Was the Lewis trilemma unsound in form, Beversluis?

When it comes to the formulation by Lewis, which is most appropriately so named, probably not:

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. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Quoted via wiki, referencing Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity, London: Collins, 1952, pp. 54–56. (In all editions, this is Bk. II, Ch. 3, "The Shocking Alternative.")

Now, the form has been considered unsound by John Beversluis.

Another criticism raised is that Lewis is creating a false trilemma by insisting that only three options are possible.[36] Philosopher John Beversluis comments that "he deprives his readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious implications".[37] For example, it is logically possible for Jesus's claims (if any) as to his divinity to have been merely good-faith mistakes resulting from his sincere efforts at reasoning, as well as for Jesus to have been deluded with respect to the specific issue of his divinity vel non while his faculties of moral reasoning remained intact. Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig cites this as a reason why he believes it is an unsound argument for Christianity.[38]

notes 36 to 38 go to:

• Lord, Liar, or Lunatic: C. S. Lewis – Jesus Trilemma, About Atheism, retrieved May 5, 2014
• Beversluis, John, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 56.
• Craig, William Lane, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, Crossway Books (1994) pages 38–39.

As I just added in that wiki section, this misses (in fact more than) one point on C. S. Lewis' formulation:

Nevertheless, this misses that C. S. Lewis formulated it in terms of

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

This means, the Lewis trilemma as per naming author, is a general principle, applicability of which to Jesus is established elsewhere (i e, C. S. Lewis was dealing with a subset of the pentalemma, since already in other places excluding guru hypothesis or lacking historical veracity). The trilemma branches out where the overall questions deals with whether Jesus

• said it
• and meant it about the God of Judaic Theism.

Lewis was establishing elsewhere he believed there was excellent ground to take Gospels as eyewitness accounts (his arguments particularly involves John chapter 8, the passage recently disputed since omitted in Sinaiticus, if I recall correctly).

So, overall question whether He said it, elsewhere dealt with in positive, overall question whether He meant it about the God of the Torah and not about some Pantheistic concept also elsewhere dealt with in positive. The trilemma is formulated as a general law, applicable to Jesus in this precise case. It is not, except by concentration on nude quote in isolation, a trilemma exhausting all that could be said about Jesus. Once question is correctly limited, we see the trilemma as a correct answer.

Now, another thing, it is also formulated as a response to a specific back then popular meme:

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.

A man ready to accept Christ as a great moral teacher is obviously accepting Him as historical. He is obviously also accepting in some sense His teachings are accessible. If he means "by reading the Gospels" he must be admitting both a historicity at least for logia and the context that is clearly Judaic and not Hindoo. If instead he actually means Jesus was a guru, he is probably accessing info on Jesus from some ... Hindu guru, or some seance, or some dream, or sth else, but not from a well informed reading of the Gospels in historical context.

Any argument for Christianity is unsound if isolated from the facts making it applicable, and many would be inadequate as overall arguments for Christianity in isolation, since the facts making it applicable are not directly stated in it.

The writer G.K. Chesterton used something similar to the trilemma in his book, The Everlasting Man (1925),[11] which Lewis cited in 1962 as the second book that most influenced him.

In fact, GKC was more like stating the uniqueness of the claim, in a passage leading up to the claim.

This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion . Nor is it even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone exaggerated unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.

The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Brahma. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.

A few paragraphs down from beginning of Part II On the Man Called Christ, chapter iii The Strangest Story in the World
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/everlasting_man.html#chap-II-iii

Where we also get the answer to Hitchens, if he thought Christ mad.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Severian of Scythopolis
21.II.2019

Scythopoli, in Palaestina, sancti Severiani, Episcopi et Martyris, qui, Eutychianis acerrime se opponens, gladio peremptus est.

His killer was an Eutyches-follower (or his killers were, if more than one) that is, more or less a Copt. His city is now called Bisān or Beit She'an.