The Jefferson Bible Revisited

Note that I'm speaking here of a specific edition of the so-called Jefferson Bible, namely the one from the Beacon Press, with an introduction by Forrest Church and an afterword from Jaroslav Pelikan. It is certainly one of the prettiest editions I've seen, but also one of the most curious ones, because it's extensive introductory materials and afterword, for all their good qualities manage to misrepresent Thomas Jefferson, and the meaning of this little book, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. I have discussed this issue in my book, but I'll summarize it briefly here.

Essentially Rev. Forrest Church in the introductions quotes Jefferson's letter to Dr. William Short of April 13, 1820, but disingenuously cuts it off just before the juiciest part, namely after the words "... the roguery of his Disciples," although he then does go on to observe how Jefferson's "opinions on Jesus and the Evangelists are sharper than ever before." For good measure, here is the critical passage:

I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines, led me to try to sift them apart. I found the work obvious and easy, and that His past composed the most beautiful morsel of morality which has been given to us by man. The syllabus is therefore of His doctrines, not all of mine. I read them as I do those of other ancient and modern moralists, with a mixture of approbation and dissent...

There you can see just exactly how sharp Jeffersons views of the matter were. Subsequently in the afterword, Jaroslav Pelikan, the noted historian of Christianity, voices his amazement at 'the sangfroid exhibited by the third president of the United States, as, razor in hand, he sat editing the gospels during February 1804, on (as he himself says) "2. or 3. nights only at Washington, after getting thro' the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." The point is very simple. There was no particular sangfroid involved, all Jefferson did was apply common sense, and extract the actual words of Jesus from the editorial arround it, and to drop some passages that in his mind were a bit over the top, all in an effort to understand Jesus plain.

Today, some 200 years after all this, and 50+ years after the rediscovery of the Thomas gospel, we just have to marvel about how good Jefferson's instincts really were, for his collection of excerpts from the gospels show a remarkably high correspondence with the Jesus quotes which form the Thomas gospel. So Jefferson in his stocking feet had the sense to take a very reasonable stab at the way the Jesus originally sounded. And while we might disagree with him about some aspects of his appreciation of Jesus, on the whole he did a remarkable job, which in some way is now vindicated by history since in the Thomas gospel we did find a Jesus who dates back to before Christianity. And although I would disagree with Jefferson, who calls himself a materialist, and reduces Jesus to a mere moralist, which I don't believe was the case at all, nonetheless his intuition and his procedure led him with laser focus to some of the core sayings of Jesus. And he was thinking of all this for a long time, as can be seen from a letter to John Adams on "The code of Jesus" which dates from October 12, 1813. There he says: "We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from among them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the Amphibologisms into which they have been led by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. 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 distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill."

In short, while Jefferson may leave off too much at times, and attempt to reduce Jesus to a materialist moralist, as he conceived of himself, historically his procedure was remarkably prescient, for he did exactly what we now historically understand to be the case, namely he put the spotlight on the teachings of Jesus as they were before he was posthumously fashioned into a proto-Christian by later writers, with Paul leading the parade. Paul's theological influence is clearly present to one degree or another in all the canonical gospels, which were all written either contemporaneously with him, or after him. The Thomas gospel is the only one which existed before the Pauline editorial influence slanted everything with a rudimentary Christian theology. And of course the Q gospel which has now been reconstructed, leaves us with the same impression. Evidently the methods with which the Q gospel has been isolated, helped tremendously also by the redisovery of the Thomas Gospel ca. 150 years after Jefferson's work with scissors and glue at Monticello, is much more sophisticated and conclusive. However the overall point is that Jefferson's method, even with the shortcomings of his own personal slant on the matter, is clear documentary evidence why anyone, long before the discovery of the Thomas material and the isolation of the Q gospel, could have isolated the original teachings of Jesus from the material, by just skipping over the editorials, and sticking to the actual sayings, and using their own intuition as a filter. Thus there is a deep truth that in spite of all the historical distortions that were superimposed on it, the teachings of Jesus were mostly always hidden in plain sight. The rediscovery of materials like Thomas which had originally been destroyed by the early church has just accellerated this process, and today the emergence of A Course in Miracles gives us a framework for a much deeper understanding of the kinds of things Jesus teaches, but in modern language. Gary Renard's work provides the bridge, and my book does little else but to take his material and to expand the implications of what he says as far as possible, so we arrive at a revisionist understanding of those early days, all in an effort to help us sort out Jesus's voice from the din of history, as much as we need to learn inside to sort out the Voice for Truth from the mad jumble of our thoughts. As ACIM says:

The ego speaks in judgment, and the Holy Spirit reverses its decision, much as a higher court has the power to reverse a lower court's decisions in this world. The ego's decisions are always wrong, because they are based on the error they were made to uphold. Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly. Not only does the ego cite Scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets Scripture as a witness for itself. The Bible is a fearful thing in the ego's judgment. Perceiving it as frightening, it interprets it fearfully. Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would also be against you. (ACIM:T-5.VI.4)

Thus this inner procedure is very similar to Jefferson's effort to discard the noise and hear the original voice, except that with the framework of the Course we would not make the mistake of reducing Jesus to a materialistic moralist, but understand him as the spiritual guide he truly is.