The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder

The “Jefferson Bible” is arguably the most controversial religious text in American history. Perhaps the other most obvious contender is Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. But while the Book of Mormon has become one of the most printed and widely distributed books in world history, Thomas Jefferson never published his Bible in his lifetime. Indeed, the Jefferson Bible never got published at all during the 1800s, despite publishers’ offers to do so. Congress finally produced an edition of it in 1904, after the Smithsonian obtained the compilation from a Jefferson descendant. In 2011, the National Museum of American History restored the fragile text, allowing for its long-term preservation and the production of a new, beautiful facsimile edition.

The Origins of Jefferson’s Bible

What we call the Jefferson Bible is Jefferson’s cut-and-paste edition of extracts from the Gospels. Partisans cannot agree what Jefferson’s intentions for the Bible were, however. Secular devotees of Jefferson see the Jefferson Bible as the epitome of his skeptical religious views. Some Christian admirers of Jefferson have argued, conversely, that the text reveals Jefferson as a Christian, albeit an enigmatic one. Such Christians say that the text was actually a simplified version of the Gospels, one intended for education or evangelism of people unfamiliar with the Bible, especially the “Indians.”

 The “Indians” were explicitly named as the audience for the first version of the Jefferson Bible, which the president produced in 1804. Unfortunately, the text of that first edition was lost, but the title page survived. He called this “wee little book” The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth … Being an abridgement of the New Testament for the use of the Indians. Scholars have debated whether “Indians” literally referred to Native Americans, or perhaps to Jefferson’s Christian enemies in the Federalist Party, who reviled him as a heretic and closet atheist. Whatever Jefferson meant, he explained later to John Adams that he composed the first Bible for his “own use.” Like the second edition, the first apparently contained a distillation of Jesus’ moral and ethical teachings. Unlike the second version, however, the first run at his Gospels compilation was only in English. The second was a polyglot edition, with side-by-side passages in English, French, Greek, and Latin.

The fact that Jefferson was capable of compiling the Gospels in four languages testifies to the man’s enormous intellectual accomplishments, including in his studies of the Bible and biblical languages. Jefferson seems to have read the Bible regularly, including the Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint, or the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Other prominent founders, including James Madison and John Adams, could also read Hebrew, but Jefferson never learned that biblical language. Indeed, Jefferson got irritated at Adams for suggesting that a truly educated man needed to be able to read both the Old and New Testaments in the original languages. In any case, Jefferson’s deep perusal of the Scriptures and his large collection of Bibles (some of which he dismantled to use in the compilations) could easily give a Christian observer the idea that the man was a devout Christian.

Diamonds in a Dunghill

Over his life, Jefferson did develop increasing reverence for Jesus’ ethical teachings. A close look at the Jefferson Bible reveals that it was a fundamentally skeptical project, however, when viewed from a traditional Christian perspective. Most notoriously, Jefferson literally used scissors to cut out sections of the Gospels that he pasted into his compilation. Thus, it was not so much that Jefferson cut out miracles in the Gospels, but that he left them behind, as tattered remnants in the New Testaments he mined for Jesus’ ethical principles. Why would Jefferson do this? Because, as an early advocate of what became known as “higher criticism” of the Bible, Jefferson regarded much of the New Testament as mythology. The stories of Jesus’ wonder-working powers were largely crafted and imposed on the man by misguided followers after his death. Jefferson saw Jesus’ ethics as the philosophical treasure of the Bible. But getting at that treasure was like picking out “diamonds in a dunghill,” he wrote. Jesus’ morals were the diamonds; the rest of the Bible was a veritable dunghill.

Jefferson called the second volume, which he completed in 1820, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” The 84-page book focused primarily on Jesus’ teachings, parables, and some episodes from his life and ministry. It is tempting to characterize the Jefferson Bible as the Gospels without miracles. Most notably, Jefferson’s Gospel narrative ends with Jesus’ burial, and includes no resurrection. To traditional Christians of any denomination, it would be impossible to accept a version of the Gospels that does not include the empty tomb. Christians therefore should be hesitant to go along with some evangelical popularizers’ efforts to cast the Jefferson Bible as being within the bounds of historic orthodoxy.

