by David Barton
I had not supposed there was a family in this State not possessing a Bible. . . . I therefore enclose you cheerfully an order . . . for the purposes of the Society.11
Furthermore, in 1798 Jefferson personally helped finance the printing of one of America’s groundbreaking editions of the Bible.12 That Bible was a massive, two-volume folio set that was not only the largest Bible ever published in America to that time, but it was also America’s first hot-pressed Bible.13 President John Adams, several signers of the Constitution and Declaration, and other major Founders joined with Jefferson to help fund that Bible.14
Jefferson personally possessed and studied many complete Bibles, including some exceptionally famous ones, such as:
• the Eliot Bible, printed in 1661 in the Algonquin Indian language by John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians (the first Bible printed in America in any language)
• the Bible in the Nattick Indian language (1666)
• the earliest Latin Bible printed in England (1580)
• the earliest French Geneva Bible printed in England (1687)
Jefferson owned many other full, uncut Bibles.15
And if we continue to follow the financial trail, we find that he also volunteered to help finance the 1808 publishing of Thomson’s Bible—the first American translation of the Greek Septuagint into English.16 Upon receiving the finished work, Jefferson told Thomson that he was thrilled with it and would “use it with great satisfaction,” grateful for “the aid you have now given me”17 through his scholarly translation of the Bible. Recall Jesus’ axiom in Luke 12:34 that “where your treasure [money] is, there will your heart be also.” Jefferson spent and offered to spend significant amounts of money on the full Bible, thus providing a glimpse into his heart and into what he felt was important.
So . . . Jefferson owned many Bibles, belonged to a Bible society and contributed to it, gave out copies of the full, unedited text of the traditional Bible, and assisted in publishing and distributing Bibles. In each of these situations, Jefferson had opportunity to indicate his personal displeasure with the Bible or at least to refrain from participating, but he did not do so.
Then what is the so-called Jefferson Bible that has received so much attention?
There actually is no Jefferson Bible, but modern spin is usually directed at one of two religious works that Jefferson prepared about Jesus. He compiled the first in 1804 and the second around 1820. Jefferson assigned an explicit title to each, accurately describing its scope and purpose. Neither was a “Bible,” and Jefferson would have strenuously objected to that characterization. In his mind each was nothing more than what he said it was in its title.
Jefferson’s title for his 1804 work about Jesus was:
The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, being Extracted from the Account of His Life and Doctrines Given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; Being an Abridgement of the New Testament for the Use of the Indians, Unembarrassed [Uncomplicated] with Matters of Fact or Faith beyond the Level of their Comprehensions.18
Notice several important points. First, this work was prepared for the use of Indians. Second, it was a work about Jesus drawn solely from the four Gospels. Third, it was not a Bible but rather an abridgment of the major doctrines of Jesus in the Gospels, and as will be seen below, it included many references to the miraculous and supernatural.
It is not surprising that Jefferson should have prepared such a work for Indians. For years preceding its compilation, Jefferson had shown a keen interest and taken an active role in promoting Christianity among various tribes. Recall that he owned several Bibles in differing Indian languages, and from 1798 to 1800 he corresponded with religious leaders and ministers such as the Reverend William Linn and the Reverend Samuel Miller on the subject of promoting Indian missions.19 In 1802 while president, he signed a law authorizing the Society of the United Brethren to “propagat[e] the Gospel among the Heathen” in which he provided federal funds for churches, missionaries, and Christian schools among the Indians in the Northwest Territory.20
Shortly after signing that act, Edward Dowse, one of Jefferson’s longtime friends, sent him a copy of a sermon preached in Scotland by the evangelical minister Reverend William Bennet in which he addressed the importance of promoting Christian knowledge among Indians of North America.21 The Reverend Bennet advocated teaching Christianity to Indians by using just the simple teachings of Jesus—that is, using only Jesus’ words and avoiding the many doctrines that caused conflict between groups of Christians. Concerning that sermon, Dowse, who knew Jefferson well, told him:
[I]t seemed to me to have a claim to your attention. At any rate, the idea struck me that you will find it of use and perhaps may see fit to cause some copies of it to be reprinted, at your own charge, to distribute among our Indian missionaries.22
Jefferson replied to Dowse, telling him, “I . . . perused it with attention” and “I concur with the author.”23 Of this exchange between the two, one scholar accurately observed:
Mr. Dowse apparently understood Jefferson’s interest in Christian missions to the Native Americans in a way that many modern scholars have dismissed as irrelevant. This dismissal has led to the misunderstanding of Jefferson’s motives for his compilation of Christ’s teachings. Jefferson had a deep, genuine commitment to missionary efforts among the Indians. His account books show that he consistently donated his own money to missionaries and to societies that distributed Bibles to both Americans and Indians.24
In 1803 President Jefferson signed a treaty with the Kaskaskia tribe to provide them Christian ministry and teaching.25 Of that treaty US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist explained:
Jefferson’s treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians . . . provided annual cash support for the Tribe’s Roman Catholic priest and church. . . . The treaty stated in part: “And whereas the greater part of said Tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic church, to which they are much attached, the United States will give annually for seven years one hundred dollars towards the support of a priest of that religion . . . [a]nd . . . three hundred dollars to assist the said Tribe in the erection of a church.”26
In 1804 President Jefferson signed yet another federal act for “propagating the Gospel” among Indians.27
Clearly, over an extended period of years, Jefferson had repeatedly demonstrated his interest in bringing Christianity to Indians. So, in 1804 he prepared for them a work using nothing but Jesus’ own words, just as had been recommended in the 1799 sermon that he applauded. He took two Bibles he had in the White House, cut from them words of Jesus in the Gospels, and then pasted those words into a separate folio, arranging them so that Indians could read the teachings of Jesus in a nonstop, end-to-end fashion.
