of the New Testament - then the great rabbi reading isn't going to wash. But Lewis doesn't claim to only be discussing such internal hermeneutic issues; instead he offers apologetics. And qua apologetics, the argument fails miserably.

But what I find most striking about this is that, unless I've utterly messed up and somehow missed something central, all of the above is completely obvious. There's zero reason for a non-believer to take the gospels as gospel. This couldn't be more straightforward. And yet it seems to escape the thought not only of C S Lewis but also of many evangelical Christians today who trot out the argument at every opportunity.

It's worth noting that Lewis did try to rebut the idea that the early Christians invented the idea of Jesus as Son of God or as Himself God. But his argument comes down to the claim that 

It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people [i.e. the Jews] in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.

But why should anyone think it more odd that some first century Jews should become mythologising heretics than it is for God to actually become man? Isn't the incarnation itself a mystery of faith, and isn't there something really rather 'odd' about it? The Jews and Muslims - to say nothing of the atheists - have at least thought so!

And as for the idea that there may be moments of legend in the gospel narratives, Lewis tells us that

as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there is no conversation that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence.

But this all-or-nothing tack is going to fool nobody. Sure, there's simply no reason to think that the gospels were entirely legend, or conceived as legend. But whilst evangelicals who believe in the inerrancy of scripture are clever at finding possible reconciliations of the various apparent contradictions in New Testament history, it is - from a non-inerrantist point of view - undoubtedly more convincing to allow that elements of legend can creep in to a historical / biographical narrative of aspects of Jesus of Nazareth's life. Given the high religious stakes, the long period of oral transmission (of several decades), the myriad facts about the conscious and unconscious motivations of human beings, etc., what would require explanation is not the claim that they did, but the claim that they didn't, include elements of legend.

So, back to Lewis' claim that it's foolish to think Jesus just a great rabbi': how could anyone - including an Oxford professor - really think something which is itself so patently 'foolish'? To fall for argument so poor seems to me to be a something which demands explanation. The psychological explanation I offer here is that a kind of 'short-circuit' obtains in a certain kind of evangelical intellect. That's just a metaphor of course. But what I have in mind is a form of thinking which takes itself to be making contact with that which is other than itself (i.e. Lewis thought his argument actually worked against a non-Christian who thinks Jesus just a great moral teacher) but which really only makes contact with its own worldview. At a juncture where work is required - the work of engaging with the truly other - we instead find an overly easy if unwitting self-satisfaction. Lewis somehow just forgets to note that the sceptic is hardly going to start from the position that the gospels tell the gospel truth! And it seems to me that we find this often - it manifests as a kind of unwitting, unholy, smug certainty in the believer. And if the non-believer is under significant psychological pressure, and their mind is in such an unsettled state as it will be satisfied with the mere appearance of rational argument, so long as this takes them to a soteriologically satisfying conclusion, they will be fooled by it.

We find this all the time, I think, in certain evangelical contexts. The need to belong, the need to sublimate powerfully unsettling sexual desires, a shameful sense of social inadequacy, loneliness, and so on, all potentiate a mind for pseudo-reasoning. Time and again someone persuades themselves that they come to faith by perfectly rational means - perhaps by going on an Alpha course - when really it's something like the social-emotional gain from the church environment that draws them in. Suddenly someone starts to think that the resurrection of its dead occupant is the best explanation for why a tomb should be found empty! But there are obviously a whole load of other better explanations - if by 'better' we mean the kind of thing that would normally pass rational muster. (They went to the wrong tomb. The body was moved. Jesus never actually died on the cross. The story is made up. etc. etc.) Oh, but there were visions you say? Well, visions under conditions of grief and trauma are, y'know, fairly common. Oh but Thomas put his hand in Jesus' side; oh but the visions were had by whole groups of people? Yes - but - why are you again so sure that the texts are accurate? Or why are you assuming, contra psychological science, that mass hallucination is somehow impossible? We've seen plenty of religious reports from twentieth century India, for example, of translocation, of miraculous apparitions, etc. Are we really going to say that these must be miraculous or diabolical - rather than a mixture of misreporting, trickery, suggestion, legend, etc?