Back
to America’s Roots: Thomas Jefferson’s (edited) Gospel of Jesus
Last
month, I took the occasion of the 4th
of July weekend to speak of the Christian values of our “Founding
Fathers,” in particular Ben Franklin and James Madison.
On that same weekend, the Los Angeles Times published a full-page
article (by Louis Sahagun, Sat. July 5, 2008, B-2) about “A Founding
Father’s View of God.”
Both Jim Williams and Fred Birkner passed the page along to me
following that sermon.
It
told of Thomas Jefferson’s compilation of “a Bible without miracles that
ended with Jesus’ burial instead of resurrection.” It was, in fact, not
the whole Bible, but only the Gospels that Jefferson took the liberty to cut
with a razor “snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find
in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and the Epistles (Letters of
Paul & other Apostles contained in the New Testament) were of no
interest to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson
reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative
and pasted them onto blank paper, each page with four columns: Greek, Latin,
French, & English. Frankly,
the intellectual breadth that such a task entails is awesome!
He called his book “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”
(Historians have dubbed it “The Jefferson Bible.”)
He began the project while in Washington, serving as our third
President of the U. S., but did not complete it until 1820 when he was 77
years old. He
admitted in a letter to his friend, Unitarian minister William Short, that
his first attempt at a “Syllabus” was done “too hastily” in the
White House “after getting through the evening task of reading the letters
and papers of the day.”
What a way to “wind down”!
Jefferson
sent a copy of his initial thoughts about the “Philosophy of Jesus” in
1803 to his friend Benjamin Rush (a Philadelphia physician whom Jefferson
met in 1776 while he and John Adams and others were drafting “the
Declaration of Independence”).
When Dr. Rush died in May 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his heirs
that these communications “were never intended to go further.
In the sacred fidelity of each to the other, these were known to be
safe; and above all things that they would be kept from the public eye.”
Jefferson knew how the traditional Bible-believing church leaders
would rail against his editing of their sacred Scriptures, and he hoped to
avoid their fury.
Jefferson
wrote in that letter: “On the subject of religion – a subject on which I
have ever been most scrupulously reserved – I have considered it as a
matter between every man and his maker in which no other, and far less the
public, had a right to inter-meddle.”
While I respect President Jefferson’s reluctance to make his
personal religious views a matter for public discussion, I believe enough
years have passed (in which the church has matured in its search for the
“historical” Jesus) that we may now read his book with intellectual
integrity, curiosity, and respect for what he tried to do in his day.
“I
am a Christian,” he wrote to Dr. Rush, “in the only sense Jesus wished
anyone to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all
others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never
claimed any other.”
In
that spirit, I invite you to my home (2666 Maine Ave. in Long Beach, just
off Willow Street/Sepulveda) on Tuesdays in August (beginning Aug. 12) at
4:30 PM to read and discuss “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”
by Thomas Jefferson.
Your
Pastor,
Rev.
Dr. Paul A. Lance
