The Jefferson Bible

[saidsimplesimon]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/peter-manseau-jefferson-bible/616476/

The Atlantic
November 2020 Issue
JAMES PARKER
The Jefferson Bible: A Biography BY PETER MANSEAU PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
…snip
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
The president preferred Jesus’s teachings to his supernatural acts—and edited his copy of the New Testament accordingly.

Was Thomas Jefferson an atheist? Plenty of people thought so. Jefferson never identified himself as such, of course. But it was his microscopes, his French friends, his whole swinging, freethinking Enlightenment vibe … “I hope he is not an unbeliever, as he has been represented,” worried the Nonconformist English clergyman (and chemist) Joseph Priestley, after Jefferson came to hear him speak in Philadelphia in 1797. Others could smell the godlessness like brimstone; if Jefferson became president, thundered a Federalist opponent in 1798, “the Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.” Two years later, as news of Jefferson’s election victory spread, there were reports that pious housewives in New England were burying their family Bibles for protection, or hiding them down wells.

As it turned out, Jefferson attacked only one copy of the Bible: his own. Not with fire, but with a razor. And not in an act of dizzy desecration, but with a kind of serrated—slightly crazed?—reasonableness. He cut and he pasted. He edited and he redacted. He called the resulting text—a collage of verses from the New Testament—The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. We know it as the Jefferson Bible.
…snip

[genxlib]

1. I have to confess

I was forty years old before I ever learned this almost 15 years ago.

It is one of those simple facts that would change a lot about what was taught in American History if it was actually taught. I would venture to say that the percentage of people who know about this is in the single digits. I would dare say many people wouldn't believe it.

I saw the actual Jefferson Bible in person at the American History Museum about 10 years ago. I believe it was a relatively short term installation there. It was fascinating to imagine one of the largest figures in our history actually editing a bible. As a Secular Humanist (and a sometimes Unitarian Universalist), it was the closest thing I have had to a religious experience.

[SCantiGOP]

2. Jefferson, like many intellectuals of the day, was a Deist

They believed that god was the "Great Clockwinder," meaning that he created the universe and the rules that dictated how it would operate, and then stepped away from any role in overseeing it because that was absolutely necessary in order for Free Will to exist.

People that try to make him out as a devout Christian because of all of his references to the Deity (i.e., man is endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights) are overlooking that this type of speech was the standard for the day. There were colonies during that time where you could be executed for blasphemy for things like denying the existence of a Deity or arguing with Biblical dogma.

In a private letter, Jefferson said that his bible eliminated all of the "stories of magic" and left in all of the profound and universal moral and ethical principles.

[saidsimplesimon]

4. Yes, you are correct, Jefferson was a deist.

Some, during his lifetime, called him a "heathen devil worshiper". Or so my grandfather claimed (oral history).

[Karadeniz]

3. The "magic" are symbolic events to be interpreted. Some of them are tied into parables and that

Is where the truths are. He may have taken things too literally, missing the important information.

[SCantiGOP]

5. Don't want to argue the point, but

raising the dead, or coming back to life yourself, are not symbolic events. The resurrection is an essential, central tenet of most Christian faiths.

[Karadeniz]

6. Most Christian faiths are at the literal level of understanding.

[AtlasHacked]

7. Do Christians believe in zombies?

Zombie can be defined as (merriam-webster)
(1) a will-less and speechless human held to have died and been supernaturally reanimated
(2) a person held to resemble the so-called walking dead
(3) a mixed drink made of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice

So which is it? A zombie apocalypse or a mind altering potion.