Jefferson's Bible

From "Doubting Thomas: On Peter Manseau’s The Jefferson Bible":

WITH A PENKNIFE in his hand, Thomas Jefferson cut out of the gospels every single interesting thing about Jesus Christ. The virgin birth? Cut. Water into wine? Deleted. The raising of Lazarus? Erased. The demoniac? Exorcised. The temptation in the desert? Removed. The resurrection? Canceled. Writing in 1819, a year before he took on this task, Jefferson expressed his desire to eliminate from the Bible the “immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection & visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of hierarchy, Etc.” He ignored that several of those concepts aren’t in the New Testament, or that the immaculate conception refers to the Virgin Mary. Applying cold rigor, Jefferson evaluated the gospels, and found them filled with superstitious dross invented by unscrupulous scribes and affirmed by credulous believers. But underneath all that rubbish, he thought, there was a “system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.” ....

In an 1814 correspondence with his frenemy John Adams, he enthuses that one can find Jesus’s authentic morals “as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.” Always sensitive to the accusations (some of them true) that he was a libertine, an atheist, and an adulterer, Jefferson anticipated his defense, writing that “I am a real Christian […] a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel” — a clever rhetorical maneuver of redefinition. ....

...[H]olding the utmost faith in the operations of his own (superior) mind, Jefferson affirmed that he could cut out those passages “which contradict the laws of nature” ....

This is what’s so unsatisfying about Jefferson’s Bible — he has expunged mystery. And mystery is the gospels’ raison d’être. Jefferson repeatedly claimed that the morality of the New Testament was the most sublime and benevolent — a frequent injunction of liberal mainline Protestantism — but is it true? I’d venture that anything which is demonstrably livable within Christian ethics is anodyne, and that anything which is novel is an impossibility, so that the gospels are only coherent if Christ is God ....

From the Sermon on the Mount come the transgressive promises of the Beatitudes, but also that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee,” and “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” How much worse are Jefferson’s sins? Christ is just as extreme in describing forgiveness. There is undeniable beauty in trying to “[l]ove your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” or in encouraging that “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” but such commandments are impossible. At the very least they’re incredibly hard — fit for mystics and saints — but not the normal congregation. Which is precisely the point — Christ isn’t offering a “benevolent code of morals” — he isn’t suggesting a code of morals at all. Rather, he’s proclaiming our intrinsic fallenness and the necessity for God’s infinite grace. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” isn’t a rule — it’s an ideal: one we’re bound to fail. As Jefferson himself did — spectacularly. ....

"Doubting Thomas: On Peter Manseau’s The Jefferson Bible,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2022.