Jefferson Bible

Based on Wikipedia: Jefferson Bible

The Founding Father with a Razor and Glue Pot

Thomas Jefferson, the man who penned the Declaration of Independence and served as the third President of the United States, spent his evenings in a rather unusual pursuit. He sat at his desk with a razor blade, a pot of glue, and several copies of the New Testament in four different languages. Page by page, verse by verse, he was literally cutting Jesus out of the Bible.

The result was something he never published in his lifetime, something he shared with only a handful of trusted friends, something he read privately before bed each night. We now call it the Jefferson Bible, though Jefferson himself never used that name.

What he created was a carefully curated portrait of Jesus as a moral philosopher—nothing more, nothing less. No virgin birth. No walking on water. No raising Lazarus from the dead. And critically, no resurrection. Jefferson's Jesus was born like any other man, taught revolutionary ethics, died on a cross, and stayed dead. The book ends with a stone rolled against a tomb. Full stop.

The Diamond Mining Operation

Jefferson believed that the authentic teachings of Jesus had been buried under centuries of theological debris. In a letter to John Adams in 1813, he described his project with remarkable confidence:

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.

Diamonds in a dunghill. That's not diplomatic language. Jefferson was saying that the core message of Jesus—the actual words and deeds of the historical man—sparkled with obvious brilliance, while the supernatural additions of later writers were, well, manure.

This wasn't mere skepticism. Jefferson genuinely revered Jesus as a moral teacher. He called the extracted teachings "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man." He believed that the original, simple doctrines of Jesus were "within the comprehension of a child." The problem, as he saw it, was that priests and theologians had wrapped these pure teachings in layers of mysticism for their own purposes.

Two Bibles, Actually

Jefferson actually produced two separate works, though only one survives. The first, completed in 1804 during his presidency, was called "The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth." Its full title reveals an unexpected intended audience: it was supposedly prepared "for the Use of the Indians, Unembarrassed with Matters of Fact or Faith beyond the Level of their Comprehensions."

Scholars debate whether Jefferson actually planned to distribute this to Native Americans, or whether the subtitle was a clever cover story—perhaps even a veiled insult aimed at his Federalist political opponents. Jefferson had used such indirect tactics before.

No copies of this 1804 version exist today. We know about it only through Jefferson's letters.

The second version, completed in 1820 after Jefferson had left the presidency, was more ambitious. Titled "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," it aimed not just to extract Jesus's moral teachings but to reconstruct his entire biography. Jefferson worked from texts in four languages: Greek, Latin, French, and English. He cut passages from each version and arranged them in parallel columns, allowing him to compare translations. He even glued in a map of the ancient world and the Holy Land for geographical reference.

The Editorial Scalpel

Jefferson's editing philosophy was ruthlessly consistent. If something defied natural law, it got cut. If a verse described Jesus performing a miracle, out it went. If a passage implied divine origin, Jefferson's razor sliced it away.

But he wasn't simply anti-miracle. He was after what he considered the authentic Jesus, the first-century Jewish teacher who had walked dusty roads and spoken to crowds. Historian Edwin Scott Gaustad notes that Jefferson would preserve moral lessons even when they were embedded in miracle stories—he simply extracted the teaching and discarded the supernatural wrapper. "Even when this took some rather careful cutting with scissors or razor," Gaustad writes, "Jefferson managed to maintain Jesus' role as a great moral teacher, not as a shaman or faith healer."

The Sermon on the Mount survived intact. The memorable parables remained. But the multiplication of loaves and fishes? Gone. The healing of the blind? Cut. The resurrection that forms the cornerstone of Christian faith? Conspicuously absent.

Jefferson's Gospel opens with the birth of Jesus—but no angels announce it, no star guides magi from the East, no prophecies are fulfilled. It ends with Jesus's burial: "There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed."

That's it. No empty tomb. No "He is risen." The story simply stops.

A Religion for the Republic

To understand why Jefferson did this, you have to understand his broader philosophical project. He saw himself as rescuing Christianity from Christians.

In 1801, just after becoming president, he wrote to a friend that "the Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind."

This is a remarkable claim. Jefferson believed that authentic Christianity—the real thing, before it got corrupted—was essentially compatible with Enlightenment values. Jesus, properly understood, was a proto-republican philosopher teaching the dignity of individuals and the importance of moral self-governance.

Jefferson found support for this view in an unlikely source: Adam Weishaupt, the German philosopher who founded the Illuminati. (Yes, that Illuminati—though the actual organization was far more mundane than conspiracy theories suggest, essentially a secret society promoting Enlightenment ideals.) Jefferson noted approvingly that Weishaupt believed Jesus's intention "was simply to reinstate natural religion, and by diffusing the light of his morality, to teach us to govern ourselves."

