Religion: Jefferson Edits the Bible

One hundred and twenty-seven years after it was prepared, Thomas Jefferson’s personal 25,000-word abridgment of the Bible made its first public appearance last week under the title Jefferson chose for it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Wilfred Funk; $1).

Jefferson is one of the two U. S. Presidents (the other: Lincoln) who did not claim membership in any church. But he spent his spare evenings at the White House and Monticello with paste pot and shears, clipping and collating Greek, Latin, French and English Bibles in parallel columns. Fear of being “exposed to the malignant perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new misrepresentations and calumnies” kept him from ever publishing it. The Government later bought the manuscript from his family, placed it in the Smithsonian, where it still remains.

A rationalist and firm believer in liberty of conscience, Jefferson summed up his purpose in a letter to John Adams: “We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists; select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus. . . . There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently His and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill.”

Of the 66 books, 1,189 chapters and 773,000 words in the King James Bible, Jefferson kept only the four Gospels. Then he cut out most of them. Among his excisions from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John: the Annunciation, the visit of the Magi, all the miracles, the Transfiguration, Christ’s promise to the thief crucified beside Him (“today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”), the Resurrection, the Ascension.

Jefferson had no belief in a bodily resurrection, ends his Bible: “There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.” But he believed in his own version. He wrote of it: “A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”