THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THOMAS

Not only did Jefferson believe in separation of church and state, but he also created his own private version of the Bible that viewed the holy texts through a prism of rationality

BY HARRY R. RUBENSTEIN AND BARBARA CLARK SMITH

Jefferson pasted identical Greek, Latin, French and English passages of the Bible into his repurposed testament, so as to compare different translations

IN THE YEAR 1820, Thomas Jefferson completed a project that he had long planned. Twelve years earlier he had resisted countless calls that he seek a third term as President and had retired from public life to his home at Monticello. Now, at 77 years of age, Jefferson constructed a book that he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Assembling excerpts from the four Gospels of the New Testament, he rearranged them to tell a chronological and edited story of Jesus’ life, parables and moral teaching. Jefferson cut from printed texts in four different languages—English, French, Latin and Greek. He pasted the extracts he had chosen on blank pages of paper, laying them in four columns on the page so as to allow immediate comparison among the different language versions of each Bible verse. When finished, he sent his pages to a Richmond bookbinder, who stitched them together in red leather binding adorned with gold tooling.

Commonly referred to today as “the Jefferson Bible,” the resulting book was small: 8¼ in. tall and just under 5 in. wide. In those pages, Jefferson sought to clarify and distill Jesus’ teachings, which he believed to provide “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” He rid the Gospel message of those aspects that appeared to him as “contrary to reason,” leaving behind only the “authentic” story of Jesus. Readers of The Life and Morals of Jesus can trace Jefferson’s inclusions and exclusions, the parts of the Gospels he considered “diamonds” of wisdom and the parts that he discarded and indecorously likened to “a dunghill.” The red leather book now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

In The Life and Morals of Jesus, we gain insight into just what teachings Jefferson prized from the four Gospels. He created his book not for publication but for his own use only. “I never go to bed without an hour, or half an hour’s previous reading of something moral,” he told a physician who inquired about his habits of daily life. Jefferson’s library included volumes of moral teaching from classical philosophers, recent works by European thinkers and multiple editions of the Bible. Yet The Life and Morals of Jesus may often have been his choice for such readings, providing thoughts and reflections—in Jefferson’s own words—“whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep.”

Jefferson was famously reticent about his convictions. No one insisted more firmly than he did on the privacy of religion, that each individual’s belief was a matter of concern only for the individual and for God. So sacred did Jefferson hold the individual’s private relationship with the Creator that he purposefully chose not to influence the beliefs even of his own family.

Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes (1505) by Juan de Flandes. In Jefferson’s Bible, stories like this were edited out because they could not be supported or verified

The Life and Morals of Jesus represents the culmination of conversations and correspondence that took place between Jefferson and an extraordinary circle of colleagues and friends over the span of several decades. Those conversations, in turn, were a part of an international flowering of scientific experiment and rational inquiry that marked the eighteenth century. Participants in the Enlightenment applied the critical force of human reason to test received knowledge about the natural, social and moral worlds. As the scientific method uncovered laws of the physical world, so human reason might fathom the laws of human nature and human institutions of society and ­government. ­Jefferson and many of his correspondents embraced the exhilarating prospect of liberating their contemporaries’ minds from inherited misconceptions and superstitions.

In 1819 Jefferson took up the project in earnest. Selecting those passages that he believed were uncorrupted by misunderstandings, fabrications and time, he cut them out and carefully glued them onto loose pages. Even though Jefferson had discussed this endeavor with several of his closest friends over the years, he never shared or directly discussed the final product with any of them. He left no explanation of his decisions regarding what to include and what to reject.

Nonetheless, the completed work reflects the goals that Jefferson had set out to accomplish. Left behind in the source material were those elements that he could not support through reason, that he believed were later embellishments or that seemed superfluous or repetitious across the four evangelists’ accounts. Absent are the Annunciation, the Resurrection, the water being turned to wine, and the multitudes fed on five loaves of bread and two fishes. It essentially offers what the title indicates: a distillation of the teachings of Jesus the moral reformer, combined with what Jefferson accepted as the historical facts pertaining to Jesus the man.

Although the phrase Jefferson’s Bible became attached to The Life and Morals of Jesus long after Jefferson’s time, in this respect it is an apt and accurate phrase. This then was Thomas Jefferson’s Bible; it contained the one form of Christianity—however misshapen it appeared to others—that ­Jefferson believed.

Excerpted with permission from The Jefferson Bible, Smith­sonian Edition (Smithsonian Books, 2011)