What C.S. Lewis Got Wrong about the Gospels

(And How We Can Learn from His Mistakes)

To celebrate three thousand readers, this post brings together two of my loves: C.S. Lewis and the Gospels. It draws on a paper I gave to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society on the first week of Trinity, 2024: ‘Missing the Leaves for the Wood: C.S. Lewis on the Gospels and their Critics.’

One possibly surprising feature about C.S. Lewis – regarded by many as the greatest defender of Christianity in the last century – is how little discussion of the Gospels, or scholarship on the Gospels, his essays or apologetic works contain.

For many theologians, Lewis’ lack of engagement of contemporary biblical scholarship placed him firmly outside the realm of academic theology.

Alister McGrath, a theologian at Oxford, writes of “[Lewis’] general failure to engage theologians of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries…” In McGrath’s view, “by failing to engage with more recent theological analyses or modern biblical scholarship, Lewis in effect disconnected himself from contemporary theological debate.”¹

Evangelical New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, has made similarly critical remarks. He states that readers of Lewis “who never moved on or grew up theologically or historically, would be in a dangerous position when faced even with proper, non-skeptical historical investigation, let alone the regular improper, skeptical sort.”²

Why do these prolific Christian theologians consider Lewis misguided when it comes to biblical scholarship? While Lewis never pretended to be anything more than an amateur, his writings betray some common misconceptions about the Gospels – about their genre, Christology, and content.

In this post, I want to unpack some of those misconceptions, aware that Lewis’ misconceptions - expressed with such force and grace - can all too easily become our own. We turn first of all, then to Lewis’ treatment of the Gospels’ genre.

C.S. Lewis on the Gospels’ Genre

The closest Lewis comes to offering a statement on the Gospels’ literary form is his 1958 paper, ‘Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.’ In this piece, which satirises contemporary New Testament scholarship, Lewis decries the view of one scholar that the Fourth Gospel can be compared to Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Taking a firm stand against the view that the Gospel are allegory, poetry or myth, Lewis appeals to his own literary authority:

“I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text [John] there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage – though it may no doubt contain errors – pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative… The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.”³

While he does not offer us a full-blown description of the Gospels’ genre, he claims that John is either ‘reportage’ or has anticipated ‘modern, novelistic, realistic narrative’. In support of this dichotomy, he points to three details: the realism of Jesus’ dialogue with the Samaritan woman; the unexplained detail that he ‘doodled’ in the dust; and the time-stamp that ‘it was night’ when Judas left the last supper.⁴

But are these details well-selected to make Lewis’ point? Commenting on Jesus’ dialogue with the Samaritan woman, New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham finds it “astonishing” that “a literary critic of Lewis’ stature” could not detect the dialogue’s artificiality, alongside its realism.⁵ Indeed, the dialogue fits into a distinctive Johannine pattern, in which “again and again, Jesus’ interlocutors misunderstand his figurative statements by taking them in a crassly literal sense.”⁶ This Johannine motif allows Jesus to unpack the underlying meaning of his statements.

The same literary artifice also applies to Judas’ departure. Lewis claims that the time-stamp, ‘it was night’, is a hallmark of vivid recollection, a casual unexplained detail. And it surely could have been ‘night’ when Judas left for supper. Yet to see this as an ‘artless’ detail is surely mistaken. To view it as such misses the theme of light running throughout the Gospel: when Judas steps away from the meal, we are not only to see him as stepping into darkness, but departing from the Light of the World.

Finally, Lewis’ appeal to Jesus’ ‘doodling’ is also unpersuasive. For as New Testament and C.S. Lewis scholar Leslie Baynes observes, textual critics unanimously regard this scene (the Pericope Adulterae) as unoriginal to the Gospel.⁷ Given that Lewis recognises the importance of textual criticism in the same paper, this oversight is particularly ironic.⁸ None of Lewis’ examples of ‘realism’ in John demonstrate its form as reportage. In fact, they point in a very different, literary direction.

If not ‘reportage’, what are the Gospels?

If the Gospels are not historical ‘reportage’, what are they? According to Lewis, we are left with only one alternative: either the Gospels are reportage, ‘pretty close up to the facts’, or they have ‘suddenly anticipated modern, novelistic narrative’. This invitation to make a choice between a neatly constructed set of alternatives is a common strategy employed by Lewis. It is part of what makes his argumentation so bracing.

Yet as with any argument set out as a dilemma, we must ask whether these really are the only options on the table. As it turns out, the genre in which most scholars place the Gospels today – ancient biography – may explain the very blend of realism and artificiality which the Gospels betray. For in ancient biography, more than other genres, the line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ was frequently blurred.

Tomas Hägg, a world expert on ancient biography, sums it up in this way:

“Ancient life-writers did not encounter among their contemporaries the same demands for documentary truth as their modern colleagues do, nor did for that matter ancient historiographers… Conversations are allowed to be fictitious, and insight is readily granted into the acting characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motives, as long as some kind of verisimilitude is maintained. The establishment of any form of higher truth – be it poetic, psychological, philosophical, or religious – overrules demands for the truth of facts.’⁹

If Hägg’s insights are applied to the Gospels, we should not see the evangelists as attempting to offer us historical ‘reportage.’ Rather, we are to read the Gospels as accounts of a historical figure with a wide degree of artistic license. If this is the case, we cannot put pressure on the Gospels to deliver ‘reportage’. That simply wasn’t what most ancient biographies were trying to achieve.

