Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online

TJ Bible 2

Had he lived dur­ing the Inqui­si­tionThomas Jef­fer­son would have been burned at the stake. His ideas about Jesus and Chris­tian­i­ty were far from ortho­dox. A prod­uct of the Enlight­en­ment, Jef­fer­son believed that every­thing, includ­ing reli­gion, should be exam­ined in the light of rea­son.

When Jef­fer­son exam­ined the Gospels he came away with a strong­ly divid­ed opin­ion. “I find many pas­sages of fine imag­i­na­tion, cor­rect moral­i­ty, and of the most love­ly benev­o­lence,” he wrote in an 1820 let­ter to William Short, “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.”

As ear­ly as 1804, when he was still pres­i­dent, Jef­fer­son began sep­a­rat­ing “the dia­mond from the dunghill,” as he lat­er put it, to assem­ble his own ver­sion of the Bible. He con­tin­ued the project in earnest dur­ing his lat­er years at Mon­ti­cel­lo, por­ing over var­i­ous edi­tions in Greek, Latin, French and King James Eng­lish. He clipped the pas­sages he thought were gen­uine teach­ings of Jesus and past­ed them, in the four lan­guages side by side, onto pages.

In 1820 — six years before his death at the age of 83 — Jef­fer­son pro­duced a leather-bound, 84-page vol­ume titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extract­ed Tex­tu­al­ly From the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & Eng­lish. Jef­fer­son elim­i­nat­ed every­thing in the Bible con­cern­ing mir­a­cles. He end­ed the Gospel sto­ry with the exe­cu­tion and bur­ial of Jesus, omit­ting the res­ur­rec­tion. The retained pas­sages, Jef­fer­son explained in an 1813 let­ter to John Adams, con­tain “the most sub­lime and benev­o­lent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

You can exam­ine and read Jef­fer­son­’s com­plete 1820 Bible online by vis­it­ing the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion’s inter­ac­tive Web dis­play.

Repro­duc­tions of Jef­fer­son­’s Bible can be pur­chased online.

The images above come cour­tesy of The Smith­son­ian.


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