what kind of nuanced compromise exists that does not paint jesus as a liar, lunatic, or lord exclusively?

That he believed a falsehood? Does that make him a lunatic? Would that not necessarily make billions of people lunatics?

That he was misrepresented?

I do think believing that you are a deity is a sufficiently far fetched falsehood to justify calling you a lunatic. For the sake of argument I suppose I'm willing to accept "profoundly confused individual" as a fourth alternative. But I don't think it helps the rhetorical point against painting arguments for "lord lunatic or liar" as an unjustified demand for absolute beliefs.

And no, you're not a lunatic for believing someone else's bullshit.

That's a convenient argument and a good analogy for the UFO phenomenon, because it omits the fourth option, which is that Jesus never existed outside of a carefully constructed narrative distributed by institutional authorities with the goal of manipulating their taxpaying population.