lunatic or devil or atheist

I think Matthew Archbold is a little hard on Richard Dawkins here. Dawkins said something like:

I wrote [an] article called "Atheists for Jesus," I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: "Atheists for Jesus." Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”

Archbold cites C.S. Lewis in response:

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.

This reminds me of the First Things discussion between Joe Carter and several commenters about whether Jesus (taking his divinity for granted) was subject to ignorance with respect to historical questions. Is it possible that Christ could have referred to the "days of Noah" in error if it could be proved that the Noah story was what one commenter called "an old Mesopotamian myth"? Here, Archbold insists that Dawkins must recognize Lewis' either/or. But Dawkins would probably argue that Jesus (understandably) claimed to be God, not because he was a lunatic or devil, but in order to effectively promulgate his great moral teachings. Furthermore, hasn't the search for the historical Jesus suggested that Jesus might have had aims that were not fulfilled in the way he himself understood at the moment he uttered them? Whether you agree with that sort of exegesis or not, clearly Dawkins would more readily accept that view than Benedict XVI's view of Christ as gestalt. In other words, the opposite of God in this case is neither lunacy or devil; it is context.