Jefferson's Bible

[rug]

Thomas Jefferson's private, personal document offers a case study in how politics and Christianity mix it up in America.



The Smithsonian has restored and put on display a 19th century book known as "The Jefferson Bible." (Courtesy of the Smithsonian)

By Craig Fehrman
January 8, 2012

Rick Santorum's near-miss in Iowa provides a reminder that, for many Republican voters (and not a few candidates), religion and politics overlap. If you need another reminder, though, consider this: recently, the Smithsonian has restored and put on display a weird and fantastic 19th century book known as "The Jefferson Bible." That's Jefferson as in Thomas, and this private, personal document offers a useful case study in how politics and Christianity have mixed it up in American history, right up to today.

To understand Jefferson's Bible, you need to start with the one book he published in his lifetime: "Notes on the State of Virginia." Jefferson wrote this survey in the 1780s, organizing it around topics like "The different religions received into that State." But the book came back to haunt him two decades later when he was battling John Adams for the presidency. Indeed, long before Rick Perry's and Mitt Romney's books caused them trouble on the campaign trail, Jefferson had to deal with some very specific attacks on what he'd written about religion.

Those attacks became a key issue in the election of 1800. While Jefferson referred to "Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence, he preferred to keep his personal beliefs to himself, a reticence that lined up with his philosophy of individual freedom and religious tolerance. In "Notes," he put it this way: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

In a presidential campaign, and in the hands of Jefferson's enemies, this passage became proof of the candidate's radicalism. One popular pamphlet from a pro-Adams minister quoted "Notes," then countered it: "Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God," the minister warned, "and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0108-fehrman-jefferson-20120108,0,6146482.story

[Rowdyboy]

1. A fascinating work....the new testament bible, stripped of mythology and miracles focusing

on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and ending with his death. It would have seemed almost heretical had it been widely known in Jefferson's time. What an incredibly advanced man.

And how idiotic do fundamentalists look when they attempt to justify Jefferson as one of their own. He would be nauseated.

[rug]

2. Here's the full text.

http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/62/The_Jefferson_Bible_The_Life__Morals_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth_1.html

Still, I feel a sadness that it ends with a burial.

Matthew 27

60: And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed

[Historic NY]

3. Jefferson's search for a purity in religion would haunt those.......

out on the stump today.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

4. What were Jefferson's sources?

I've been doing a little bit of reading about the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and it turns out that most of the Greek texts are wildly changed from the original readings. For example, Erasmus's printed Greek edition is today considered woefully inaccurate, because of the inferior sources he used. What did Jefferson have access to?

[rug]

5. It looks like he used contemporaneous translations into several modern languages.

"Jefferson literally extracted the passages he wished to include from these two volumes of Jacob Johnson's 1804 imprint of the King James New Testament. In 1920, the Cohen family donated the books, which Adler had located in their relative's library many years before."

http://americanhistory.si.edu/JeffersonBible/history/page-6.cfm

[ChadwickHenryWard]

6. That's disappointing.

If one is truly concerned with what the New Testament actually says, one should not consult translations. Even St. Jerome's Vulgate departs considerably from modern scholarship's best reconstruction of what the books of the New Testament actually said in the originals. While most of the important manuscripts used today had not yet been uncovered by Jefferson's time, the principle that older is generally better was certainly known among biblical scholars. Careful men seek out the earliest possible copies in the original Greek on the supposition that there is the smallest number of generations of copying between that version and the original. (Neither Erasmus nor the men working for King James in 1611 can be considered "careful" in this regard.) It is intellectually lazy for Jefferson, who spoke Greek, to forgo the effort necessary to seek out Greek manuscripts for his edition.

Further, I was fascinated when I first learned about Jefferson's version of the bible. I am completely sympathetic to Jefferson's assessment that the presence of miracles does serious damage to the credibility of the writings, but as I learn more about how the bible is studied critically, I realize that this is no better than any other theologically motivated alteration of the text. If a Catholic were caught interpolating some explicit reference to the Papacy in one of the Gospels, we would not regard this as proper scholarship, even if we found ourselves in total agreement with his arguments in favor the institution's necessity to the Christian Church. It's not okay to just change the words to say whatever you want. For better or worse, the miracles are in there, and unless they can be definitely removed on sound academic grounds (like the woman caught in adultery,) they should stay put.

As far as copying and pasting extant translation, I do not know what the most common French edition of the New Testament is, but I would be willing to wager money that it differs in not insignificant ways in not an insignificant number of places from the KJV. Prudence would dictate that one's edition say the same thing in all four present languages.

Further, it is not okay to cram all four Gospel accounts of Jesus's life into one single narrative. These are four works by four different authors telling four different stories. To simply cut and paste parts from all four into one long narrative to to completely disregard the content of four of them. Both Matthew and Luke use some version of Mark as a source, but not exclusively; clearly, both of these authors felt that there was something more that needed to be said about Jesus than just what was written in Mark. From this we can see definitively that there are real and important differences between the Gospels. There is no reason why we (or Jefferson, for that matter) should regard these differences as trivial or nonexistent.

[rug]

7. I tend to agree.

There has been an awful lot of scholarship on the original languages in the last two hundred years.

Still, his purpose was not to squeeze shades of meaning out of text, he wanted to seperate the natural from the supernatural.

What disappoints me is his slicing the passages out of the books rather than copying them. It seems so out of character.