Jefferson’s Bible
I don’t remember quite how I came across this. As with so much else, I was probably looking for something else and came across it by accident. Oh, in case you were wondering what “it” is, it’s Jefferson’s Bible.
A bit of backstory: legend had it that one night, Jefferson took a razor blade to the Bible, excising the bits with which he didn’t agree. Those bits consisted mainly of the stuff referring to the geneology and divinity of Jesus. What’s left reads like a synopsis of the synoptic Gospels, a Cliff’s Notes version of the Good News.
Interestingly, Jefferson originally envisioned this as a sayings gospel, much like the Gospel of Thomas. He described the project to a handful of friends and associates, among them J.B. Priestly and John Adams, saying to the latter:
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 distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.
The resulting work can be read–along with commentary, photos of a 1904 edition, and other bits of scholarly marginalia–on the website of the University of Virginia. Alternate views of the Bible, of Jesus, and of Christianity itself are much in vogue these days; it’s somehow appropriate that here, as with so much else, Jefferson would be ahead of the curve.