#959 Correcting Wikipedia
September 28, 2025Dear Dr. Craig, I have read a lot of texts on your website and as far as I'm able to follow your answers (I mean the more difficult philosophical/logical explanations), I have found a lot of useful advice in order to enable me to "give answers". One of the questions that often arise are those that deal with Jesus' divinity. I know most of the places in the N.T. where Jesus refers to his status as "Son of God", but I'm always confused when I read that some scholars maintain that He never claimed to be God.
Now I found an article in WIKIPEDIA which also mentions a kind of criticism from your part, which really makes me uneasy, because I thought that you defended Jesus' deity.
Here is the quotation:
[.quote ]Craig gives several other logically possible alternatives: Jesus' claims as to his divinity were merely good-faith mistakes resulting from his sincere efforts at reasoning, Jesus was deluded with respect to the specific issue of his own divinity while his faculties of moral reasoning remained intact, or Jesus did not UNDERSTAND the claims he made about himself as amounting to a claim to divinity. [unquote].
Please, help me to disentangle my confusion.
Margret
Germany
Dr. craig’s response
A
Wow, this just goes to underscore the point that you can’t blindly trust Wikipedia but must always verify what it says. I guarantee you that I never said anything like the quotation that is attributed to me. Check out the source!
I’m inferring that the context here is something like the famous “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” trilemma for explaining Jesus’ radical personal claims. By showing that Jesus was not plausibly a liar or a lunatic, one can show that he was who he claimed to be, namely, the Lord. I’ve criticized the traditional trilemma for its incompleteness: we need to add and then exclude a fourth alternative, namely, “Legend,” that is to say, that Jesus never actually made claims to divinity. On the contemporary scene this is the most important alternative to be refuted. But try as I might, I cannot make the paragraph you cite fit that schematic.
I do notice that the author lists the alternatives as merely “logically possible alternatives.” That’s pretty innocuous. It’s logically possible that Jesus was a man from Mars, but no historian would take that seriously! So the real question is what our historically realistic alternatives are for explaining Jesus’ self-understanding and claims. You can find my defense of the authenticity of Jesus’ claims to divinity in my Reasonable Faith, 3rd edition.
- William Lane Craig