The TRILEMMA (Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?) is an argument for the divinity of Jesus, and it has a very long history.

The basic idea is that Jesus claimed to be God, so either he was telling the truth and is God (LORD), or he was NOT telling the truth, in which case he was either deceived (a LUNATIC) or a deceiver (a LIAR). It is then argued that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a liar, so we are left with the only other alternative: Jesus was God.

There are hints of the basic ideas and reasoning of the Trilemma in the New Testament. For example, Paul argues for the resurrection of Jesus on the grounds that Paul would be a liar if Jesus had not actually risen from the dead:

¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³ If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, ¹⁴ and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain. ¹⁵ We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. ¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. 

1 Corinthians 15:12-16, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, emphasis added

In the above passage, Paul offers the Christian believers two dilemmas:

EITHER God raised Jesus from the dead OR your faith is worthless.

EITHER God raised Jesus from the dead OR Paul and all the other apostles are liars.

So, a Christian who was familiar with this letter of Paul to the Corinthians, and who wanted to defend the resurrection of Jesus would have motivation to argue that Paul and the other apostles were NOT liars and to formulate an argument for Jesus’ resurrection based on the above dilemma:

1. EITHER God raised Jesus from the dead OR Paul and all the other apostles are liars.

2. It is NOT the case that Paul and all the other apostles are liars.

THEREFORE:

3. God raised Jesus from the dead.

Another likely source of the ideas in the Trilemma is an accusation allegedly leveled against Jesus by some of his Jewish opponents. In Chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, Jesus makes claims about himself that suggest he is the Messiah, the promised savior of the Jews:

¹¹ “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹² The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. ¹³ The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.  ¹⁴ I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me, ¹⁵ just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.

John 10:11-15, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

The Messiah was spoken of as being a shepherd of the nation of Israel (Micah 5:2-4), so Jesus’ Jewish audience thought these statements suggested that Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah:

²⁴ So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

John 10:24, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

Many Jewish contemporaries of Jesus rejected the view that Jesus was the Messiah, and some of them allegedly justified their view by claiming Jesus was out of his mind. According to the Gospel of John, that is how many Jews in the audience when Jesus claimed to be “the Good Shepherd” justified their opposition to following Jesus:

¹⁹ Again the Jews were divided because of these words. ²⁰ Many of them were saying, “He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?”

John 10:19-20, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

So, a Christian who was familiar with the Gospel of John and who wanted to defend Jesus and defend their faith in Jesus as the Messiah, or as the divine savior of mankind, would be aware that some people dismiss belief in Jesus on the basis of the claim that Jesus was “out of his mind”. That would provide motivation for the earliest defenders of Christianity to argue that Jesus was NOT “out of his mind”.

An early defender of Christianity might well have formulated an argument for belief in Jesus as the divine savior based on the dilemma found in John 10:20:

1. EITHER Jesus was the divine savior of mankind OR Jesus was out of his mind.

2. It is NOT the case that Jesus was out of his mind.

THEREFORE:

3. Jesus was the divine savior of mankind.

The apostle Paul was in Roman custody when Porcias Festus became the governor of Judea. When Festus visited Jerusalem, Jewish leaders there made charges against Paul, and Festus asked some of them to bring their accusations to Caesarea, where Paul was in custody, and that Festus would hear their charges there. After various charges were made against Paul in Caesarea, Festus asked Paul if he would go to Jerusalem for a trial by Festus, but Paul then, as a Roman citizen, demanded to appear before Caesar, and Festus decided to grant this request (Acts, Chapter 25).

King Agrippa visited Festus a short time later, and Festus asked Agrippa to hear Paul’s response to the various accusations in order to help clarify what specific charges should be the basis for sending Paul to appear before Caesar (Acts, Chapter 25). So, King Agrippa asks Paul to speak and defend himself, and Paul then launches into a sermon about Jesus being the savior of mankind and about God raising Jesus from the dead (Acts, Chapter 26). Festus speaks up:

24 While he was making this defense, Festus exclaimed, “You are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning is driving you insane!”

Acts 26:24, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

So, Jesus was not the only one to be accused of being out of his mind. Any early defender of Christianity who was aware of these stories about Paul in the book of Acts might well have thought of an argument based on a dilemma concerning Paul:

1. EITHER Paul was out of his mind OR God did raise Jesus from the dead.

2. Paul was NOT out of his mind.

THEREFORE:

3. God did raise Jesus from the dead.

We have seen that in a letter of Paul to the Corinthians, in the Gospel of John, and in the book of Acts, there are dilemmas very close to the surface, dilemmas that are similar to the Trilemma. There are EITHER/OR claims suggested by passages in the New Testament that concern whether Jesus was “out of his mind” and that concern whether Paul was “out of his mind” and that concern whether Paul and the other apostles were liars.

