The False Trilemma

"Liar, Lord, or Lunatic".

How many times have you heard that phrase boom out from your radio while going through the dial? It's become a staple of televangelists and radio "ministries" in the last decade or two.

One could as easily ask that question of any fictional protagonist- John Galt, Horatio Hornblower, Michael Corleone or Holly Golightly. Because it makes an assumption: that the person about whom it is asked is able to be any of the above. In none of the above cases is it a sensible question because those people don't exist, and never did.

And neither did Jesus of Nazareth.

I got the following from a friend yesterday: (Ellipses mine;)

" I'm now convinced that Jesus was fictional, because the process by which the gospels were generated makes perfect sense if you follow Star Trek.... The key is the period in between the end of the show (TOS) in '69 and the next ten years before Paramount decided it had a franchise on its hands. People started writing independent fiction of various types regarding the world of Star Trek: it all went a different way based on the 'facts' of the series, and it evolved its own conventions so powerfully Paramount and Roddenberry had to "do it Frank's way" when they started writing new Star Trek. There were these fanzines-"zines"-and in fact the Star Trek community probably invented the zine as it came to be known, which ended with Jim Goad and the general Internet migration...the K/S ones, for Kirk/Spock, were written by fat females, housewives, had them buggering each other and later other "slash" fiction with Starsky and Hutch, came out...other types as well, see a 1974 book by Marshak and Culbreath, very jewy, Rand discussed a lot.

..... If Mark the first gospel, the others came in afterward and were compliant to it but not each other, like Vulcans having pointed penises in one story and two small ones in another, and they were trimmed or redacted by monks in antiquity to fit. But not all the way, which is why there are ludicrously incongruent genealogies in Matthew and Luke."