Jefferson Bible, Thomas Gospel & The Nature of Dunghills

The following material is a contribution by Rick van Vliet, which was originally posted in a discussion group on the Thomas Gospel, and it offers a rather interesting way of looking at the remarkable correspondences of the so-called Jefferson Bible, with the material in the Thomas Gospel. As I've argued elsewhere, I might agree with Jefferson's selections some of the time, but on the whole it is totally remarkable how he intuitively picked a consistent picture of the teachings of Jesus out of the extant materials in his time, and indirectly almost anticipated the facts that would be borne out 130 years later by the discovery of the Thomas Gospel.


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Thomas Jefferson's Bible, The Gospel of Thomas, & the Nature of Dunghills

Introduction:

Thomas Jefferson said most of the Christian Bible was a dunghill, with a few diamonds of genuine Jesus sayings. His great life work, delayed  until his retirement, was to write his own version of the Christian Bible. It's called The Jefferson Bible, and he threw out over 90% of  the Christian Bible.

"In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurgos, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of ... or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from 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. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages."

Thomas Jefferson In a letter to Adams written from Monticello, October 12, 1813

Statistics:

So, Thomas Jefferson considered over 90% of the New Testament a dunghill, what percentage of the Thomas sayings in the Christian Bible did Jefferson consider a dunghill? He thought less than 10% of the Bible was genuine, what percentage of the Thomas sayings paralleled in the Bible did he consider genuine? 1%? 10%? 20? ...
No, about 71%. Thomas Jefferson nailed it.

.#                   //'d in Bible - # in Jeff - %in
First Third.     21 .......         15 ...       77.8
Middle Third  20 .......         10 ...       66.7
Last Third..    14 .......           7 ...       66.7
total.......        55 .......         32 ...       70.5

This is organized by the way the Jesus Seminar sorts our sayings in the Five Gospels. Some sayings have more than one part, those parts are what's counted. Direct parallels only, no Cf. Cross referenced to the list on:

http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/jeffbtab.html The 10% of the New Testament is hearsay that is roughly checked.

Summary:

Jefferson only kept about 10% of the New Testament, but he kept 71% of the Thomas parallels in it.

He kept 79% of the first third of Thomas that wasn't secret and contains all the Law/Jewish parallels.

Good job Tom!

Appendix:

http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/jeffbtab.html

http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/jeffbsyl.html

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Jesus-Without-Miracles1dec05.htm

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/

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Note: in my book I correlated the work of the Jesus seminar with the Pursah version, and on that basis the results would vary slightly, but the overall outcome remains totally remarkable.