Jefferson Bible Research Paper

The Jefferson Bible: A Reconciliation of Jefferson & Christianity

As a work of theological literature, Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or otherwise popularly known as the Jefferson Bible, has historically either been considered a philosophical masterpiece or shrugged off as irreverent blasphemy. From a fundamentalist point-of-view, Jefferson had desecrated the world’s most glorified and holy text, butchering doctrines by which countless people live with his illicit cutting-and-pasting. On the other hand, thinkers from the Enlightenment camp saw Jefferson’s aggressive interpretation of the New Testament as a necessary adaptation to modernity, a much-needed reconciliation of an outdated text with a changing
From a pragmatic perspective, he needed a general belief and adherence to Christianity in order for his bible to have any impact. The code of ethics as prescribed by both Jesus and Jefferson relies on the condition that there is a heaven and a life after death, as incentives for humanity to behave benevolently for the temporal duration of their worldly lives. Ideologically, Jefferson did not attack the existence of God, rather all the dogmatic intermediation required under the Church for a human being to reach Him. In this way, he was above all else a humanist, resonating the Enlightenment values of human potential, individual freedom, and democracy. As such, Jefferson wanted to bring God closer to the common man, so close in fact that each human being could potentially find God within himself (instead of in some obscure Trinity) – that is if he lives a Samaritan life by Jesus’ moral standard. Thus Jefferson’s Jesus is not a deity or shaman or faith healer, but simply an extraordinary human being with a reformist mind and an enlightened sense of morality, qualities of the ideal leader of humanity. Through him, the Jefferson Bible exudes a refreshing sense of optimism in the dignity and goodness of humankind, in turn rejecting the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, corrupted, fallen creature. In the
In this way, he separates himself from the crowd of Enlightenment thinkers and authors, giving birth to an American Enlightenment that retained the fundamental ideals of its European counterpart but departed from the beaten track. To explain such a distinctive presence, Jefferson most likely read and studied very widely, running the gamut from Baruch de Spinoza all the way to Thomas Paine, but he made it all his own possession, taking and modifying the parts with which he agreed and cutting out the parts that did not suit him, just as he did with the Jefferson Bible. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the striking similarities between Jefferson’s major ideas and the principles of English philosopher John Locke. Although Locke advocated for an abundance of different religions as opposed to Jefferson’s utopian world of a singular, absolutist belief system, the two thinkers are bonded by their common sentiment that human nature is characterized by reason, sensibility and tolerance, and of course, their famous mutual conviction that all men are created