Blaze: The historical Jesus, who speaks to us through the Gospels, makes claims about himself that are inconsistent with those of a man who was merely a Jewish prophet and nothing more.
As C.S. Lewis famously argued in book 2, chapter 3 of “Mere Christianity,” a man who said the kinds of things that Jesus said could not have been a prophet, plain and simple. Either he was, as he claimed to be, the eternal Son of God, or a madman on the order of someone who thinks he is a poached egg, or the devil of hell.
American apologist Josh McDowell, in good preacher form, boiled down the options to three words all beginning with the letter “L”: liar, lunatic, or Lord. Either Jesus was the worst blasphemer who ever lived (as Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin ruled) or a crazy person who needed to be locked up (as his own family thought; see Mark 3:21) or the promised Messiah and Son of the living God (as his disciples came to recognize and believe).
No one at the time said he was only a prophet: neither his friends nor his enemies made that unsustainable claim. More to the point, no one disputed Jesus had made the claims he made. They either believed what he said, or they used his words as proof of his blasphemy or his lunacy. Those who heard his message either attacked him or ridiculed him or worshiped him. What they didn’t do was domesticate him as a mere prophet. more
C S Lewis is my favorite author. He was a brilliant man and I love his style of writing.
Forgotten by who? I have three feet of shelf space taken up by CS Lewis that I reread regularly. Twice that much GK Chesterton.