The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth – March 26, 2009 Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Jefferson Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1604591285 | Format: EPUB
The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth – March 26, 2009 Description
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"[A] fascinating document, telling us a great deal about a great eighteenth-century mind and its world." ---Charles S. Adams, Religious Studies Review
--This text refers to the
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Text: English, French, Greek, Latin
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Paperback: 100 pages
- Publisher: Wilder Publications (March 26, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1604591285
- ISBN-13: 978-1604591286
- Product Dimensions: 0.2 x 5.9 x 8.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Thomas Jefferson was no Christian. Like many of the most famous of the founding fathers, he was a Deist, and counted himself a Unitarian, but he often said he was the sole member of a sect including no one but himself. He had confidence in his own reason and conscience. He did admire Jesus, saying, "Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being." It was Jefferson's view that he himself could sort the truth from the imposture, for he felt that the real words applicable to Jesus were "as distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill." He thought about the process of doing so for many years, did a quick job around 1800 and did a thorough one in 1820. His purpose was to make his own version of the gospels, an extraction that would summarize Jesus's life and morals, for "I hold the precepts of Jesus, as delivered by himself, to be the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man. I adhere to the principles of the first age; and consider all subsequent innovations as corruptions of his religion, having no foundation in what came from him."
It was not enough for the polyglot Jefferson to make such a distillation from the King James Version; he also bought a couple of Greek, French, and Latin versions to use, two volumes of each, for his plan was to cut and paste the parts that he found useful into one volume, but using all four languages.
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