Lot’s of people who have done the research on Jesus and found that they cannot dispute his historicity solve the “problem” Jesus creates by explaining that he was a uniquely gifted human being … and only a uniquely gifted human being.

Thomas Jefferson

American Founding Father and third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson fell into this category. He famously “edited” the gospels to construct a customized version of Jesus as moral philosopher.  Using a razor, Jefferson cut out of his New Testament all references to miracles in the gospels. The resulting 84 pages was the basis for his own, personal, “religious philosophy.” (A Jeffersonian model of Jesus = ethos of good will toward men / good works for humanity can be seen in the Congregationalist denomination and also in the Unitarian church.)

Jefferson wrote to a Unitarian friend, “To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.” (Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush) In other words, Jefferson affirmed Jesus’s teachings but discounted Jesus’s claims to, (and evidence for) supernatural authority.

The problem is that Jesus ties all his moral teachings to supernatural authority. Jesus even subjugates his many miracles to a status of lesser importance than that supernatural authority. For Jesus, the teachings and the miracles are simply demonstrations of the authority!

Moral Teaching and Supernatural Authority

Jefferson is hardly unique in his enthusiastic response to Jesus’s teachings. Throughout the gospels, people react to the sense that Jesus’s teachings have special weight, unique magnetism. They talk of Jesus as “having authority” – not just when Jesus is casting out demons and healing people, but whenever Jesus teaches, too. Like Jefferson, the crowds who followed Jesus around were enthusiastic about what Jesus was teaching. But when Jesus acknowledges the authority his listeners attribute to his teaching, Jesus claims that authority is his because it has been given to him by his “Father” – God. Indeed, Jesus stakes his identity – his whole identity, including as a teacher (Rabbi) – in his authority as God’s Son.

Interestingly, Jesus validates this authoritative identity and the teachings that flow from it by demonstrating his authority over physical matter via miracles. Jefferson and many others find the miracles objectionable / hard to believe; but according to Jesus, the miracles were not the big deal – the moral authority was. One example: when a crowd objects to Jesus’s telling a paralyzed man that his sins have been forgiven, Jesus responds, “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic— “Stand up, take your bed and go to your home.” (Matthew 9:6, emphasis added) The sense Jesus gives here is that everything about his ministry – miracles included – are demonstrations of his identity / divine authority.

Crucifixion, Death and Resurrection

Another obstacle to the “Jesus as good teacher only” model is the crucifixion. According to Jesus, his whole mission hinged on this ultimate act of self-sacrifice and its miraculous conclusion. Jesus’s offering on the cross mattered, according to Jesus, because it had power to save souls – power from God. Therefore, Jesus’s willingness to be tortured to death on the Cross was not some sentimental gesture of affection. Rather, the suffering of Jesus went beyond human suffering – took on supernatural proportion – and the accomplishment of Jesus went beyond human accomplishment – took on supernatural significance. 

On the cross, Jesus claimed, all human sin was vanquished. And by the resurrection, Jesus claimed, death was vanquished, too. This revolutionary reversal of sin and death was, according to Jesus, the whole point of the incarnation (Jesus taking on human flesh) in the first place. And Jesus’s most frequent teaching topic – the kingdom of Heaven – only makes sense in light of the cross and resurrection.

Jesus teaches that his death and resurrection make a way for his followers to share eternal life with him, in Heaven. Pretty audacious, eh? And Jesus reiterated this teaching, over and over again. (See John’s gospel, chapter 14, for an extended explanation from Jesus about how this works.)

“Redacted” Gospels?

For all these reasons, Jefferson’s assertion that Jesus only ever desired to be “ascribed every human excellence” requires the spliced-and-diced version of Jesus that Jefferson himself constructed. Such a Jesus = ethos of good will toward men / good works for humanity relies on a very, very highly redacted version of the gospels.

(Consider the way this kind of editing / falsification through deleted context happens regularly in our age of instant updates. Can we rely on contemporary “news” that’s been created from bits and pieces of quotes, to prove an editor’s point? No — we have to go on searching for what’s been left out, accidentally or on purpose, in order to understand what’s actually going on. In the case of ancient texts, cross-referencing other extant copies serves this purpose for us.  Characterizing Jesus based on others’ reactions / re-imaginings of the gospel leaves us in a similar position as credulous consumers of “fake news:” at best, missing the point; at worst, persuaded of a lie.  The only good option we have if we want the “straight scoop” on Jesus is to go digging into the Gospels for ourselves.)

Jesus’s own account of himself consistently links his teaching authority, his moral authority, and his miraculous power to Divine agency and identity… so, if we give assent to the historicity of Jesus, we cannot categorize him as “a great moral teacher” and be done.

According to C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis’s explanation of why the historical Jesus cannot be simply a “great moral teacher” remains the standard and best. Here it is: 

“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 was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the 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.”   From Mere Christianity