The Jefferson Bible or, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth

5 Responses to “The Jefferson Bible or, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”

1. Anonymous says:

   June 11, 2010 at 10:38 am

   Thomas Jefferson was a man of the (self-described) Enlightenment. Not knowing anything about Christianity, he despised it. He disbelieved in all of its central tenets — that Christ was Christ, not simply a “moral teacher”; that He was born of a virgin; that he rose on the third day according to the Scriptures; that He ascended into the Heavens; and that he will come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead, among others.

   Yet, Jefferson called Jesus Christ “the greatest moral teacher.” How could he avoid concluding that He was simply a liar or a lunatic, in light of His claims to be the “Son of Man” and “the Way, the Truth, and the Light”? Simply, he argued that His Apostles had “made it all up.” The Scriptures, if Jefferson was right, were just one huge lie.

   Pity Jefferson. Having no familiarity whatsoever with the writings of the Church Fathers (knowledge of the works of St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. John the Theologian’s student at the end of the first century and leader of several extant epistles mandating obedience to one’s bishop, might have spared Jefferson the writing of his tres embarrassing “Notes on Episcopacy”), he dared to declare the Church a cabal for “priestcraft’s” sake.

   Silly thought, that hundreds of thousands of people would conspire to become monks in the deserts of Egypt (routinely 120 degrees in the shade), Palestine, etc. Crazy of Saul of Tarsus to give up a position of esteem among his own people for the life of a peripatetic outcast. The only explanation of these phenomena I can arrive at is that these people thought what they were doing was based on Truth.

   One can grant Jefferson a small wiggle room, in light of his assumption that Roman Catholicism was the oldest variant of Christianity still extant. Yet, others in his day (including additional members of the Virginia elite) knew the history of the Church well enough to be familiar with Greek Orthodoxy. (Why did Jefferson insist on equating papal abuses with “Christianity”?) They, unlike Jefferson, did not have a pathological (“sinful”?) aversion to the thought that anyone knew more than they, that their minds were the limit of wisdom. They didn’t live the life of Epicurus on a mountaintop like this red-headed prodigal, supported in luxury by their slaves. They had not all bought into Satan’s sin.

   Jefferson didn’t know, as we have seen in the last 8 years, that there is a extant manuscript in Greek from the first century of a large part of the Gospel of Matthew JUST AS WE HAVE IT, in biblical Greek. So much for the grand conspiracy to make “Jesus” into God. I guess He was God. What does that mean to Thomas Jefferson, wherever he is now?
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
2. Anonymous says:

   June 11, 2010 at 1:10 pm

   “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” (Revelation 22:19)

   The Jefferson Bible is a book that I read not in search of redemption but out of curiosity. I am a Christian and have been for over eight years. For some time, I revolted against all atheism, and refused to read any literatures against Christianity. But I had learned as I matured more, that different opinions and beliefs are vital to one’s life. I read several books and they were okay, but then I selected up The Jefferson Bible to see what our third President had to offer. I read it open-mindedly; willing to see my convictions changed, as from what I had seen, Jefferson was a brilliant man with much knowledge. The preface provoked me to further curiosity; I establish it a bit dry, but it interested me, because of this man’s apparent change in life because of this book. As I read “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson” (Forrest Church), I establish his history appealing, although a bit confusing. I had permanently come to the conclusion John Adams had been a Christian, and yet he encouraged Jefferson’s efforts in placing “the character of Jesus in its right and high light.” Jefferson had many encouragers of whom I have never heard of too that were not religious, but materialists, socialists, atheists, etc.

