Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Library of Religious Biography) by Edwin S. Gaustad

Author:Edwin S. Gaustad
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2009-06-02T07:46:00+00:00

Jefferson took two copies of the New Testament in the King James Version and cut out those verses from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that - in his view - best conveyed the "pure and unsophisticated doctrines" of Jesus. Having undertaken the task of separating the authentic and original Jesus from the later Platonized and ecclesiasticized Jesus, Jefferson told John Adams that he found the true sayings "as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill." Jefferson worked without a knowledge of manuscript transmission or oral traditions or any of the biblical apparatus that later centuries would introduce. Rather, taking Reason and Nature as his trusted guides, he determined by sense and sound what had fallen from the lips of Jesus himself. And the result was pure gold, gold separated from the dross, as he told William Short much later. In examining the Gospels carefully, Jefferson found on the one hand "many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence." But all that beauty sat trapped in "so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture." Something had to be done to extract the gold, and "I found the work obvious and easy."

The result, as Dickinson Adams has demonstrated, highlighted the parables and ethical teachings even as it minimized the miraculous and the theological. Jefferson operated on the principle that the genuine teachings had to be simple and clear enough for unlettered fishermen to understand and remember. What was obscure or esoteric therefore fell fruitless by the wayside, like the seed cast on stony ground. Jefferson declared that this compilation would be used chiefly for his own purposes: to reinforce his conviction that the founder of the Christian religion concerned himself primarily with the moral condition of humankind. Such a convenient booklet would enable the busy president regularly to meditate upon those teachings without being distracted or offended by the dung.

While "The Philosophy of Jesus" remained Jefferson's own private manual of devotion, he shared it with a few friends, as he had the Syllabus. In August of 1804, he wrote Benjamin Rush that "I shall some of these days ask you to read" the "little volume" on Jesus. Rush, who had responded positively to the Syllabus sent the year before, now gave a disconcerting reply. Unless Jefferson's "little volume" advanced the divinity of Jesus "and renders his death as well as his life necessary for the restoration of mankind, I shall not accord with its author." Jefferson, who had abandoned all notions of atonement and divinity, therefore declined to send his modest editing effort to his good friend.

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