Lord, Liar, Lunatic...or Legend?
"I am the Good Shepherd" (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You may have heard C.S. Lewis' Trilemma challenge?. Your local university teacher maybe a skeptic, but happy to expose students to good thinking even if he didn't believe what the Bible taught about Jesus. But believes there is a fourth possibility: The Gospels are legends. Tom Gilson has written an excellent new article in Touchstone . He considers this fourth possibility in an interesting way. It's not only about how a legend about a man called Jesus developed. It's about how four separate legends about a man called Jesus with a uniquely good character and great power developed independently and remarkably similar. It's easy to miscalculate what this would require, and Tom thinks it through very carefully and in an extremely helpful way. In order for the legend hypothesis to hold water, there must be a plausible explanation for the genesis o...