   Anyways, after concluding that the men of the time of Jefferson were more intent on philosophy that spiritualism, I nonstop on my research. I studied Jefferson efforts, as he, “razor in hand, … sat editing the Gospels during February, 1804″ to make Jesus more of a philosopher than a Redeemer. I establish that Jefferson’s efforts were poor and very disappointingly researched. Jesus, lacking His leading us to eternal life, has nothing to offer. He had a very few excellent morals to teach, but each was linked to the Way, and there was no way Jefferson could have depicted them to fit his intentions. I establish that Jefferson’s Jesus lacked the ingenuity and flowing of readability. Jefferson attempted to only include Jesus’ morals and philosophies, but also included several of Jesus claims to being the Son of God, that I would have assumed he would omit. The main catch was that he allowed the verse where Pilate puts up the sign “JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS” in Jesus’ crucifixion, and that he left several mentions of the resurrection. I establish that lacking Jesus Christ’s teaching of eternal life, that this work of Jefferson has no power or reference. It leaves Jesus as more of a heretic than anything else. He refers to God as His Father, and this book describes Him as one who taught well but lost His mind before His death. It is sad that many consider Jefferson’s work a masterpiece. I reflect Jefferson did his best to described Jesus in the way he wished (as one who was a fantastic philosopher), but failed.

   I judge that the only reason for men deeming this as truthful is because they are attacking the truth of Jesus, and will resort to any additional than the one truth: that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and He holds to Way to eternal life. It is sad to know how Jefferson and many of his contemporaries end up in the end, condemned to eternal death. For there is no way to Life additional than through the Son of God ~ not through “Jesus the philosopher”.

   I would recommend this book to persons curious about Jefferson’s beliefs, as they are ingeniously described throughout. But if you are looking to see “the right Jesus”, I am worried you will be disappointed. Many atheists will do there best to get the most out of it (after blocking from their minds the mention of Jesus’ Father and the resurrection as Jefferson did, because He failed to omit it; the Gospels mean nothing lacking the Truth.), but there is nothing to learn additional that Jefferson was lost and so were the others mentioned in the forwards, afterward, etc. Jefferson tried to get rid of all that “supernatural stuff”, and though he tried, he only got everything confused. The stuff additional than Jefferson’s “cuttings” were well written although a small mislead, so I give it three stars (though if I were going by how much I loved and learned from it, it would be one or two). Does it deserve it? Read it and find out. Excellent luck.

   “We cannot separate His demands from His like. We cannot dissect Jesus and tell only to the parts we like.” –Rebecca Manley Pippert
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
3. Israel Drazin says:

   June 11, 2010 at 2:00 pm

   President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a deist, believed in the being of a single deity who was uninvolved in the daily life of people. He disliked both the Hebrew Bible and the New Tribute for many reasons, especially because they include unnatural, even impossible events. He felt that some, but not all, of the ethical teachings in the Bibles are worth teaching.

   He – like Leo Tolstoy in his The Gospel in Brief, and others – chose to cut and paste the New Tribute Gospels, with no attempt to retain the order of the Gospel writers, and remove persons items that distressed him, including the miraculous birth of Jesus, told with different “facts” in two of the four Gospels, and all of the additional miracles, including the events that occurred after Jesus death. He solved the problem of the frequent differences between the Gospels about what occurred to Jesus at different times – for each Gospel has its own version of the life of Jesus that differs widely with the additional three – by selecting passages from each that he thought made sense and blending them together to make what he considered a perfect no longer defective Bible, a Bible that teaches morality.

   Persons who suppose that Jefferson’s Bible has any relation to the New Tribute are flawed.

   Jefferson’s well-meant volume is like the work of a foolish scientist who had a lovely wife and three gorgeous daughters. He loved them all, but he disliked some physical and mental features in each of them; the eyes in one, the ears in another, the legs in a third and the all-purpose approach to life in the fourth. What did he do?

   As a scientist, he was able to graft the four of them into a single woman, a woman of his dreams, a woman who attracted him physically and intellectually; he had the best of the four people most dear to him. Yet when the new creation was concluded, he realized his mistake. His beloved wife was gone. Right, her faults were removed, but so too was her personality that was so dear to him. Now she was composed of the best parts of his daughters; and, so, how could he live with her as a man lives with his wife; it would be incest. And he had lost his daughters as well. Now, too late, he realized that despite their human faults, these four meant more to him than any “perfect” being.

