Ex-President Dismissed Old Testament, Took What He Found Credible in New
By Richard N. Ostling
Associated Press
Saturday, August 25, 2001
It must have been a peculiar sight: The author of the Declaration of Independence, seated in his Monticello mansion, cutting the Bible into pieces.
But such was the pastime of Thomas Jefferson during his last decade, reviving a project he originated while serving as the nation's third president.
Driven by a desire to select what he considered the most attractive and authentic material in the four Gospels, Jefferson pasted up 46 pages of his favored passages. He took from translations in several languages -- Greek, Latin, French and English (the King James Version) -- and arranged his selections in parallel columns.
The English version has now been reissued as The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Appropriately, publisher Beacon Press is an arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Jefferson's religious outlook fit the budding Unitarian movement of his day -- Unitarians recognized Jesus as an inspiring moral teacher but not a divine being -- though he never formally affiliated with it.
The Founding Father's treatment of the Bible, meanwhile, was radical.
The Old Testament was of no interest to Jefferson, who regarded Jesus as a reformer of the depraved religion of his own country. Expressing his opinions mostly in letters to family and friends, Jefferson also repudiated the writings of the Apostle Paul, whom he considered the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.
And he eliminated much of the material from the Gospels, whose compilers he castigated as groveling authors with feeble minds. Jefferson excised all supernatural events and any hint that Jesus was God, or even had an unusual relationship with God -- including the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.