C.S. Lewis on the Gospels’ Christology

In Lewis’ argument on the Gospels’ form, we were confronted with a dilemma. But as we turn from the Gospels’ genre to their Christology – their views on the person of Christ – we are confronted with a trilemma: either Jesus was a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord. This famous passage from Mere Christianity sets out the argument:

“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.”¹⁰

There are many responses to this trilemma. From the perspective of Gospels studies, however, Leslie Baynes’ critique is the most interesting I have read. Assuming the general reliability of the Gospels, she questions whether the Gospels do, in fact, present the Nicene Christology which Lewis reads into them.

Take a key example of Jesus’ claim to divinity in the Gospels: the healing and forgiveness of the paralytic man in Mark 2 (par.) Here Lewis claims that Jesus went around, not only offering forgiveness to people who sinned against him, but to those who sinned against others. He therefore took upon a divine prerogative.

But is this indeed what Christ is doing? Notice a few things about this scene. To begin with, Christ does not claim to forgive sins, but rather to announce the forgiveness of sins. The construction of the verb to forgive is a so-called divine passive; ‘your sins have been forgiven’ (2:5). With this passive construction, Jesus is claiming that God – the divine subject – has forgiven the sins of the paralytic.

Yet to announce forgiveness of sins is not to claim to be God. John the Baptist, we have been told already in Mark, had announced a baptism ‘for the forgiveness of sins’; the priests in the Temple played their part in the forgiveness of sins; and even Jesus’ disciples were, in the end, given the authority by Christ to forgive sins. According to Wright, Jesus is not claiming to be God so much as to be the New Temple, the place where God’s spirit resides and in whom forgiveness is found.¹¹

But what about the Pharisees question in the heart, ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (2:7). Jesus in fact answers the question in this passage, but not by affirming their suspicions; rather, he claims that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins. In fact, Matthew removes the question from Mark altogether. One possible reason for this omission is that Matthew knew it didn’t make sense.

If not Nicene Christology, then what?

Why then does Lewis misread this passage as Jesus claiming ontological equality with God? He seems to overlook Jesus’ teaching here about the Son of Man because he conceives of ancient Judaism as a strict monotheism – another either/or. As he puts it elsewhere: ‘only two views of this man are possible…. There is no middle way.’¹²

Yet to construct Judaism in terms of a strict monotheism is perhaps not quite right. The term ‘monotheism’ was coined by the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, in the seventeenth century.¹³ And in the cage of its terminology, we have tended to understand ancient divinity in terms of a simple binary: that there is a single divine being and everything else. Every time someone does something god-like, they comes close to transgressing this line.

Yet in ancient Second Temple Jewish literature, the ‘line’ was again more blurred. The Son of Man was just one among several figures – angelic beings, divine and personified attributes such as the Wisdom and the Logos – who occupy a certain space high up on the gradient of divinity, without necessarily being equal to God.

Royal figures and holy men were called ‘Son(s) of God’; Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, describes the divinised Moses as ‘God’ (theos) and the Logos, associated with Wisdom, as the ‘Second God’. And other figures, such as Metatron and Yahoel, bear the divine name within them, like Jesus in the Gospels.

This is the landscape of Second Temple Judaism, but it is one which Lewis does not make any serious attempt to wrestle with in his writings. To be sure, a Nicene Christology may be a legitimate transposition of the Gospels for a later time. And is it not the case that Jesus’ equality with God relies upon the claim expression of that view in his ministry. Those are theological questions.

Yet Lewis’ failure to engage the Gospels’ Christology within their own literary and theological context is an oversight. And it is a particularly ironic one, given Lewis’ views elsewhere that historians often retrojected their own ideas and interests onto Jesus. Here, Lewis is arguably caught in the same exercise. In reading the Gospels, he finds a Jesus whose teaching aligns with his own Nicene beliefs.

C.S. Lewis on Gospel Unity

A third and final area in which Lewis is in danger of misreading the Gospels is in his assumption that they speak univocally, with a single voice. He appears to express this principle when he writes, in one of his letters, “I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts.”¹⁴

One striking example of Lewis’ tendency to conflate the Gospels’ distinct voices can be found in a letter from Lewis, in which he pastorally consoles a woman with the fact that God did not become incarnate in a Stoic superman; he wrestled with God’s will. For his evidence, he appeals to Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer in Matthew and John.

Unfortunately, Lewis does not recognise that these represent very different traditions. While it is true that Matthew presents Jesus struggling with taking the cup, John seems to offer a subtle corrective of this position. In John, Jesus asks: ‘Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour’ (12:27). In the Johannine narrative, then, Jesus is more stoic.

