Thomas Jefferson’s Bible – October 6, 2013 by David Green

On his tombstone at , left specific instructions on how he wanted to be remembered: as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom; and the father of the .

Of course he also happened to be the third president of United States, serving two terms. Maybe he could see into the future when the US government would shut down over partisan squabbling, and he didn’t ever want to be associated with that. So he left out a few things.

But looking at his epitaph, it’s hard to argue with the legacy he valued most. Jefferson championed the ideals of the , the primacy of human reason and individual conscience, the cause of human rights, and the importance of public education.

Still, Jefferson was something of an enigma in his own time. That’s been true for historians ever since, and for us today. We wonder how this advocate of liberty could also be a slaveholder. It irritates us when people portray every founder of our country as an Evangelical with the goal of establishing a Christian nation, when Thomas Jefferson – one of the chief architects of our founding – the guy who coined the phrase, “separation of church and state,” we know was accused by people in his own time as being an infidel and an atheist because of his unorthodox religious views.

Jefferson never directly contradicted those accusations, but privately considered himself something of a Deist, someone who believes in a distant creator god of one sort or another – like many of the other founders believed. But he also recognized his personal beliefs set him apart. In one piece of correspondence he said, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”

So Unitarians have adopted Jefferson as a hero because of his religious independence, but at the same time, a flawed hero. We can’t avoid his slaveholding. Some have defended that, saying he was as a product of his time and place. As a southern plantation owner, he had slaves just like other wealthy Virginians. They point out his personal distaste for slavery.

But the ugly fact remains he owned people because their skin was a different color, while plenty of his contemporaries believed slavery was wrong and chose not to. And he owned other people at the very same moment he was writing the words, …”all men are created equal.”

The question we have to ask ourselves is, does that contradiction invalidate everything else he ever said or did? Are we compartmentalizing Jefferson by admiring his religious views on the one hand, while conveniently ignoring some of his social beliefs and behavior?

Maybe we are. About the only thing we can say for sure is he was a very complex person. But I don’t think we need to ignore the more distasteful aspects of his life to appreciate what was happening in the mind of a man who truly pushed the boundaries of religion and ethics in his time. We can acknowledge his flaws and still appreciate his genius. Even though he did help create new ways of thinking about religion in public life especially, the truth is we’ll never really know a lot about his personal religious views. He was intentionally private about what he believed and thought other people ought to keep their religious opinions to themselves, too.

But apparently, he was fascinated by religion. One clue about his beliefs is found in the bottom of his portable writing desk; the same desk he used to draft the Declaration of Independence. On the bottom of the desk he’d attached a note in 1825. It reads, “Politics, like religion, has its superstitions. These, gaining strength with time, may, one day give an imaginary value to this relic (meaning his desk), for its association with the birth of the great charter of our

Independence.”

Today we are going to discuss an extraordinary project Jefferson pursued over the course of almost 20 years that has everything to do with what he considered religious superstition.

He began putting pieces of it together while serving as president between 1801 and 1809, but he didn’t complete it until 1820. It was a private endeavor, known only to a few very close friends.

Because it was nothing less than reconstructing the life of Jesus. Which is not something – at least in those days – that would make you very popular with the public.

But more than anything else it may be the primary source of understanding Jefferson’s personal ideals.

Reading it, it’s clear Jefferson admired Jesus as a great teacher and moral philosopher. At the same time, in constructing it, Jefferson reaffirmed his belief and commitment to the power of pure reason as the basis for understanding life and the natural world.

Today we call it “The Jefferson Bible,” but he never gave it that name. The actual title was, “The Life and Morals of

Jesus of Nazareth, extracted textually from the in Greek, Latin, French and English.”

As I said, it was a long project, but after all, he had things to do, like the . You could say he started on it in 1803, when he first wrote a pamphlet he called a “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of

Jesus.” In this he concluded that Jesus had never claimed to be God, but only a great moral philosopher much like

Socrates. He showed this to a few trusted friends but always asked to have it back.

The next year he put together a second small self-published book called “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth…Being an Abridgement of the for the Use of the Indians.” Nobody’s quite sure what he meant by that, since there’s no record of him distributing any copies to Native Americans.

