“Jesus claimed to be God. He did not leave any other options. His claim to be God must be either true or false and is something that should be given serious consideration.” ~ Josh McDowell from “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”
I was born and raised in Upstate New York and I have many fond memories from my youth. We lived about 2 hours away from Cooperstown, NY home of the Baseball Hall of Fame which I loved to visit. As a youth I was told that I was a distant cousin to Hall of Famer Mel Ott; the first major leaguer to surpass 500 home runs which was an amazing feat for a man who was only 5’9” tall and weighed 170 lbs.
I loved going through the HOF and walking through all of the local shops selling baseball memorabilia. I could spend hours looking at the display cases with all of the autographed merchandise. But my reverie was always short lived (in my estimation) because part of the total Cooperstown experience was letting my mom visit the antique shops and also the various museums. What pre-teen boy in his right mind would swap watching Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on First” to visit the James Fenimore Cooper house? Cooper lived in a beautiful home on Otsego Lake, and was the author of “The Last of the Mohicans”. But being a dutiful son I grumpily went along and mockingly “oo’d” and “aa’d” at the old stuff.
If this wasn’t bad enough we also would have to make our obligatory stop at The Farmer’s Museum to see what life was like back in the early 1800’s. The museum grounds features two dozen buildings and recreates small village life and truth be told is very fascinating. The one item that I was immediately fascinated by was the Cardiff Giant which turned out to be one of the most famous hoaxes in American history. The Giant was found on October 16, 1869 in Cardiff, NY by two workers digging a well who believed that it was a 10’ long “petrified man.”
According to Wikipedia; “The Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister named Mr. Turk about the passage in Genesis 6:4 that there were giants who once lived on earth. Hull hired men to carve out a 10-foot (3.0 m) long, 4.5-inch block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a German stonecutter to carve it into the likeness of a man and swore him to secrecy. Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weathered, and the giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. Then Hull transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868. He had by then spent US$2,600 on the hoax.”
After the "discovery" Mr. Newell put the giant on display and initially charged $0.25 admission to see it, but the demand grew and the price quickly increased to $0.50. Wikipedia explains how the hoax was eventually revealed; “Archaeological scholars pronounced the giant a fake, and some geologists even noticed that there was no good reason to try to dig a well in the exact spot the giant had been found. Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh called it "a most decided humbug". Newell eventually sold the Giant for $37,500 to a syndicate headed up by David Hannum who incidentally is the real author of the phrase “there is a sucker born every minute.”
Most of us believe we are not gullible enough to be drawn in by a hoax and we believe we can spot a fake. However oft times there is a tremendous amount of evidence that points to the validity of a claim, and if we will give it a fair hearing and study it in depth we must come away with the awareness that it not only bears a certain amount of truth, but demands we make a decision. This is the conclusion that the author and atheist C.S. Lewis came to when he coined the trilemma about Jesus Christ; He must be a liar, lunatic or Lord.
Lewis has written extensively on his faith and one of his classics is titled “Mere Christianity” and in it he states; “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Lewis develops the premise by saying; “We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said, or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.”
Unlike Mr. Hull and Mr. Newell, Jesus Christ had nothing to gain by perpetuating a hoax and being obedient to the will of God and dying on the Cross. And his 12 disciples did not enjoy the praise or respect of the world by staying true to Jesus Christ and his teachings; they endured shame, ostracism, and imprisonment and ultimately death yet nary a one ever renounced their faith or said the empty tomb was a hoax. As we draw closer to the Easter season to celebrate the resurrection what will you do with the fact of the person and work of Jesus Christ?
“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die-- but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” ~ Romans 5:7-8
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