Leslie Baynes remarks, “Jesus’ Stoic control of himself in John’s passion narrative is evident and universally acknowledged. That Lewis does not recognize this is nothing short of astounding, especially given his reputed capacity for sensitive, nuanced reading in his own field.”¹⁵ Moreover, as Baynes shows elsewhere in the same article, this is not the only place that Lewis appears to conflate John with the Synoptics.¹⁶

If not a Single Voice, then What?

What are the Gospels, however, if they do not speak with a single voice? They are four texts, with distinct emphases, interests and agendas, which sometimes contradict one another at a plain level. Perhaps the most glaring contradiction among John and the Synoptics concerns the date of Jesus’ death.

For the apologist whose purpose is to defend the Christian faith, this may present a problem. Yet for readers of the Bible throughout the centuries – both Christian and Jewish – it has been precisely these differences which invite us to read parts of the Scriptures at a different level: not as reportage, but as metaphor and myth.

Notably, Lewis is careful to attend to the ways in which a story can develop elsewhere. Commenting on Genesis, he observes that, “[s]tories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately… If unknowingly, his then his unconscious has been at work…” The result is that “at every step… a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved.”¹⁷

For Baynes, Lewis could have benefited from a redaction critical approach, in which greater attention is paid to the distinctive themes within each of the Gospels. Unlike so many scholars of his time, Lewis perceived that the Gospels were works of literature – a literary unity – rather than a hodgepodge of stories stitched together at random. Yet when it came to a close reading of the Gospels as distinct works, he seems to have thrown off the nuance which characterises his judgement elsewhere.

Learning from Lewis Today

In the arguments and examples above, I have tried to unpack why Christian theologians and New Testament scholars are not convinced by C.S. Lewis’ treatment of the Gospels. I have also attempted to offer some correctives to Lewis’ approach.

Yet in avoiding Lewis’ specific mistakes about the Gospels, it would be remiss not to see that there is much we can learn from Lewis’ own writings. Lewis’ view of biblical inspiration, to provide just one example, allows for the kind of fictionalisation we find in ancient biography. Lewis certainly did not think that the presence of myth in the Scriptures hindered its use as a vehicle for revelation.¹⁸

Moreover, as we have already noted, Lewis was acutely aware of the dynamics of development in an ‘evolving’ story – even if he does not always carefully attend to those dynamics in the Gospels. If we are to appreciate the Gospels as distinctive voices today, we will pay attention to these dynamics: how Matthew and Luke have adapted their primary source (Mark), and how John more radically altered his.

In the end, while we may wish that Lewis had turned more of a scrupulous eye towards the Gospels, there is still much we can learn from him today. Aware of his stature as a literary critic, I am sometimes worried for those who dismiss Lewis’ entire apologetic on the basis of such initial objections. I am sure if Lewis was alive today, some of us would very quickly find out we had bitten off more than we could chew….

Further Reading

Leslie Baynes, “C.S. Lewis’ Use of Scripture in the ‘Liar, Lunatic, Lord’ Argument,” Journal of Inklings Studies, 4 n.2 (2014): 27-66.

Richard Bauckham, “Are we still missing the elephant? C.S. Lewis’ ‘Fernseed and Elephants’ half a century on,” Theology 116 n.6 (2013): 427-434.

1. Alister McGrath, The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), 165.

2. N.T. Wright, ‘Simply Lewis: Reflections on a Master Apologist after 60 Years’, Touchstone Magazine 20 (March 2007).

3. C.S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 155.

4. Lewis, “Modern Theology,” 154-155.

5. Richard Bauckham, “Are we still missing the elephant? C.S. Lewis’ ‘Fernseed and Elephants’ half a century on,” Theology 116 n.6 (2013): 427-434 (430)

6. Ibid., 431.

7. Leslie Baynes, “C.S. Lewis’ Use of Scripture in the ‘Liar, Lunatic, Lord’ Argument,” Journal of Inklings Studies, 4 n.2 (2014): 27-66 (35).

8. Ibid., 35.

9. Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3-4.

10. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 40–41.

11. See N. T. Wright, ‘Jesus’ Self-Understanding’, in The Incarnation, ed. Stephen T.Davis et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 57.

12. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 11-12.

13. More was the subject of Lewis’ unfinished doctoral dissertation.

14. Lewis, Letter to Emily McLay, August 3, 1953. See Walter Hooper (ed.), The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, vol. 3 (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007), 354.

15. Baynes, “Scripture,” 59.

16. See Baynes, “Scripture,” passim.

17. C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), 110.

18. In his doctoral dissertation on C.S. Lewis and the quest for the historical Jesus, Mark Freshwater comments, “Lewis had no difficulty obtaining theological insights of profound importance from the Old Testament, even though he himself freely admitted that portions of the Old Testament were historical while other portions were mythological. It was only when Lewis came to the New Testament that he claimed the material found there was almost totally historical, "myth become fact." But never in his writings did he provide the necessary basis for this assertion.” See his “C.S. Lewis and the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” (PhD Dissertation, Florida State University, 1985), 272.