To read more from Daniel, visit his blog: Sic Et Non.
Cover image: Oldest-known mosaic depiction of Christ, 300s AD.
Between 1941 and 1944, the great British scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis delivered a series of radio talks for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC. In 1952, those lectures were gathered together and published in book form as “Mere Christianity.” One of the best-known passages in that book is Lewis’s famous “trilemma,” which is also sometimes called the “liar, lunatic or lord trilemma.” He used it on more than one occasion thereafter, but this is the classic statement of it:
“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.”
It’s a powerful argument, I think. But it has a major vulnerability; it’s subject to one objection that, if the objection is granted, deprives the argument of much, if not all, of its force: What if Jesus himself never actually claimed to be divine? What if such claims are later legendary accretions? What if they’re merely traditions that evolved over multiple Christian generations? In that case, Lewis’s “trilemma” collapses.
In fact, though, many scholars do contend that the Jesus of the New Testament gospels never actually claimed divinity. It’s really only in the Gospel of John, they say, that Jesus sometimes appears to stake such a claim. But the Gospel of John, they further say, is the latest, most “evolved,” most “literary,” and most different of the four New Testament gospels—and therefore the most “theological” and least historical of them. On the other hand, so the argument goes, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which, because they are very similar to one another, are often termed the “Synoptic Gospels”—from the Greek words “syn” (“together”) and “opsis” (“view”)—take a very different position from John’s Gospel. Yes, they present Jesus as a wonderworker and as a mighty and unique prophet and teacher, but they do not portray him in any clear way as divine—and perhaps not really in any way at all.
That claim to deity, some say, arose only among his disciples, and only after his death. Perhaps it was sparked by his supposed resurrection. Perhaps it occurred under the influence of pagan religions, as converts brought their preexisting ideas with them into the rapidly spreading new Christian faith. These would have included ideas about demigods, about mortal children who had been sired by gods but born to mortal women.
Of course, believers in the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon don’t need to wonder whether or not Jesus was the divine Son of God. The Book of Mormon settles that question for them.
Among many nonbelievers in the Book of Mormon, however, the question remains unsettled. Among still others, though, it seems to have been settled quite firmly—but in the sense that they no longer seriously entertain the possibility that Jesus ever claimed divinity, let alone that he really was more than merely human. It has become something of a standard assumption not only among theologically liberal or unbelieving scholars but also among more than a few of the general public that Jesus “became divine” only with the passage of time.
(It’s beyond the scope of this brief column, by the way, to address those who’ve decided that there was never actually a historical Jesus at all. That “mythicist” view, as it’s often called, is a fringe position that is far more popular among internet atheists than it is among scholars in the relevant academic fields. Even liberal biblical scholars, even those who reject the divinity of Christ, overwhelmingly believe that a historical Jesus actually lived in first-century Palestine. Their ranks include not only Jewish writers but also agnostics and atheists such as Bart Ehrman and the late Maurice Casey, both of whom have published books arguing against “mythicism.”)
Unfortunately, a few onetime believers in the Book of Mormon, assuming that the seeming scholarly consensus is correct—that belief in the deity of Christ arose not with Jesus himself but, instead, developed out of the enthusiasm of later generations of mythologizing Christians—have drawn the conclusion that the Book of Mormon’s powerful affirmation of the deity of Christ must therefore be false. Accordingly, the Book of Mormon itself must be historically inauthentic and, thus, false.
However, an interesting new volume—Brant Pitre, “Jesus and Divine Christology” (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2024)—makes a powerful argument that Jesus did indeed claim divinity for himself. And not only in the Gospel of John.
On his first page, Pitre, who is a prolific Catholic New Testament scholar, quotes from the opening chapter of Albert Schweitzer’s watershed book “The Quest of the Historical Jesus,” which was originally published (in German) in 1906. In “The Quest,” Schweitzer, a theologian who later also became famous as both a musician and a medical missionary in Africa—and who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952—exhaustively reviewed prior scholarly work on the question of the “historical Jesus,” going back all the way to the late eighteenth century.
