Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Then, using a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper — alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.
In a letter dispatched from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his “wee little book” of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
“The Jefferson Bible” remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation’s third president and principle author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus.
The little leather-bound tome continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.
The big question now, mused Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this: “Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, ‘I only believe these parts’?”
In Jefferson’s version of the Gospels, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there’s no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson leaves in Jesus’ crucifixion, but ends the text with his burial, not the Resurrection.
Stripping miracles from the story of Jesus was among ambitious projects by a man with a famously restless mind.
“To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed,” he wrote to a friend, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, “but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”
