The Lord, Liar, Lunatic trilemma has been proposed by several Christian apologists, including the noted layman’s theologian C. S. Lewis. It seeks to argue that Jesus Christ was Lord, Savior, and all those other wonderful things he said he was in the New Testament. It goes about this by proposing something of a trilemma regarding Jesus:

Assuming that Jesus existed, and that he said he was the Lord, there are three possibilities regarding his claims: either he was

1. telling the truth (he was LORD),
2. lying (he was a liar), or
3. insane (he was a lunatic).

Since his words are very profound, they can hardly be discounted as the words of a raving lunatic. He could not have been a liar because he was willing to die for his beliefs, as were many of his followers; this hardly seem like the acts of a liar. Therefore, since the other two options have been eliminated, he must have been LORD.

There are a number of flaws with this argument, starting at the most fundamental level of the assumptions. The assumptions need not be accepted at all; there are a number of other options. If the historical figure of Jesus did not exist at all (which is possible, but not overly likely given a conservative approach to the evidence), then the argument is superficially ludicrous. If Jesus did exist, then he may not have ever said he was LORD, but rather the early Christians such as Saul/Paul and the New Testament Gospel authors merely fit the semi-historical person of Yeshua/Iesos to fit their Messiah god Xristos. The most likely scenario, I think, is that he never said he was LORD, but was merely a Jewish religious reformer, and that his teachings were encrusted and embellished with miraculous life narratives and salvation myths as his followers shifted from the original Jewish reformers to the apocalyptic mystery cult of Christianity.

The next significant flaw is that of trifurcation; it proposes only three options when there are in fact more. One of the most likely is that Jesus and/or his followers sincerely believed what they said, but were not correct. It is quite possible that, whether Yeshua ever said anything about being LORD or not, Saul/Paul and the various other authors of early Christian books sincerely believed that Yeshua was the Messiah in the form of Xristos.

The final significant flaw in this argument is that it seeks to eliminate the options of liar and lunatic, but fails to do so adequately. If Yeshua was delusional as to his godhood, that does not in anyway preclude his abilities to make cogent moral and religious observations; delusions of godhood do not rule out functional sanity in other fields of life, and even were he totally insane there are still several cases of insane or marginally loony people putting out observations that seem profound to some (eg, Nietzsche, who produced his final works the last year before he became clinically insane). The argument against liar is even less convincing; history has been littered with people making huge sacrifices for liars and lunatics. Was David Koresh truely the Second Coming of Christ? Are all those Scientologists shelling out thousands of dollars doing so for true revelation? In fact, the reasons given to rule out liar and lunatic can easily be applied to most other would-be prophets and saviors; many have fought and died for Muhammed, and his moral teachings could be argued to be as profound as those of Yeshua. Was then Muhammed truely the prophet of Al-Lah?