According to Jefferson, that work was a “digest of His [Jesus’] moral doctrines, extracted in His own words from the Evangelists, and leaving out everything relative to His personal history and character.”28 In essence, this work was made up of the “red letters” of Jesus compiled into a short, pithy work to be read by Indians.
While this work is sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible,” it is actually and only what Jefferson said it was: an abridgement of the four Gospels for the use of Indians. For centuries abridgments of the Bible have been a significant and an accepted part of the Bible market, popular for use among the young and new learners.29
No original copy of that work survives, but what does remain is Jefferson’s title page for the work, his handwritten list of the passages he included, and the two White House Bibles from which he clipped the Gospel passages. In 1983 historian Dickinson Adams took those documents and reconstructed Jefferson’s Philosophy of Jesus . . . for the Use of the Indians,30 as did Charles Sanford in 198431 and Mark Beliles in 1993.32 From those three reconstructions, it is clear that Jefferson definitely did include the subjects below:
Miracles such as the healing on the Sabbath in Luke 14:1–6, and the commission of Jesus to His disciples in Matthew 10 to go and heal the sick
and raise the dead. It includes Jesus’ teaching about the resurrection of the dead, about His own second coming, about His role as judge of all men at the end of time, and about His place as Son of God and Lord of a heavenly kingdom. He is also shown forgiving the sins of men and women in a manner reserved for God alone.33
That abridgement also contained the miraculous resurrection of Jarius’s daughter (Matthew 9:18–25), the healing of the bleeding woman (Matthew 9:20–22), and the healing of two blind men (Matthew 9:27–31), all of which are clearly acts of a miraculous or supernatural character.34
Numerous other passages also contained mentions of the Divine, the miraculous, Heaven, Hell, and other supernatural elements, including Mark 14:61–62 (Jesus saying He is the Son of God); Matthew 11:4–5 (Jesus healing the blind, lame, lepers, and deaf, and raising the dead); Matthew 10:28 (Jesus’ teaching about Hell); Luke 15:7, 10 (Jesus’ teaching about Heaven and angels); and Matthew 19:29 (Jesus’ teaching on eternal life). It also included many other passages referring to Heaven, Hell, the resurrection, and other supernatural subjects (Matthew 13:40–42; Luke 14:14; Matthew 22:29–32; Matthew 25:31–34, 41, 46; Matthew 13:49– 50; and so on). In light of this, it is obvious that the charge that Jefferson clipped the supernatural or miraculous from this work is blatantly false.
Jefferson understood that the words of Jesus would change Native Americans just as they had changed other Americans and the rest of the world. And even though it took Jefferson “the work of one or two evenings only”35 to prepare this work for Indians, Pulitzer Prize–winning Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone nevertheless observed that “it is a notable fact that this chief of state devoted even that time to such a task.”36
So, since the 1804 work does not fit the modern description of a so-called Jefferson Bible, then how about Jefferson’s 1820 work? Could that be the alleged Jefferson Bible that demonstrates a dismissal of Jesus’ supernatural works?
With the 1820 work Jefferson took a much different approach than he did in the earlier one. He spent several years planning and preparing the later version; but like the 1804 work, it, too, had a specific purpose. He titled it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth; and on numerous occasions he said that the sole purpose of the work was to collect and present the major moral teachings of Jesus in one short, simple collection—teachings that on numerous occasions Jefferson declared surpassed those from all other sources.
It is a little-known fact that Jefferson spent literally decades of his life studying and comparing the moral teachings of dozens of history’s most famous teachers and leaders, including Ocellus, Timæus, Pythagoras, Aristides, Cato, Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, Xenophon, Seneca, Epictetus, Antoninus, and many others whose names are probably completely unknown to today’s readers. Jefferson read and critiqued the moral teachings of each of these leaders and then compared them against the moral teachings of Jesus, finding those of Jesus to be far superior.