These dilemmas might well have led early defenders of Christianity to formulate arguments in which skeptical claims like “Jesus was out of his mind” or “Paul was out of his mind” or “Paul and the other apostles were liars” are denied in order to support basic Christian beliefs, such as “Jesus is the divine savior of mankind” or “God raised Jesus from the dead.”

If we think about these various dilemmas, there is a fairly obvious way to combine ideas from these dilemmas in order to produce a stronger argument, namely a similar trilemma-based argument. Consider the following dilemma:

EITHER God raised Jesus from the dead OR Paul and all the other apostles are liars.

This is based on the claim that Paul and all the other apostles proclaimed that God raised Jesus from the dead. But an obvious objection here is that there is a third possibility: Paul and the other apostles might be SINCERELY MISTAKEN. Instead of being liars or deceivers, they might themselves be deceived. If so, then it could be the case that God did NOT raise Jesus from the dead, and yet Paul and the apostles were NOT liars or deceivers but were simply mistaken.

One obvious way to get around this objection is to expand the above DILEMMA into a TRILEMMA:

EITHER God raised Jesus from the dead OR Paul and all the other apostles are DECEIVERS OR Paul and all the other apostles are DECEIVED.

Similarly, the following dilemma about Jesus is problematic:

EITHER Jesus was the divine savior of mankind OR Jesus was out of his mind.

What about the possibility that Jesus was perfectly sane but was a liar or deceiver? In that case, it could be that Jesus was NOT the divine savior of mankind and yet that Jesus was NOT out of his mind. One obvious way to get around this objection is to expand the DILEMMA into a TRILEMMA:

EITHER Jesus was the divine savior of mankind OR Jesus was out of his mind OR Jesus was a liar.

And thus one can quickly develop the “modern” TRILEMMA argument for the divinity of Jesus out of a previous DILEMMA argument for the divinity of Jesus.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the first known published argument along these lines for the divinity of Jesus was based on a DILEMMA:

The “385AD” date mentioned in the above quote is incorrect since Marius Victorinus died about 370 CE (as Paul Brazier himself notes). I have seen this work dated as having been written in 358 CE, which is much more likely, because Victorinus converted to Christianity in about 355 CE, and he died in about 370 CE. The above quote from Victorinus is a translation from Latin. Here is the Latin passage that this was translated from:

Thus, a little more than 300 years after Jesus was crucified, a defender of Christianity argued that Jesus was God on the basis of this DILEMMA:

EITHER Jesus was God OR Jesus lied about himself.

A similar DILEMMA was used to support the divinity of Jesus more than a thousand years later (in 1534) by the Catholic philosopher (and author of Utopia) Sir Thomas More:

For surely, if he [Jesus] were not God, he would be no good man either, since he plainly said he was God.

(A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, this edition published in 1951, transcribed from the 1557 version in Everyman’s Library with modifications to obsolete language by Monica Stevens, originally written by Thomas More in 1534, Book 3, Section 14)

Thomas More implied this DILEMMA:

EITHER Jesus was God OR Jesus was not a good man.

The first appearance of a TRILEMMA argument concerned with Jesus’ claims about himself seems to have been presented by John Leland in 1733 in An Answer to a Late Book – Part 2. Leland also presents a TRILEMMA argument concerned with the preaching of the apostles about the resurrection of Jesus. Both of those arguments are based upon a more basic TRILEMMA that is concerned with the evaluation of Testimony as the basis for a belief that something is the case or that an event took place:

Leland specifies two criteria for the evaluation of testimony as reliable:

• We have reason to think the person who provided the testimony is NOT deceived about the matter in question.
• We have reason to think the person who provided the testimony does NOT have an intention to deceive others about the matter in question.

These criteria lay the foundation for the construction of TRILEMMAS concerned about (a) the claims of Jesus about himself, and (b) the claims made by the apostles, especially about the alleged resurrection of Jesus. So, it is no surprise that Leland goes on to present such TRILEMMA arguments based on the following general TRILEMMA:

EITHER the person who provided the testimony was telling the truth about the matter in question OR the person who provided the testimony was deceived about the matter in question OR the person who provided the testimony was attempting to deceive others about the matter in question.

