The Jefferson Bible by Thomas Jefferson

First published:The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, 1902

Edition(s) used:The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Biblical studies

Core issue(s): Ethics; Gospels; Jesus Christ; reason

Overview

Thomas Jefferson had long pondered the meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus. Growing up at a time when Christian belief was central to American culture, he was nonetheless heavily influenced by the Age of Reason. The religious beliefs of this intellectual movement found expression in what is known as Deism, a belief in God based strictly on reason that rejected all forms of revelation and belief in supernatural mystery. Over time Jefferson came to see the ethical teachings of Jesus to be based on a rational foundation, while the stories of miracles and other supernatural events found in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life he saw as fallacious and inaccurate additions made by his followers.

Jefferson first expressed these views in a short work entitled “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others” that he sent to his friend Benjamin Rush in April of 1803. In that work he places Jesus’ teachings within the context of the writings of various classical authors (Pythagoras, Socrates, Epicurus, Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, and Antoninus) and of the Jews, and it is here that he refers to the ethical system of Jesus as “the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man.” In his letter to Rush that accompanied this work, he made mention of a project that he “wished to see executed by someone of more leisure and information for the task than myself” (he was, after all, in the midst of his first term as president of the United States); this clearly refers to the work that he himself would later undertake, of editing and rearranging the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.

Despite the demands of the presidency, Jefferson made his first attempt at this project just a year after the writing of the syllabus. In Washington, during a period of two or three nights in February of 1804, “after getting thro’ the evening task of reading the papers and letters of the day,” he completed a work known as “The Philosophy of Jesus,” which sets out to combine the Gospel accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus into a single, integrated whole and to remove all the supernatural material which he thought later writers had added. On the cover page of this work he, interestingly, referred to it as “an abridgement of the New Testament for the use of Indians, unembarrassed with matters of fact or faith beyond the level of their comprehensions,” apparently linking it to his own plan for “civilizing” Native Americans, although most scholars believe that this statement was included as a way to blunt the criticism of his religious beliefs set forth by his political opponents at the time of the previous election. (In the election of 1800, Jefferson’s Federalist opponents had attempted to depict him on more than one occasion as a threat to the religious faith of the Republic.)

Although he still intended to complete a much more ambitious work along the same lines as “The Philosophy of Jesus”—including parallel texts from Greek, Latin, French, and English editions of the Bible—he did not return to this project for more than fifteen years. Finally in 1820, at the age of seventy-seven, he once again took up the project. Thus, the work now known as The Jefferson Bible was finally completed. Originally titled by Jefferson The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English, the work edits and rearranges the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings and sets them side by side in the four languages. All references to the divine nature of Jesus’ birth and to the numerous miracles that he performed according to the Gospel accounts are removed, and only the “natural” events of his life and the rational aspects of his ethical teachings are retained. For example, in the famous story of the curing of the man born blind in chapter 9 of John’s Gospel, Jefferson includes the section in which Jesus’ disciples ask him “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” as well as Jesus’ response “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him,” but leaves out completely the rest of the story (verses 4-41), which includes Jesus’ curing of the blind man and the man’s subsequent statement of belief in the “Son of Man.” The work then offers a purely rational account of Jesus’ life and teachings, fully consistent with the Enlightenment belief in the supremacy of reason and the Deist belief in a God who operates wholly within the framework of natural laws.

Due to the considerable controversy he had experienced over his religious views during his lifetime and his opinion that one’s religious beliefs were a private matter, Jefferson did not allow his final work on this subject to be published during his lifetime. It remained in manuscript form in the possession of relatives until it was sold in 1895 to the National Museum in Washington. Seven years later, Congress voted to have the work printed, and as a reflection of the changing religious views of the times, copies of what has now come to be known as The Jefferson Bible were traditionally given to new members of Congress for many years.

Christian Themes

By virtue of its Age of Reason focus, many of the central doctrines of traditional Christianity—the Incarnation, the Trinity, Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead, and so on—have been eliminated from Jefferson’s work. Its Deist views are perhaps today most closely aligned with Unitarianism, and its broad, nonsectarian view of God and its emphasis on Judeo-Christian moral values are a clear reflection of both the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers (including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Paine) and the kind of “civic religion” that continues to be deeply rooted in the national experience (consider, for example, the adding of the phrase “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950’s).

Although Jefferson’s views as expressed in The Jefferson Bible are by no means totally original—the English clergyman and scientist Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and other writers of the period had written in a similar way about the ethical teachings of Jesus—the work’s true contribution lies in its effort to place the Gospel texts themselves within a wholly rational and Deist framework.

Sources for Further Study

Gaustad, Edwin S. Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996. Provides a good overview of the evolution of Jefferson’s religious beliefs and their impact on his life, both public and private.

Holmes, David L. The Faiths of the Founding Fathers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. A summary of the spiritual beliefs of the Founding Fathers (among them Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe) as well as other, more orthodox members of their own families and generation. Helps fill out the eighteenth century Deist background in which Jefferson and his contemporaries were so deeply immersed.

The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Includes, in addition to the English portion of the work itself, an introduction by F. Forrester Church and an afterword by Jaroslav Pelikan, both of which provide useful background information.

The Jefferson Bible, with the Annotated Commentaries on Religion of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1964. Includes a facsimile of Jefferson’s original manuscript, as well as a collection of Jefferson’s other writings on the subject of religion and an introduction by Henry Wilder Foote.