Neither is the Jefferson Bible as naturalistic as some secular observers would suggest, however. There are miracles in the Jefferson Bible, or at least references to supernatural events. There are also suggestions that Jesus operated under divine inspiration. Jefferson’s Jesus has foreknowledge of the future, and the Jefferson Bible includes references to hell, the end times, the Second Coming, and the general resurrection of mankind. So Jefferson was not as rigorous about excising all supernatural content from the Gospels as a casual observer might assume. Why Jefferson left such supernatural references in the compilation is uncertain. He never exactly explained his rationale for what got included, and what got cut.

Principles of Production

The beginning pages of the Jefferson Bible suggest how he proceeded, however. Jefferson skipped over the account of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to Mary in Luke 1, and went straight to Luke 2:1: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” Jefferson included historical material about Jesus’ life, but he tended not to include passages where supernatural beings or miracles were driving the narrative. Thus, he stopped at Luke 2:7, with the baby Jesus being laid in a manger, and skipped the angels appearing to the shepherds and declaring “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” He picked up again at Luke 2:21a, Jesus’ circumcision, but he excised the note in 2:21b that the child was called Jesus, “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

But Jefferson didn’t always follow his angel’s rule, either. He included Jesus’ remarkable prediction in Matthew 13:41–42 that “the Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Here we have references both to angels and to a fiery judgment in hell. This is exactly the sort of stuff you would think Jefferson wouldn’t put in his Bible. But this passage apparently “made the cut” (pun intended) because it was part of Jesus’ interpretation of a parable. Jefferson liked the parables, so he sometimes included supernatural references if they were part of those teachings. Jefferson perhaps did not obsess over the exclusion of supernatural happenings as much as we might expect. The biblical text is obviously interwoven with miraculous claims and accounts, so he may not have found it easy to be entirely naturalistic in his selections.

Whatever his rationale for the selections, Jefferson was an early example of a long tradition in elite studies of the Bible: judging Scripture’s authenticity by one’s own standards of reason. Most of the secular and liberal academic study of the Scriptures assumes that the Bible contains some content that was added by later authors or transcribers. Some of the Bible’s contents could be historically reliable, such critics reckon, but other parts were tacked on for ideological or polemical purposes or to enhance Jesus’ messianic claims. To discover the “historical Jesus,” one must dispense with the accretions and identify the more “authentic” content. This type of higher critical approach reached its apex in the oft-lampooned “Jesus Seminar” of the 1980s and ’90s. This meeting of prestigious higher critical scholars famously voted on the authenticity of Gospel passages by using colored beads to indicate their confidence in the authenticity of individual verses.

A Sect unto Himself

The problem with such approaches is that the Jesus who emerges after the requisite excisions tends to look like the critic’s “Personal Jesus,” as a 1989 Depeche Mode song put it. If you want a hippie Jesus, you get one. If you want a non-divine Jesus (as Jefferson wished), you get one. Once you assume that parts of Scripture are erroneous, unreliable, or ahistorical, your decisions about what should “stay in” tend to become fatally subjective.

Of course, even biblical inerrantists are tempted to emphasize certain parts of Scripture over others. But while lots of people have implicitly cut out sections of Scripture they don’t like, Jefferson literally did so. Doing this could not produce anything but a radically individualized, cut-and-paste version of Christianity. Jefferson admitted as much in 1819, while he was beginning to compose the Jefferson Bible. He told a correspondent that year “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” To Jefferson, being a sect by yourself was a good thing. But such radical individual judgment of the text certainly doesn’t foster confidence in the Bible’s plenary inspiration. No matter how you “cut it,” there’s no doubt that the Jefferson Bible was an attack on the reliability of Scripture.