Leland summarizes his TRILEMMA arguments before he lays them out in more detail:

To “impose on others” is to DECEIVE others. Thus, this passage lays out three possibilities: telling the truth, being deceived, or being a deceiver.

Leland starts out by applying the TRILEMMA to Jesus. First, he argues that Jesus was not himself deceived:

Next Leland argues that Jesus was NOT a deceiver:

Leland does not say here that Jesus claimed to be God. But the focus is on a claim Jesus made about himself, namely that Jesus claimed “that he was extraordinarily sent of God…” (An Answer to a Late Book, Part 2, p.42). This appears to mean that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and the savior of mankind:

Leland goes on to lay out a similar argument based on a TRILEMMA concerned with the testimony of the apostles about Jesus’ miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. Again there are only three alternatives: the apostles were telling the truth about Jesus’ alleged miracles and the alleged resurrection of Jesus, or they were themselves deceived about Jesus’ alleged miracles and the alleged resurrection of Jesus, or they were deceiving others about Jesus’ alleged miracles and the alleged resurrection of Jesus.

On pages 44 to 45 of An Answer to a Late Book – Part 2, Leland argues that the apostles were NOT deceived about Jesus’ alleged miracles and the alleged resurrection of Jesus. On pages 45 to 48 of the same book, Leland argues that the apostles were NOT trying to deceive others about Jesus’ alleged miracles and the alleged resurrection of Jesus. By eliminating those skeptical alternatives, Leland believes that he has provided a powerful argument for the conclusion that the apostles told the truth about Jesus’ alleged miracles and the alleged resurrection of Jesus, and thus that Jesus really did perform the miracles described in the Gospels, and that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

While John Lelund might well be the first defender of Christianity to have presented a TRILEMMA type of argument in support of extraordinary claims that Jesus made about himself, an earlier defender of Christianity had already used a TRILEMMA type of argument concerning the testimony of the disciples of Jesus.

According to Dr. William Craig, a man named Hugo Grotius may “rightly be called the father of modern apologetics” (Reasonable Faith, 3rd edition, p.211). Grotius was “the first to provide a developed historical argument for Christianity in his De veritate religionis christianae (1627).” (Reasonable Faith, p.212). Craig summarizes the case Grotius makes for the resurrection of Jesus.

• A very old copy of De veritate religionis christianae in Latin
• An English translation published in 1800: The Truth of the Christian Religion

Most of the points made by Grotius in his case for the resurrection are concerned to eliminate the possibility that the apostles were DECEIVERS who were lying about Jesus’ alleged resurrection from the dead: a conspiracy to deceive involving so many would not have been successful, they had nothing to gain by lying about Jesus’ alleged resurrection, their own religion prohibited lying, and they would have abandoned following Jesus’ teachings if they knew that Jesus had failed to rise from the dead as he had predicted (Reasonable Faith, p.213). But the argument of Grotius makes another important point: “And it is clear from their writings that the apostles were not madmen.” (Reasonable Faith, p.213). That is to say, the apostles were not themselves DECEIVED about the alleged resurrection of Jesus.

So, more than one hundred years before John Lelund used a TRILEMMA type of argument concerning Jesus’ claims about himself and a TRILEMMA type of argument concerning the claims of the apostles about the alleged miracles and resurrection of Jesus, Hugo Grotius in 1627 used a TRILEMMA type of argument about the claims of the apostles that Jesus had risen from the dead. Grotius argued against the possibility that the apostles were DECEIVERS, and he also argued against the possibility that the apostles were DECEIVED (by being out of their minds or mentally ill). Grotius concluded that the apostles were telling the truth when they proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead.

The use of DILEMMAS to support Christian beliefs about Jesus was probably influenced by the New Testament (esp. Chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, and Chapter 26 of Acts). Marius Victorinus used a DILEMMA argument for the divinity of Jesus in about 358 CE. Thomas More used a DILEMMA argument for the divinity of Jesus in 1534. The shift in Christian apologetics from DILEMMAS to TRILEMMAS took place no later than 1627 when Hugo Grotius wrote his defense of the Christian faith. In 1733 John Leland used a TRILEMMA argument to support Jesus’ alleged claim to be the Messiah and the savior of mankind and a TRILEMMA argument to support the claim of the apostles that Jesus had risen from the dead.