One can be sincerely deluded about certain specific things, and yet in other regards be functionally rational.
He either said the words attributed to him, or he didn't. If he didn't, then they are legendary (or he was misquoted). (This is, in fact, a very common view among biblical scholars.)
If he did, then he either meant what evangelical Christians think he did, or he didn't. (If he didn't, then he was misinterpreted or misunderstood.)
If he meant what Christians think he did, then he was either a liar, a lunatic, or lord.
The Contemporary Debate on the Resurrection
Secular Objections to the Resurrection
Assessment
Having now surveyed four different writers on the resurrection, I'd like to evaluate their arguments. In particular, I'd like to pay close attention to the assumptions each writer makes about the nature of the resurrection. And second, I'd like to expose (where necessary) the assumptions each writer makes about miracles.
McDowell's Arguments
The Trilemma
The trilemma is a flawed argument. First, it makes considerable assumptions about what Jesus supposedly claimed, and the accuracy of the reporting and interpretation of those claims. It requires that one grant the truth of the gospels, especially John, and furthermore requires a conservative interpretation of the gospels. That is to say, the argument presupposes that we agree that Jesus existed, that he taught a new faith representing a considerable modification of the Judaism of his time, and that he claimed to literally be the incarnation of God. These may all be reasonable assumptions on McDowell's part, but the point is that there are other logical possibilities besides "Lord, liar, or lunatic." And as long as these other alternatives have a significant probability, the trilemma is therefore an implausible argument.
Second, even if we grant that Jesus taught a new religion and claimed the authority as God incarnate to do so, the LLL argument is fallacious. True, if Jesus said those things, then they were either completely and literally true, or they were not. If they were not true, then either he knew this or he didn't. The basic fallacy is proceeding from that dichotomy to the extremes of raving lunatic and pathological liar. As Jim Perry writes:
One can be sincerely deluded about certain specific things, and yet in other regards be functionally rational; it's a classic feature of paranoia that aside from the object of one's delusion, one can be quite rational, and even the delusion itself can be quite reasoned. So Jesus could have sincerely believed he was God incarnate come to teach a new religion, and thus been technically insane, and yet not have been obviously raving (he kept his claim of divinity, if any, mostly to himself), and capable of perfectly good teaching and thinking on other subjects, such as morality. The McDowell form of the argument is implicitly using the cultural presumption that Jesus was indeed a sound moralist to argue that a lunatic would have been so obviously insane as not to be credible as a moralist, nor in fact capable of sound moral reasoning, thus he must have been telling the truth. The Lewis form is similar, but on the surface omits the last part - he wants to discredit the claim that Jesus was morally good on the basis of a claim to be God (or, actually, the vaguer 'said the sort of things Jesus said'). There are good arguments to be made against the moral greatness of Jesus' supposed teachings, but the argument that some of his beliefs were based on delusion and therefore that his moral teachings can't be considered sound is simply wrong.
Again, this is all assuming that Jesus said "the sort of things that Jesus said," traditionally interpreted. That is assuming far more than many skeptics would be willing to grant, but even granting that, the argument is fallacious.
Therefore, if we were to eliminate the implicit assumptions in the trilemma, we would get a statement similar to the one derived by Jim Lippard:
He either said the words attributed to him, or he didn't. If he didn't, then they are legendary (or he was misquoted). (This is, in fact, a very common view among biblical scholars.) If he did, then he either meant what evangelical Christians think he did, or he didn't. (If he didn't, then he was misinterpreted or misunderstood.) If he meant what Christians think he did, then he was either a liar, a lunatic, or lord.
There are other problems with the trilemma as well. For example, Jesus seems to have incorrectly claimed (Matt. 10:23) that his second coming would occur during the lifetime of his followers. However, if we apply the logic of McDowell's trilemma in this situation, which assumes that if someone makes a claim about something they must be lying or insane, this means that Jesus was either a liar or a lunatic. Surely McDowell would not accept this conclusion. It is therefore unclear why we should apply this same logic to Jesus' claims to be God.
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