Was Jesus God?

One of the proofs that Jesus is God goes along the following. Historical records, in this case the gospels, state that Jesus claimed to be God. Specifically, he applied the name I AM to himself: before Abraham was, I AM (John 8:58). We know both from the book of Exodus and the Jews' reaction that I AM is effectively the secret name of God, who when Moses asked for his name, said I AM WHO AM. From this we can conclude a few possibilities: either Jesus was telling the truth, he was deliberately deceitful, or was crazy. By eliminating the latter two, we arrive at the conclusion that Jesus was telling the truth, and is indeed God.

However, there seems to be arguments against this proof, claiming that it sets up a false dilemma. A false dilemma is when two (or more) options are pitted against each other and are claimed to represent the whole of possibilities, when this is not the case. For example, a false dilemma is to state: Either you support Barack Obama's bid for the presidency, or you're a racist. This doesn't actually partition the whole space. A true partition that makes use of both is the following. First divide the populace between those who support Obama and those who don't. Then divide the populace between those who are racist and those who are not. We end up then with four categories: Barack/not racist, Barack/racist, not Barack/not racist, and not Barack/racist. What the false dilemma actually tries to assert is that the categories of Barack/racist and not Barack/not racist are empty, but is this really the case? A simple poll will show that some people support Barack simply because of his skin color (which is a racist view), and some people who have no problems with a black president don't like Obama simply because they disagree with his policies (which is not racist).

The claim that the original argument is a false dilemma simply states there must be other alternatives than what is offered in the argument. Suppose, for example, Jesus was simply a holy man, a good philosopher, but not God, as a number of different groups might claim (e.g. Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, agnostics, and even some atheists). But do alternatives really hold any water?

Let's examine the divisions that are made in the original argument. Either Jesus was telling the truth, lying, or crazy. Let's handle truth first. Either Jesus' claim was true, or it was false. There's no fuzziness there, so let's move onto the second division that is made, i.e. Jesus' intent. Either Jesus intended to tell the truth, or he intended to deceive. Now we have four categories:

1. Jesus' claim was true and he intended to tell the truth
2. Jesus' claim was true and he intended to deceive
3. Jesus' claim was false and he intended to tell the truth
4. Jesus' claim was false and he intended to deceive

We could, potentially, further divide the categories, or we could discard these particular categories and invent new ones, but it is obvious that these completely partition the space. (But wait, some might argue, couldn't his claim be either true and false, or neither true nor false? Couldn't Jesus have had no intent at all? I hope these aren't strawmen arguments, but they're all I could think of at the moment. But a proposition is either or true or false. It cannot be both, and it cannot be neither. And to deny that Jesus had an intent flies in the face of what he set out to do.) If we have completely partitioned the space, there can be no false dilemma.

The first case is obviously the one the original argument means to prove. The second is tricky. If Jesus was indeed God made man, then the only way he could intend to deceive (by claiming to be God) was to believe he wasn't God. Could such a thing really happen? Because this is such a tricky case, it is often lumped together with the fourth argument, where the consideration of deceit is handled by reference to empirical evidence. What is the intent of someone who goes about claiming to be God? What does it say that Jesus freely chose to give himself up to death, and how does that work with the intent of someone falsely claiming to be God? In other words, we only handle the "liar" aspect of both the second and fourth argument. For the third argument, we have a word for someone who claims to be God, truly thinks that he is God, but is not actually God. That word is crazy.

So now we're back at the original argument. It posed that either Jesus was telling the truth, was a liar, or was crazy, and we have just shown how these three conditions fully partition the possibility space. One might object to arguments against Jesus being a liar or crazy, but one cannot claim that the argument itself poses a false dilemma.