Mr. Jefferson's Bible

June 25, 2014

         In 1985 thirty New Testament scholars formed something called the Jesus Seminar.  The goal of the seminar was to determine which of the sayings, deeds and actions of Jesus which are recorded in our New Testament could be agreed upon as authentically his.  Here is the beginning of the opening paper read at the first meeting of the group.

            We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise. We are going to inquire simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said. In this process, we will be asking a question that borders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As a consequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We may well provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced, much as Mt. Everest confronts the team of climbers.             We are not embarking on this venture in a corner. We are going to carry out our work in full public view; we will not only honor the freedom of information, we will insist on the public disclosure of our work and, insofar as it lies within our power, we shall see to it that the public is informed of our judgments. We shall do so, not because our wisdom is superior, but because we are committed to public accountability. 

            Our basic plan is simple. We intend to examine every fragment of the traditions attached to the name of Jesus in order to determine what he really said—not his literal words, perhaps, but the substance and style of his utterances. We are in quest of his voice, insofar as it can be distinguished from many other voices also preserved in the tradition. We are prepared to bring to bear everything we know and can learn about the form and content, about the formation and transmission, of aphorisms and parables, dialogues and debates, attributed or attributable to Jesus, in order to carry out our task.[i]

            These scholars decided to make all their debates and decisions public.  One way they did that was to have every member vote publicly for the record on the authenticity of each saying or deed of Jesus.  They used colored beads to indicate their decisions--red for "Authentic" and black for "Non-Authentic;" pink and gray beads allowed for a voter to record his belief that Jesus said something close to the biblical saying if not that exactly.  Those colored beads were soon seized upon by many Christians as almost blasphemous.  In many Christian circles the Seminar was ridiculed as well as condemned.  Many scholars also criticized both the make-up of the Seminar and its methods.  In the end--by the early 2000's--the Seminar had worked its way through the New Testament and concluded that just 16% of the sayings of Jesus recorded in our Gospels were authentically his.  For them, these selected sayings became the Gospel of Jesus!

            Two hundred years before the Jesus Seminar began its work, Thomas Jefferson was our ambassador to France.  He had already distinguished himself as a gifted writer and thinker.  It was he who drafted our Declaration of Independence.  In 1800 he was elected President and he was re-elected in 1804. The campaigns for the presidency opened Mr. Jefferson's life to minute scrutiny.  As always, the attacks on presidential candidates tried to expose any weakness in the candidate and opponents were merciless in their attempts to turn the public away from Mr. Jefferson.[ii]  One area of his life upon which opponents focused most was Jefferson's religion or lack of it.  Many opponents pictured him as an atheist--a charge he vehemently denied.  He was, he said, a deist, that is, he believed that God created the world to exist according to fixed laws and did not intervene in the affairs of earth from outside.  If God did not intervene from outside the universe then, obviously, there is no place within the universe for miracles.  It was this fundamental belief that led him to say that the descriptions of Jesus' healings and nature miracles were the stuff of legend, the accretions added by loving worshippers over the centuries.  He could not accept these accounts as they were recorded in our Gospels or interpreted by the apostle Paul.  But he was convinced that Jesus lived and that he was the greatest moral teacher the world had ever known.  The inability to accept the Gospel accounts of Jesus and the reverence he gave Jesus' teachings made it necessary for him to decide precisely what was and what was not historical.  Almost two hundred years before the Jesus Seminar began its new quest for the historical Jesus, Thomas Jefferson began his own search.  That search was a very private one--the exact opposite of the Jesus Seminar approach.  His search led him to produce two versions of the New Testament for his own use.  It is the second version which is generally called The Jefferson Bible that we will look at in this session.

The Life and Morals Of Jesus of Nazareth

            "The Jefferson Bible"  was actually called by Jefferson "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."  Thomas Jefferson was 77 when he completed his "Bible" in 1820;  he had retired from public life and was back at his beloved Monticello.  He had served his country magnificently.  He was governor of his state of Virginia twice.  He served in the Continental Congress and grew famous for drafting the Declaration of Independence.   He replaced Benjamin Franklin as Ambassador to France.  He lost the election for President in 1796 by three electoral votes and, therefore, served in the runner-up position of Vice President for one term.  And then, of course, he was elected President in 1800 and again in 1804.   Jefferson died in 1826; he was 83 years old.

            His "Bible" is an 84 page document divided into seventeen chapters beginning with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem and ending with the stone being rolled across the entrance to the tomb.  Jefferson had the volume bound in red leather.  It contained pages made by pasting verses cut from six Bibles  written in four languages:  Greek, Latin, French and English (the King James Version).  He put the Greek and Latin verses on one side and the French and English verses on the other so the reader could immediately compare the translations.  One might assume that Jefferson simply went through the four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-- and deleted passages he did not like.  One would be wrong.   As we shall see, no Chapter in Jefferson's Bible simply moves ahead through one of our Gospels.  He drew similar passages together and, apparently where he felt justified, he inserted text from one Gospel into another because their content was related.  It appears that he used both an English and a Greek "Harmony of the Gospels" to help him piece together related passages from all four Gospels.

            As we try to get the flavor of what he has done, we need to hear his opinions about religion in general and the Gospels in particular as these can be determined from his letters.[iii]  Then we will look at three of his chapters to see exactly what he changed around and what he left out.  First, let's look at why he felt it necessary to make his own Bible.