In describing this book to his friend , he said, “In extracting the pure principles which Jesus taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves.”

But he wasn’t happy with the book, so he spent the next 15 years or so tinkering with it, while also taking on a few minor projects like establishing the University of Virginia and designing its campus. Some people just have too much time on their hands, I guess.

The process of his finished creation was amazingly straightforward, but took quite a bit of diligent work. He ordered two copies each of four different language versions of the New Testament: two each in Greek, Latin, French and

English.

Using a razor and some glue, Jefferson cut and pasted his arrangement of selected verses from the books of Matthew,

Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order, mingling pieces from one writer to the next to create a single story.

At the beginning of the book he included a handwritten table showing which verses he’d selected from which book, and how he’d arranged them. When you look at it, there are four columns side by side, each one in a different language, but corresponding across the two open pages.

The most striking thing about the work is what’s missing: pretty much anything Jefferson considered or miraculous, leaving only behind the teachings and moral lessons of Jesus. If a story happened to include a moral lesson, he’d keep the moral and cut out the miracle.

So, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” starts out with Jesus’ birth, but there are no references to being fulfilled, no singing, none of the usual stuff we’ve all seen in Christmas pageants. I suppose if Jefferson was writing the Christmas carol, “Silent Night, Holy Night” instead, he would have called it, “A Perfectly Rational Quiet

Evening.”

And so it goes, with no and very few references at all to anything supernatural. We 84 pages of things like the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Jesus debating with Pharisees. But then, the is left out completely. Jesus is crucified and buried, and that’s the end of the story.

So in 1820, Jefferson took the book to a book binder, had several copies made and gave them to some close friends, but he never allowed it to be published in his own lifetime.

In 1895, his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, sold his copy of the book for $400 to the National Museum – now the . In 1904, by an act of congress, it was published every other year and a copy was given to every new member of Congress until the mid 1950s. Other publishers, the Libertarian Press and the American

Humanist Society, have since published it.

In 2011, the Smithsonian, which still had that original copy, carefully restored it, had digital images made of every page, and published a beautiful reproduction. One of which was given to me as a gift last year, I’m happy to say. You can also see the entire book, page by page, on the Smithsonian’s website. It’s worth looking at.

Beyond seeing Jefferson’s Bible as an interesting historical artifact, you still have to wonder: why would he do it in the first place; go to so much trouble? Even though he shared it with a few friends, most historians think he did it primarily for himself. He didn’t want to shock or offend the public, which they surely would have. It’s understood he composed it for his own satisfaction, his own devotion. His own way of reconciling two deeply held beliefs: reason and faith.

Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say, his faith in reason.

To a friend, writing about the book, Jefferson said, “A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

Maybe because he’d been accused so often of being a heretic, because he had fought hard to keep religion out of politics and government, he felt the need to justify in his own mind – and among a few close friends – that he did believe in something after all. And that something qualified him as a Christian.

Jefferson’s Bible is important for us because it seems to represent two of the most powerful threads woven onto our national character: rationality and faith. So often, they’re at odds. Every day we can’t avoid hearing the latest on some school board debating the teaching of evolution versus creationism, or now as it’s called, “intelligent design.”

The abortion debate is hugely influenced by religious doctrines. Many people date the beginning of moral decay of our society to the early 1960s, when forcing children to pray in school was declared unconstitutional.

Enormous amounts of time, energy, and money are poured into efforts to blend government and religion. To leap over that wall of separation Thomas Jefferson understood was necessary to avoid the kind of injustice and brutality and bloodshed that inevitably takes place, when one brand of religion is supported by a government, and officially imposes its will on a society.

Enlightened reason and religious faith were – and still are – the two sides of the American coin. What too many fail to grasp is they do not need to be in conflict. What too many fail to grasp is that freedom of religion means acknowledging the right of others to respectfully disagree with me. What too many fail to grasp is, it is not an attack on my religion if my government or my children’s public school does not officially endorse it. When that does happen, religion no longer becomes a choice; it becomes tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson understood that, and stood up for that principle. And maybe there’s no better expression of his huge gift to us of the freedom to think and believe as our conscience dictates, than his own blending of religion and reason in this little book.