In today’s shallow academic climate of Minimalism and Modernism, Jefferson’s preoccupation with the study of morals seems eccentric and out of the ordinary. It is usually dismissed as nothing more than what critics consider to be a thinly veiled subterfuge masking his true hatred of the Bible. After all, those modern critics surely wouldn’t have undertaken such an arduous study of morals across the millennia, so they can’t imagine that Jefferson would have done so. But the subject of morality was indeed a genuine theme of concentrated academic inquiry—not only for Jefferson but for most Americans. It was even a required, stand-alone course in nearly every American university during the Founding Era.
For example, Princeton University had a dedicated Professor of Moral Philosophy,37 and its president, John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration, delivered to students systematic “Lectures on Moral Philosophy.”38 Harvard had a Professor of Natural, Intellectual, and Moral Philosophy39 as well as a Professor of Christian Morals. Even Jefferson’s own university had a Professor of Moral Philosophy,40 and similar moral instruction was common in other major colleges in the Founding Era.41
In Jefferson’s day works addressng morals were written by individuals from a broad spectrum of professions, ranging from economists such as Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)42 to ministers such as the Reverend Richard Price with his Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1757).43 Many prominent Founding Fathers also wrote full works on morality44 or offered lengthy declarations about the importance of morality,45 and morals were a frequent object of legislation during the Founding Era.46
Now let us examine in detail Jefferson’s comparisons between the moral teachings of ancient leaders and those of Jesus, especially his reasons for finding those of Jesus superior to all others. Chief among those reasons was because Jesus “pushed His scrutinies into the heart of man; erected His tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.”47 If Jefferson had felt that Jesus’ teachings were somehow lacking embarrassing enough to warrant the slashing and reconstituting of the Bible, then why declare His moral superiority over and over again?
In the excerpt below Jefferson critiqued the moral teachings of eight different leaders, finding them deficient to those of Jesus:
I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed has given us what was good of the Stoics, all beyond of their dogmas being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great crime was in their calumnies [deliberate falsehoods] of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines, in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice—diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind. . . . Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon. . . . Seneca is indeed a fine moralist, disfiguring his work at times with some stoicisms and affecting too much of antithesis and point, yet giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality. But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country was Jesus of Nazareth. . . . Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves; Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others.48
How many of today’s most educated scholars even recognize these ancient names, much less have read their works and compared them with those of Jesus? Certainly few have, but Jefferson had. He was genuinely and sincerely focused on the issue of morality in a way that few in this era can comprehend—a way that Modernists, Deconstructionalist, Minimalist, and Academic Collectivists flatly dismiss.
During Jefferson’s first term as president, as was dealing with various national issues affected by morality, he began expressing his desire to compile a work on the morals of Jesus. He explained:
I should first take a general view of the moral doctrines of the most remarkable of the ancient philosophers, of whose ethics we have sufficient information to make an estimate—say Pythagoras, Epicurus, Epictetus, Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Antoninus. I should do justice to the branches of morality they have treated well, but point out the importance of those in which they are deficient. I should then take a view of the deism and ethics of the Jews and show in what a degraded state they were, and the necessity they presented of a reformation. I should proceed to a view of the life, character, and doctrines of Jesus. . . . [H]is system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers.49
Jefferson thought that his work should contrast the morals of Jesus not only with those of ancient leaders but also with several Christian movements of his day. (Interestingly, a number of Christian groups in Jefferson’s time distinguished themselves by their attempts to combine the morality of some ancient philosopher with that of Jesus.) Jefferson explained:
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 etc. etc. etc. 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 . . . There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.50
Jefferson believed that the moral teachings of Jesus needed nothing added from any other philosopher, whether Christian or Pagan. He declared:
The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus Himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms [i.e., teachings of Plato] engrafted on them—and for this obvious reason: that nonsense can never be explained.51
Jefferson regularly and repeatedly effused about the superiority of Jesus’ teachings,52 and it was never his intention for his proposed work to do anything except investigate only the morals of Jesus and nothing else—a point he made clear for years.53 In 1813 he finally began compiling the work about which he had so often spoken, reporting to his friend John Adams:
We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists [the Gospels], select even from them the very words only of Jesus. . . . 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. . . . The result is an octavo of forty-six pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered Apostles, the Apostolic Fathers, and the Christians of the first century.54 (emphasis added)
Two years later, in 1815, he told his close friend and famous Virginia evangelical leader, the Reverend Charles Clay, about his work:
Probably you have heard me say I had taken the four Evangelists [Gospels], had cut out from them every text they had recorded of the moral precepts of Jesus, and arranged them in a certain order; and although they appeared but as fragments, yet fragments of the most sublime edifice of morality which had ever been exhibited to man.55 (emphasis added)