THE MOST EXQUISITE STORY EVER WRITTEN is simply told in about 25,000 words. These words extracted textually from the Gospels by Thomas Jefferson, form a beautiful, moving story of the life and morals of Jesus.
Within this brief and sublime story are the authentic words of Christ which give life to the Bible. They are its essence.
During his first term in the White House the Father of American Democracy revealed his dream of separating the sayings which were indisputably the words of Jesus from what he considered to be extraneous matter in the Holy Library of 66 volumes, 1189 chapters, 773,000 words.
Jefferson first tried to induce others to do the work. In 1803 he sent to Dr. Benjamin Rush the syllabus of his comparison of the moral doctrines of Jesus with those of the other ancient philosophers. In his letter to Dr. Rush, Jefferson emphasized the confidential nature of his study with these words:
“And in confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new misrepresentations and calumnies. I am, moreover, averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public, because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavoured to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquest over the rights of conscience, which the laws have so justly proscribed. It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself to resist invasions of it in the case of others, or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.”
Others failing to do the work, Jefferson, in evenings of escape from affairs of the nation, prepared a preliminary extraction which it was his custom to read nightly before retiring. After removing to his plantation at Monticello, Jefferson conducted a voluminous correspondence on religious subjects with John Adams. In one of his letters to Adams in 1813 the great statesman gave this description of his work:
“We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists; select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from Him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dung-hill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages.”
This octavo Jefferson later enlarged to the form here presented by Wilfred Funk, Inc.
Three years later, 1816, Jefferson wrote from Monticello to Charles Thompson:
“I, too, have made a wee little book from the same materials, which I call the philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. 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.… If I had time I would add to my little book the Greek, Latin and French texts, in columns side by side.”
Later Jefferson did make the time to complete his work and the finished volume with extracts in four languages in parallel columns, was purchased from the family and placed in the United States National Museum at Washington in 1895.
Jefferson waived any intention of publishing his compilation with the words “I not only write nothing on religion, but rarely permit myself to speak on it.” However, the Fifty-seventh Congress provided for publication of a limited edition by photo-lithographic process, the volumes to be given to members of the house and senate. It was printed in 1904 little more than a century after Jefferson first actively planned its compilation.
One of the first copies of the so-called Jefferson Bible issued by the government printing office was secured by my father through the good offices of my grandfather, the late Congressman Clinton Babbitt.
One Sunday while I was still very young, in response to my plea that he read me a story, my father told me he would read “the most beautiful story in the world.” And after reading the Jefferson Bible he charged me to treasure it among all of the many hundreds of books in his schoolmaster’s library. I did treasure it for even as a boy I was impressed by the simplicity of the volume as compared to the mellowed big Bible from which my soft-voiced mother frequently read aloud.
Down through the years I have kept the Jefferson Bible with its readily accessible story of the life and morals of Jesus. With it, I have treasured the worn, copiously annotated and underscored Bible of 364 pages that was my mother’s. It is interesting that the exceedingly familiar pages most worn and marked were those on which the words of Jesus appear. And on the title leaf of my mother’s Bible is her notation: “To Douglas.… Study it out.… Pray it in.… Put it down.… Pass it on.”
I kept these matchless volumes, turning to the one with all of its sentiment and to the other with its rare clarity and simplicity, dreaming the while that the Jefferson Bible should be given the one thing it lacks-the beauty and legibility made possible by modern typography, and release from the obscurity of the national museum and collectors’ shelves.
So here is the English section of the Jefferson Bible; the extractions from the Gospel studied out over a period of sixteen years by the man who wrote the Declaration of American Independence, and finally titled by him “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”
I “pass it on.”
—Douglas E. Lurton