   Bart D. Ehrman highlights a sample of about a hundred thousand differences between the four gospels in his 2009 book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). He points out that there is something far more significant than these different descriptions of New Tribute events; it is the fact that each of the gospel writers wrote his book to offer his readers his unique understanding of Jesus life and mission. These views differ momentously. For example, Mark, writing a small more than several decades after Jesus’ traditional date of death, emphasized that Jesus was predicting the advent of a new and better world on planet during the lifetime of persons listening to him. In contrast, John, who composed his Gospel decades later, after the death of all of Jesus’ contemporaries, stated that Jesus’ message was that people should strive to achieve an everlasting life in heaven.

   Jefferson’s perfect Bible retains many “flaws” that Ehrman told exist in the canonical version, such as the census in its opening verse, which history has shown never occurred, and the curious statement that Joseph had to take his family tree to Bethlehem because one of his ancestors had lived part-time in this city over a thousand years before he was born.

   But, more importantly, Jefferson demolished the uniqueness of each of the four gospels. He made a Bible that each of the Gospel writers would reject. He distorted the moral teachings in two ways. First, as we said, he changed the overall focus and intent of the document. Second, by mixing the language of each gospel writer and presenting them in his own chronological order, he perverted the details of the teachings.

   But the most significant problem with Jefferson’s Bible and with Jefferson himself is that despite promising the production of a book of moral teachings, he retained forty episodes in which the Gospel writers insulted Jews. The Gospels were written during a period of strife between the Jews and their sister religion Christianity. Both sides had people who made unfortunate overheated remarks. Many of them made their way into the Gospels.

   The fact that Jefferson retained forty disparaging remarks in a book touted to be a book containing the best of morality, a tiny book of only 103 pages, is astonishing and tragic. Such insensitivity reminds us of his similar insensitivity toward his slaves. One wonders how such an intelligent man could make such mistakes. To say that he was influenced by his times is no answer. There were many people of his age and of earlier times who rose above bigotry. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), in his The Gospel in Brief, wrote his version of the Gospels with the same intent as Jefferson, but his work does not have these statements.

   Most arresting is that Jefferson included the following statement from John 7:1, “After these things Jesus walked in Galilee, for he would not walk in Jewry because the Jews sought to kill him.” This is remarkable because the statement stands alone. There is no tie whatsoever with what proceeds or follows it in Jefferson’s Bible. It is gratuitous. If Jefferson could cut miracles and the supernatural from his Bible, why place this sentence, a sentence that is not connected in any way to morality?

   While insisting that he would include the ethical teachings of the Gospels, Jefferson violated one of the five basic ethical commands of Jesus, mentioned in Matthew, not to distinguish between people, to treat friends and enemies alike, to like your national as yourself. In fact, Jesus said that this is the principal mandate.

   In fleeting, Jefferson saw himself as more able than persons people who preceded him in deciding what it is proper for a excellent person to read. He failed because he distorted what he proposed to improve and he made a work that is an embarrassment to thinking and considerate people and a violation of the basic teaching of Jesus.

   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
4. Anonymous says:

   June 11, 2010 at 3:16 pm

   this is not a bible at all. it is a redacted ‘gospel according to jefferson.’ it is really devoid of any spiritual or moral value since the jesus described is not divine. i do not recommend this work of fiction unless it is studied in comparison with the actual four cannonical, historically accurate gospels.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
5. Nathan Markley says:

   June 11, 2010 at 5:25 pm

   “In 1820, at seventy-seven years of age, Thomas Jefferson removed the six testaments from his shelf, where they had been sitting for a decade and a half, and carved out a Gospel for himself, one whose witness he could respect and whose message he could know.”

   Yes, Jefferson factually cut and pasted the Bible, nixing the supernatural parts and leaving only Jesus’ teachings in a new arrangement.

   The history behind it and the book itself are appealing, but the content is misguided and harmful. Jesus’ life revolved not around his teachings but his identity.

   A prime example is the fact that Jefferson’s text ends with a dead Jesus laid in a tomb. If Jesus was incorrect about being the Son of God (the core of his teachings) and never resurrected, how reliable could his doctrine really be?

   This edition includes:
   
   - Background on Jefferson’s text written by Forrest Church.
   
   - Few pages of Jefferson’s actual cut-and-paste copies [fascinating]
   
   - Jefferson’s entire carved text
   
   - Pointer of used New Tribute extracts

   Read with caution.
   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5