The Jefferson Bible

By Thomas Jefferson and Percival Everett

An atheist’s analysis of the Founding Father’s document on deism and the philosophy of Jesus.

Unlike any other presidential commentaries in print, Akashic’s US Presidents series pairs the writings of these American historical figures with contemporary commentators whose critical viewpoints provide a counterbalance to the overly reverent and conservative analyses that invariably accompany presidential writings.

In this volume, Percival Everett, acclaimed author of such novels as Telephone and Erasure and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, takes an atheist’s-eye-view of the little-known “Jefferson Bible,” the third president’s response to the King James Bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Dec 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781617752193

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd president of the United States. William Peden is professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri.

Book preview

Akashic Books presents a thought-provoking series of early writings from United States Presidents, starting with George Washington and moving chronologically forward to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson (in this volume), and beyond. Each slim book offers an introduction by a groundbreaking contemporary writer. This series is unlike any other Presidential commentaries in print, and is characterized by a critical viewpoint that will provide a counterpoint to the more staid analyses that have traditionally accompanied Presidential writings.

Thomas Jefferson’s original title page.

All rights reserved. No part of this book’s introduction by Percival Everett may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

The statue of Thomas Jefferson on the cover of this book stands in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was cast by Rudulph Evans between the years of 1945 and 1947.

Published by Akashic Books

Introduction ©2004 Percival Everett

ISBN: 978-1-888451-62-7

e-ISBN: 978-1-61775-219-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004106238

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Table of Contents

___________________

Copyright & Credits

Introduction by Percival Everett

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush

Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others by Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson Letter to William Short

The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted textually from the Gospels Compiled by Thomas Jefferson

About the Authors

About Akashic Books

Introduction

Perhaps more than any American historical figure, Thomas Jefferson represents our desired belief that, at least in the past, the intellectual had a place in our political system. Of course, legends are tricky things at best, playing both sides of the truth/falsehood coin. I am bound by several influences, my education for one, my desire to believe in the inherent good of democracy another, to admit to the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence, the document of which Jefferson was the primary author. But not far behind, if not right alongside or slightly ahead of my acceptance of the political correctness of the Declaration, is the gnawing idea that the document’s beauty lies in its being a remarkably outstanding example of sophistry, if not an outright, self-serving lie.

Some of Jefferson’s most famous quotes remain hauntingly resonant today:

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The government is best which governs least.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying loses.

The first two have remained as right-wing and now Republican battle cries. The second two are hardly mentioned. But it is no wonder that Jefferson is the Founding Father so beloved and frequently quoted by the armed hideaways and hooded American extremists.

Jefferson remains impressive as someone interested and engaged in the world. He has sometimes been called the father of archaeology for his role in devising excavation techniques. Instead of haphazardly digging straight down until something was uncovered, he instead insisted on cutting a wedge out of the Indian burial mound he was desecrating; this allowed him to walk into the site and observe the disturbed remains without having to bend over. A wine lover, a gourmet, a thinker, he was strongly influenced by the Enlightenment and so he approached the world with a scientific eye, a desire, a need to present his beliefs with the benefit and support of so-called reason and scientific method.

Jefferson’s recasting of the four Gospels of the New Testament—The Jefferson Bible, completed in 1819—was an interesting (or not) bit of play intellectualism. Many claim his translation amounts to little more than a paraphrasing of the parts of the Bible with which he agreed. In fact, a glance at the Geneva Bible of 1557, the Rheims Bible of 1582, and the Anglican Authorized version of 1611, along with, of course, the King James Bible, might lead one to agree with this assertion. Still, he took it upon himself to do it, whatever it was he did. He decided that the rules of the club to which he wished to belong were not the rules he wanted to play by. So instead of changing clubs, he changed the rule book by literally cutting and pasting together only the sections that he found relevant to his interpretation.

The cover of Jefferson’s creation bore the words, The Morals of Jesus, though the title page elaborated: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. In the eighty-one-page document, translations in all four languages are positioned side by side.

Jefferson was greatly influenced by some of the Unitarian thinkers of his day, as well as by the Enlightenment philosophers and their new appeal to reason. For Jefferson, Paul was the villain of Christianity, reducing the religion to the worship of a man as a god rather than focusing on the teachings of Jesus; this hardly sat well with rational thought and led to the superstitious character of Christianity that Jefferson detested. There is in fact no reference to the divinity of Jesus in the Jefferson Bible, and at the end of the story, once the big rock is rolled in front of the tomb of Jesus, well, that’s it. There is no rising from the dead and therefore no doubting Thomas. Except for the one who happened to write his own version of the text some 1500 years later.

Jefferson wrote, I am a sect by myself, as far as I know. He claimed he was not a Jew, as he did not accept their theology, in particular the part that supposes God punishes the sins of the fathers upon their children. One can well imagine. More importantly, he believed that words and ideas were inadequate for the defining of God. For Jefferson, Jesus said that God was perfect and good and did not define him.

In fairness to Jefferson, he admitted that his version of the Gospels was hardly a translation at all, but a paradigma of Jesus’s doctrines. He in fact referred to it as a wee little book. I have taken liberties here because of the way we in Jefferson’s future have chosen to construct his life. Perhaps I am more sympathetic to Jefferson than I let on. I believe what Jefferson has to teach us is more profound than we realize, more subtle, more complicated.

Before I get to the stuff of Jeffersonian thought, I have here to address an interesting aside, that being my notion of retrograde evolution. Two hundred years after Jefferson’s election to his first term as President (an election marred with electoral irregularities), George W. Bush was elected to the same office. I would venture to say (using reasoning very close in quality to Jefferson’s own) that during this time the necks of giraffes might have lengthened by a centimeter, the shells of tortoises might have grown slightly harder, and the speed of cheetahs might have increased, however imperceptibly. But during this same time, Presidents of the United States of America failed to achieve any kind of advance. Jefferson was digging up Indian graves for scientific reasons and rewriting the Bible . . . and George Bush plays pull-my-finger and makes up nicknames for people. Thomas Jefferson founded a school, the University of Virginia, while we all sit and wonder, all of us, how it was possible for George Bush to make it through college at all. From Jefferson we are left with, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . From George Bush, Our nation must come together to unite.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." That’s the line of greatest interest to me and of course to all democracy-loving Americans: black, white, conservative, liberal, neo-Nazi, post-neo-fascist. This remarkable bit of hocus-pocus is full of philosophical and moral baggage, assumptions, presumptions, and supposition. Perhaps the only nonambiguous word in the statement is we. We is the signers of the document, and supposedly by extension, the remaining population of the colonies, the largely illiterate, unmonied rest who were nothing like the signers themselves. You know, the ones who would later gloriously die for freedom and the pursuit of Happiness. It all sounds scarily familiar.

I thought, tear apart the statement, but that would be boring. And besides, I’m