Lewis's trilemma is an apologetic argument traditionally used to argue for the divinity of Jesus by postulating that the only alternatives were that he was evil or mad.
Criticisms of the argument have included that it relies on the assumption that Jesus claimed to be God, something that most biblical scholars do not believe to be true, and that it is logically unsound since it presents an incomplete set of options.
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.
"[12]Lewis, who had spoken extensively on Christianity to Royal Air Force personnel, was aware that many ordinary people did not believe Jesus was God but saw him rather as "a 'great human teacher' who was deified by his superstitious followers"; his argument is intended to overcome this.
Elsewhere, he refers to this argument as "the aut Deus aut malus homo" ("either God or a bad man"),[15] a reference to an earlier version of the argument used by Henry Parry Liddon in his 1866 Bampton Lectures, in which Liddon argued for the divinity of Jesus based on a number of grounds, including the claims he believed Jesus made.
Philosopher Peter Kreeft describes the trilemma as "the most important argument in Christian apologetics",[18] and it forms a major part of the first talk in the Alpha Course and the book based on it, Questions of Life by Nicky Gumbel, an English Anglican priest.
"[24] The atheist writer Christopher Hitchens accepts Lewis's analysis of the options but reaches the opposite conclusion that Jesus was not good.
Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it 'moral' ... to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs?
[29][needs independent confirmation] A frequent criticism is that Lewis's trilemma depends on the veracity of the scriptural accounts of Jesus's statements and miracles.
[27] According to the biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman, it is historically inaccurate that Jesus called himself God, so Lewis's premise of accepting that very claim is problematic.
Ehrman stated that it is a mere legend that the historical Jesus called himself God, and that this was unknown to Lewis since he never was a professional Bible scholar.
[33] John Hick, writing in 1993, argued that this "once popular form of apologetic" was ruled out by changes in New Testament studies, citing "broad agreement" that scholars do not today support the view that Jesus claimed to be God, quoting as examples Michael Ramsey (1980), C. F. D. Moule (1977), James Dunn (1980), Brian Hebblethwaite (1985), and David Brown (1985).
[28][34] According to Gerd Lüdemann, the broad consensus among modern New Testament scholars is that the proclamation of the divinity of Jesus was a development within the earliest Christian communities.
He proceeds to list several other alternatives: Jesus was Israel's messiah, simply a great prophet, or we do not really know who or what he was because the New Testament sources portray him inaccurately.
Philosopher John Beversluis comments that Lewis "deprives his readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious implications".
This has also been done by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, both Saint John's Seminary professors of philosophy at Boston College, who have also suggested a pentalemma, accommodating the option that Jesus was a guru, who believed himself to be God in the sense that everything is divine.
"[40]Writing from a presuppositional perspective, Richard L. Pratt Jr. has criticized the trilemma as expanded by Paul E. Little ("Lord, Liar, Lunatic or Legend") as being too reliant on human reason: "Instead of insisting on the necessity of repentance and faith as the ground for true knowledge, Little acts as if the unbeliever needs merely to be logical about Jesus' claims in order to arrive at the truth.