Nor was it clear why anyone would bother with him eighteenĬenturies later whatever moral principles Jefferson's Jesus taught had become not only "common sense" but also, by then, commonplace. The depraved religion of His country." From his abridgment it was impossible to know why any Christian would give up his own life rather than deny faith in Jesus. But in editing out the miracles and other gospel stories, Jefferson also made Jesus into a self-deluded prophet, albeit "the greatest of all the reformers of Jefferson purged the gospels of nearly half their text. In reducing Jesus to a teacher of morals, His abridgment of the gospels was just as tidy. Jefferson was deist, a luminary of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment who imagined God to be as reasonable and rational as the laws that govern the visible universe. Noble and self-evident to those who (like himself) could separate the wheat of common sense from the chaff of superstition.
There is, in short, nothing to suggest that Jesus was anything more than a teacher of morals that - to Jefferson's mind - were both So are the narratives of his miraculousīirth and the greatest miracle of all, his resurrection from the dead. Congress, is interesting now mainly for what it leaves out. The Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, published posthumously in 1904 by the U.S. Principles and hoped to distill them by "abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers ,Īnd as separable from that as the diamond from the dung hill." Set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law." Nonetheless, Jefferson much admired Jesus as a teacher of moral Those passages he deemed most likely to yield the "philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth." As best he could make out, Jesus was "a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind who Working after hours in the White House, Jefferson clipped and pasted from the New Testament Shortly after he was elected the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson began a project that was to consume much of his leisure time in later life.
The Meaning of the Miracle Stories in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam