The problem is that your first premise may not be true, which means your second premise is certainly not true.
Here’s a short video (about 12 minutes) that adds a fourth L to C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument: Legend. It compares the story of Jesus with that of Heracles (Hercules), a real man whose legend grew as time went on. It doesn’t state in any way that Jesus couldn’t have been Lord, but it does show how false Lewis’s trilemma is.
Generally, Mike, referring people to view a YouTube video that coincides with your views is less preferable than summarizing the views with which you agree in print. I can read a textual argument much more quickly than watching someone talk. Particularly as, if you’ll pardon my frankness, most atheist YouTube videos present some of the most turgid and preposterous arguments that I’ve ever wasted precious moments of my life watching. Sam Harris fans on the Internet owe me big time for suggesting that I listen to his endless droning on YouTube videos in support of whatever point they were trying to make. I’d rather gargle with peanut butter than listen to another Sam Harris lecture, or most any other New Atheist lecture.
But anyways, your argument is known as the Euhemerism thesis, and it was occasionally used by the early apologists (like Clement) as a defense of the Christian faith, to claim that the people worshipped as gods were just men with divine accretions added over time.
The problem your argument presents to you in applying this theory to the divinity of Christ is that the miracles that were ascribed to Christ, and which are presented as evidence of his divinity, were described as to place, relative time, and corroborating witness within a very short period. We do not have that with Heracles, who lived, if he was based on a mortal king, about 1260 B.C. (or possibly far earlier - Herodotus claimed that Heracles was an older Egyptian God, adopted and adapted by the Greeks, in his
Histories, which would tend to discredit the idea that he was an historical figure.
We also have corroborating incidents from history in the Gospels that track pretty closely with what we know happened in the ancient world at that time, as well as incidents from the NT that tell scholars more about what was happening in that time and place. As it happens, I’ve read all the classical pre-Christian texts that mention Hercules’ mythical exploits. There are not many (Apollodorus, Hesiod, Diodorus Siculus, Hesiod, Ovid, and the Homeric Hymn). The post-Christian texts show the influence of the Neoplatonic move towards monotheism, in reaction to the increasing popularity and mass conversions under Christianity, and begin to describe him in messianic terms as a “Us, too!” pagan phenomenon. The classical texts on Heracles don’t give us that, reducing the probability that they are based in historicity. They read like fairy tales, which the Gospels don’t. If the same Euhemeristic process was taking place in both instances, we would expect to see historo-textual evidence of veracity in the Heracles texts. We don’t.
Euhemerism itself is not in much favor in classical studies, these days, BTW.
We also have textual evidence of Christian attestation as to the facts of the life and miracles of Jesus as the son of God within an extremely short time frame, within years after his death. We do not have that with Heracles, if he existed. We have oral histories from the apostolic generation collected by men like Papias, who corroborate the historical existence and divinity of Jesus. We have no textual evidence of an actual king named Heracles (or variants) or possessing any of his attributes.
We also have the witness of martyrdom - men who knew Jesus, and were in a position to witness the miracles He performed, accepted martyrdom rather than renouncing Him within a very short time after His death. That is unlikely in the extreme if Jesus did not display divine attributes, given what evidence we have for the length of time for a mortal to undergo a myth-making process. We certainly have historical evidence for followers being imprisoned or killed while fighting on behalf of recently deceased charismatic figures who claim to be prophets (such as Brigham Young) but not divine, and we have historical evidence that people commit suicide at the orders of cult leaders who claim to be divine, such as Jim Jones or Sai Baba, but then people killed themselves for pop stars like Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain. I even have examples of atheists accepting execution and torture from the state for their beliefs, although there were other factors at play in those cases that we don’t see in Christian martyrdom, and historically, we see the majority of suicide bombings committed by atheists, not jihadists. Those forms of death acceptance, like the suicide killings of jihadis, are quite different from the torture that the early martyrs underwent.
We would not expect to see that level of commitment in Christians if your argument were correct.
