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Wasn't Jesus just a good man?
If Jesus was only a good man, why did he claim to be equal with God? The Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, once summed up the alternatives we have in responding to Jesus' claims:
"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 moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that 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 demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord. But don't come up with any patronising nonsense about him being a great moral teacher. He hasn't left that alternative open to us:'
You might think that anyone can claim to be God. There have been people who have declared themselves to be God, but in time have been shown up as rogues or madmen. The evidence of the way they lived did not support their claims. What makes Jesus unique is that the way he lived gives us good reason to believe that what he said was true. Jesus' character and work supports his words in a way we see in no other human life.
This contrasts with Caesar's 'Gallic Wars', for example, for which the oldest copy surviving today was made over 900 years after the original was written. This is typical of ancient manuscripts. In fact, the manuscript evidence for the Gospels and the rest of the New Testamentis far more plentiful than for any other ancient book. Because of the wealth of the evidence and its early date, modern scholars have no doubts about the basic reliability of the transmission of the New Testament documents. In this way we can check the accuracy of the text of our modern translations and see that it has remained unchanged through history.
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