“The historical investigation of the life of Jesus,” Schweitzer wrote, “did not take its rise from a purely historical interest; it turned to the Jesus of history as an ally in the struggle against the tyranny of dogma. . . . For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate. . . . It was hate not so much of the person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so easy to surround him, and with which he had in fact been surrounded. They were eager to picture him as an ordinary person, to strip from him the robes of splendor with which he had been appareled, and clothe him once more with the coarse garments in which he had walked in Galilee.”
But, Pitre observes, such approaches to Jesus run into a serious obstacle right from the start. As he points out, Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious scholars alike strongly tend to agree that a very high view of Jesus arose extremely early in the history of the Christian movement. A couple of quotations will serve to make the point:
“The idea that Jesus is God,” says Bart Ehrman, “was the view of the very earliest Christians soon after Jesus’ death.” And, as the late Larry Hurtado wrote, “Devotion to Jesus as divine erupted suddenly and quickly, not gradually and late, among first-century circles of followers” “They all agree,” Pitre himself summarizes, eventually quoting yet another New Testament scholar, “on one thing: after the death of Jesus, his earliest Jewish followers did not begin with a low Christology in which Jesus was regarded as merely human and then slowly develop a high Christology in which Jesus was regarded as in some sense divine. Rather, Jesus was regarded as “Divine from the Beginning.””
But how to explain this?
“If Jesus himself never claimed to be divine in any sense,” Pitre asks, “then how do we explain the origins of early high Christology?” He again cites the unbelieving Bart Ehrman: “How did an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state, come to be thought of as equal to the One God Almighty, maker of all things? How did Jesus—in the minds and hearts of his later followers—come to be God?”
That is the question that Brant Pitre’s book sets out to answer: “In this study, I will argue that the best explanation for why the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine shortly after his death is because Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime. . . . (T)he historical Jesus claimed to be divine, but he did so in a very Jewish way—using riddles, questions, and allusions to Jewish Scripture to both reveal and conceal the apocalyptic secret of his divinity.”
One of the subsidiary aims of the book, he writes, “is to demolish the modern scholarly myth—which goes back at least as far as the time of Ernst Renan—that Jesus is not depicted as divine in the Synoptic Gospels, but only in the Gospel of John. For it is this myth that is one of the principal barriers to recognizing that Jesus speaks and acts as if he is more than merely human in all four of his first-century biographies. . . . Jesus speaks and acts as if he is divine in all three Synoptic Gospels. . . . [T]he shopworn idea that Jesus never speaks or acts as if he is divine in the Synoptic Gospels needs to be consigned once and for all to the dustbin of history, where it has always belonged.”
The argument that Pitre sets forth in “Jesus and Divine Christology” is subtle and complex. It isn’t a romance novel or a mystery. It’s not a page-turner. It relies on the very careful reading of a considerable number of New Testament passages. Among other subjects, it ranges from a careful consideration of what Pitre identifies as the Savior’s “epiphany miracles” through his frequent use of “riddles” to his crucifixion for (significantly) “blasphemy.” Now, of course, I readily admit that I was already strongly disposed to agree with Dr. Pitre’s thesis before I even saw the book. But I have to say that find his argument convincing. Furthermore, it’s lucid and clear, even brilliant. And it addresses a vitally important topic. Very much hinges upon our answer to the question that Jesus himself posed to Peter and the other apostles at Caesarea Philippi: “He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:15-16)
If Brant Pitre’s argument is correct, the notion that belief in Christ’s divinity evolved in the Christian community only after the departure of Jesus is false. And, if it is false, it cannot serve as a good reason to reject the Book of Mormon. Even more importantly, if he is right Lewis’s trilemma is back: It seems obvious that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a devil. Accordingly, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, we may indeed be obliged to accept the proposition that Jesus was and is the Son of God. And there can be no more important proposition than that.
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For something of my own appreciation of C. S. Lewis, see my brief recent essay “Prepping for the Last Battle,” in “Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship” 63 (2025): vii-xviii: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/prepping-for-the-last-battle/.
For one defense of the historicity of John’s Gospel, see Craig L. Blomberg, “The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: Issues Commentary” (2011).
