Steelmanning and stress-testing C.S. Lewis's famous argument about who Jesus claimed to be.
C.S. Lewis argued you cannot call Jesus merely a great moral teacher: given his claims, he was either lying, deluded, or telling the truth (Lord). The argument's strength is that it refuses a comfortable middle. Its weaknesses are real and worth naming: it assumes the Gospels accurately report Jesus' self-claims (a historical question Ehrman and others contest), and it omits a fourth option — 'legend,' that the divine claims developed in transmission. An honest treatment presents Lewis's logic at full force, then the scholarly objections at full force, and labels the conclusion as theological reasoning rather than proof. That is how truth-first apologetics works: persuasion without sleight of hand.
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