Jefferson's Estimate of the Work of the Gospel Writers

            In a letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly, a noted English chemist and Unitarian theologian dated April 9, 1803 Jefferson summarized his thinking about the four Gospels.  Here is what he wrote:

To do him [Jesus] justice it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines have to encounter, not having been committed to writing by himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard them from him; when much was forgotten, much misunderstood, and presented in very paradoxical shapes.  Yet such are the fragments remaining as to shew (sic) a master workman and that his system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught; and eminently more perfect than those of any of the antient (sic) philosophers. His character and doctrines have recieved (sic) still greater injury from those who pretend to be his special disciples, and who have disfigured and sophisticated his actions and precepts, from views of personal interest, so as to induce the unthinking part of mankind to throw off the whole in disgust, and to pass sentence as an imposter on the most innocent,  the most benevolent the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.[iv]

Clearly Jefferson believed that the Gospel writers misunderstood Jesus and misrepresented him.  Jefferson did not believe that Jesus ever claimed divinity for himself, and he assumed that the miracles attributed to Jesus by the Gospels were expressions of worship but were not historical.  Yet Jefferson affirmed that "fragments" of those Gospels present us with "the most benevolent and sublime" system of morality ever taught.  He thought it his mission to disentangle the historical from the legendary in the Gospels.  In a letter to John Adams in October 12, 1813 Jefferson says it is a simple matter to distinguish between the authentic and unauthentic verses in the Gospels.

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 distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. [v]

The reference here is to his first collection of verses which he had entitled "The Philosophy of Jesus," a volume which has been lost.  It contained only the English texts.  Of this book he wrote to Adams in that same letter:

The result is ....46 pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered apostles, the Apostolic fathers, and the Christians of the 1st. century.[vi]

The Way He Did It

            Enough talk about Jefferson and what he did.  Let's look at an actual section of his "Bible."  Chapter 7 begins with Matthew, includes a section from Luke and then ends with John.  Jefferson did not leave notes explaining his choices so we are left to see if we can determine his reasoning.  The first section of Matthew 18 which was excluded was verses 5 and 6 which says:

5 Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.  6 If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Why did he delete these two verses?  He did not think that Jesus asked people to
"believe in me;"  to Jefferson this reflected the later church's situation and, thus, was added.  He deleted verse 10, "Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven."  Since it is closely linked to verses 5 and 6 he chose to delete it as well.  Perhaps also he could not accept the picture of children's angels representing them before the heavenly Father, a theology common among Catholics.  Also, although Jefferson accepted the concept of an afterlife, he did not accept the divinity of Jesus and did not keep anything as authentic which Jesus could not have known as a human being.  For this reason, Jefferson also deleted verses 18-20:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. ¹⁹ Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. ²⁰ For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

            At this point, Jefferson added Luke 10:1-12, the sending out of the disciples to preach and heal (except for verse 9 in which Jesus tells the disciples to "cure the sick;"  he did not accept any miraculous cures as authentic.)  It is difficult to understand why Jefferson placed the mission of the seventy disciples here.  There does not seem to be any close connection to what comes before or after in this chapter. 

            After the Lukan passage, Jefferson inserted the seventh chapter of John's Gospel with several passages deleted. He left out John 7:1 not because it contained a miraculous event but because it does not provide any words of Jesus.  It is a note setting the scene in Galilee and indicating that a plot to kill Jesus forced Jesus to leave Judea.  He left out John 7:17-18 which has Jesus claiming openly to have received his teaching from God.  Jefferson did not accept the concept of revelation:

¹⁷ Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. ¹⁸ Those who speak on their own seek their own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him.

Likewise John 7:27-31 was omitted because in it Jesus says

"But the one who sent me is true, and you do not know him. ²⁹ I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”

The final omission is a long one.  Jefferson omitted John 7:33-42 for several reasons.  Jesus says that he is "going to him who sent me" implying that he was divine.  Jesus also invites people at the festival he attended to "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me" which again is a claim of divinity.  Some of the verses were not kept because they did not record any direct teaching of Jesus.

Chapter 7 of Jefferson's "Bible" reads remarkably well when one is not aware of the changes he made. 

What Then Shall We Say About Mr. Jefferson's Bible

         Thomas Jefferson professed to be a Christian and did so publicly.  But he admitted that he may have been the only one in his "denomination."  He apparently spent time nearly every day reading and meditating on the words of Christ which he had collected.  Obviously, when one is aware of what is missing, Jefferson's Bible seems to be terribly lacking, taking Jesus completely out of his context, and reducing his teaching to its moral nucleus.  But having said this, one has to wonder what would remain in our Bible if we forced ourselves to set forth our own standards for identifying what Jesus said and then rigorously applied these standards to our existing text.  Most of us don't do this consciously, but by returning to some sections of the New Testament often and never reading others we have produced our own unique Bibles.  We have a lot more in common with Mr. Jefferson's Bible than we might think.  What's in your Bible?

---

[i]Excerpt from opening remarks of Jesus Seminar and Westar Institute founder Robert W. Funk at the launch of the Jesus Seminar in March 1985 in Berkeley, California.  http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/

[ii] " Despite the leading role Jefferson played in the campaign to separate church and state in Virginia, his own religious views did not become a major public issue until the time of the bitter party conflict between Federalists and Republicans in  the late 1790s.   After leveling sporadic allegations of infidelity

against Jefferson beginning as early as the election of 1796, Federalist leaders and their clerical supporters in New England and the middle states made this theme the centerpiece of a powerful propaganda offensive that was designed to blacken his character and destroy his electoral support during the presidential campaign of 1800.   .   .  .But most of all the Federalists and their ministerial allies arraigned Jefferson before the bar of public opinion as an unbeliever who was unworthy to serve as chief magistrate of a Christian nation." Dickinson W. Adams, editor, Jefferson's Extracts From The Gospels  (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1983), 10.

[iii] Adams, Jefferson's Extracts From The Gospels  has collected Jefferson's correspondence that relates to his Bible

[iv] Adams, 328

[v] Adams, 352

[vi] Ibid.