In this reading, Jesus becomes a champion of what Jefferson called "pure deism"—belief in a creator God who established natural laws and moral principles, without ongoing supernatural intervention in human affairs.

The Sect of One

Jefferson's religious views made him politically vulnerable throughout his career. His opponents accused him of atheism, a serious charge in early American politics. The Jefferson Bible can be understood partly as a defense—a way of demonstrating that he was, in fact, a genuine Christian.

In one letter, he described his edited Gospel as "a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus."

But notice that qualification: a disciple of the doctrines. Not of the theology, the creeds, the councils, or the churches—just the teachings themselves.

When pressed about his religious affiliation, Jefferson gave one of the more memorable responses in American religious history. In 1819, he wrote to a minister: "You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."

A sect of one. It's a peculiarly American religious position—the individual conscience as the ultimate authority, rejecting institutional claims on belief. Jefferson wasn't just editing the Bible; he was asserting his right to do so.

The Long Afterlife

Jefferson never published his work. He showed it to a small circle of friends and read it privately for his own spiritual nourishment. After his death in 1826, the manuscript passed to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

For decades, it remained in family hands, a curious artifact of the founding era. Then, in 1895, Jefferson's great-granddaughter Carolina Randolph sold it to the Smithsonian Institution for four hundred dollars. That's roughly twelve thousand dollars in today's money—a modest price for a document hand-crafted by a founding father.

Nine years later, in 1904, Congress authorized the Government Printing Office to produce a lithographic reproduction. Here's where the story takes an unexpected turn: beginning that year and continuing for half a century, new members of Congress received a copy of the Jefferson Bible.

Think about that for a moment. The United States government was distributing a version of the New Testament that explicitly removed all miracles, denied the divinity of Jesus, and ended with him dead in a tomb. To freshmen congressmen. As an official gift.

The practice eventually stopped in the 1950s, though a private organization called the Libertarian Press revived it in 1997. In 2013, the American Humanist Association published its own edition and sent copies to every member of Congress and President Obama. Their version added a twist: alongside Jefferson's selections, it included passages he had cut, allowing readers to see what he rejected as well as what he kept.

Seeing the Work Today

The original Jefferson Bible—the actual physical book that Jefferson assembled by hand—now lives at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. In 2009, conservators began a careful restoration project, and in 2011 the museum unveiled a major exhibit featuring the work.

The Smithsonian photographed every page using a high-resolution camera setup: a Hasselblad with a fifty-megapixel sensor and a specialized Zeiss macro lens. These images are now available online, allowing anyone to zoom in and examine Jefferson's handiwork—the precise cuts, the glue marks, the places where he textually corrected verses or extracted individual words to improve the flow.

The exhibit also displayed something equally fascinating: the source books Jefferson used. These were the Bibles he had physically destroyed to create his new work, their pages now riddled with rectangular holes where verses once lived.

What the Jefferson Bible Means

The Jefferson Bible matters not because it's an authoritative text—it isn't, not for any religious tradition—but because of what it reveals about the American experiment.

Jefferson believed that religion and reason could be reconciled, but only if religion submitted to reason's editing. He thought the essence of Jesus's teaching was ethical, not metaphysical. Love your neighbor. Do unto others. Care for the poor. These principles, stripped of supernatural claims, could form the moral foundation for a republic of free citizens.

This is a distinctly Enlightenment project, and it has its critics. Traditional Christians argue that you cannot separate Jesus's moral teachings from his divine identity—that the authority of his ethics depends precisely on claims that Jefferson cut away. Remove the resurrection, and you remove the reason to listen to the Sermon on the Mount.

Secularists might argue the opposite: that Jefferson didn't go far enough, that even his curated Jesus is still a product of a specific time and culture, not a universal moral teacher.

But Jefferson wasn't writing for either camp. He was writing for himself, trying to find a version of Christianity he could honestly believe. His private reading ritual—studying his hand-assembled text before bed each night—suggests genuine spiritual seeking, not mere intellectual exercise.

In the end, the Jefferson Bible is a document of American religious individualism, the audacious claim that even sacred texts can be edited by a single reader with a razor blade and a clear sense of what he's looking for. It's heresy by some measures. It's also, in its own strange way, an act of devotion.

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. His Bible outlived him by centuries, a testament to one man's attempt to find diamonds in what he considered a dunghill, and to build a faith he could live with.