Bible 1 Peter 1 Begotten Us Again

illustration with text of Jefferson Bible over an engraving of Thomas Jefferson
Illustration by Katie Martin; images from Kean Drove / Getty; National Museum of American History

Was Thomas Jefferson an atheist? Plenty of people idea so. Jefferson never identified himself equally such, of class. But it was his microscopes, his French friends, his whole swinging, freethinking Enlightenment vibe … "I hope he is not an unbeliever, as he has been represented," worried the Nonconformist English chaplain (and chemist) Joseph Priestley, after Jefferson came to hear him speak in Philadelphia in 1797. Others could scent the godlessness like brimstone; if Jefferson became president, thundered a Federalist opponent in 1798, "the Bible would be bandage into a bonfire, our holy worship inverse into a trip the light fantastic toe of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat." Two years later, as news of Jefferson's election victory spread, there were reports that pious housewives in New England were burying their family Bibles for protection, or hiding them down wells.

As it turned out, Jefferson attacked only one re-create of the Bible: his ain. Non with fire, simply with a razor. And non in an human activity of dizzy desecration, but with a kind of serrated—slightly crazed?—reasonableness. He cut and he pasted. He edited and he redacted. He called the resulting text—a collage of verses from the New Testament—The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Nosotros know it as the Jefferson Bible.

Peter Manseau's fluent and instructive The Jefferson Bible: A Biography arrives to celebrate the 200th anniversary of this patchwork Gospel, which Jefferson completed, after many years of trivial, in 1820. Manseau, the curator of American religious history at the National Museum of American History, carefully traces Jefferson'south pilgrimage into the non-miraculous, from the Anglicanism in which he was raised, via exposure to Locke and Newton and the polemics of the roaring infidel Henry Saint John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke, to the point where he writes to his nephew in 1787: "Question with disrespect even the being of a god; considering, if there be one, he must more corroborate the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

The message minus the mumbo jumbo: that's what Jefferson was later. The teachings—the "precepts," he called them—without the supernatural baggage. Jesus the ethicist, Jesus the philosopher, writer of "the nigh sublime and chivalrous lawmaking of morals which has e'er been offered to man." Of this Jesus Jefferson was indeed a fan. Of Jesus the dusty thaumaturge, the wandering soul-zapper and self-styled son of God, less so. Jefferson esteemed Jesus as he esteemed Socrates and "our master Epicurus"—as a beautiful mind. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John: cringing rustics who had fumbled the story, "forgetting frequently, or not understanding, what had fallen from him … giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves." Fourth dimension to dig the real Jesus out from under "the dross of his biographers." Cutting away the walking on water, kick-out of demons, laying-on of easily, teleportation, claims of divinity, resurrection, etc. Preserve but, in a thousand or so verses, the bare details and pure utterance of a dead-on moralist. "Information technology is equally easy to dissever those parts," wrote Jefferson to John Adams in 1814, "equally to pick out diamonds from dunghills."

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It was the hobbyhorse of his old historic period, undertaken in retirement at Monticello, largely for his ain satisfaction: the Jeffersonian equivalent of pottering around the garden shed. But Manseau makes the point that The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth—in technical terms—was quite as radical artistically equally it was theologically: "The Dadaists might have recognized information technology as a découpé. Had it come from the desk of William Burroughs a generation later, it would have been called a cut-up. Today, the most advisable counterpart for what Jefferson achieved might exist music sampling."

So: piece of work of fine art, or humanist hit job? It doesn't exactly move, the Jefferson Bible. To the poetry of the Gospels, their awareness of metaphor pressing at the hinge of reality, of Word condign mankind, Jefferson was utterly impervious, or he wasn't interested. Mark is the evangelist of whom he makes the least apply (31 extracts, compared with xc from the Gospel according to Matthew), perhaps because the Markan Jesus simply cannot exist extracted from the cyclone of healing and supercharged spoken communication in which he moves. The demons who know his name, who cry out in fearful recognition, and whom he ejects from their possessed hosts with the undemonstrative compactness of a bouncer mid-shift; the centurion at the foot of the cross, nonplussed at the last cry—these are Marking's witnesses to the nature of Jesus. John's Gospel is featured slightly more than (33 times), only with, of course, none of the John-ness: the In the starting time–ness, his droning light-tunnel back to the showtime syllable of Cosmos.

Mystery, if you're a rationalist, is not a radiant depth, still less a spiritual invitation; it's merely something that hasn't been explained yet. And so Jefferson's narrative rumbles along at basis level, on square wheels—no baptismal shock of light from above, no dove descending. And no risen Jesus. The Jefferson Bible ends with Jesus snug in the tomb, the cave mouth securely plugged, gobstopped, by the nothoped-for-moved stone. No more words. Resurrection foreclosed. And it's odd: Every bit a regular, somewhat inspired guru-human, Jesus makes less sense than earlier. My yoke is easy and my burden lite … I am the skilful shepherd … Stripped of their divine warrant, these weird claims make the Jeffersonian Jesus sound like Charles Manson.

White-haired Jefferson kept his Bible to himself and his firsthand intellectual circumvolve, heeding perchance the concerns of friends like the Reverend Charles Dirt, who wrote to him hand-wringingly in 1814: "My fears are … that your Proper name will exist degraded from the Venerable Council of truthful, 18-carat, Useful Philosophy; & Condemned to be Ranked with the wild Sophisters of Jacobinism the Theosophies of Masonry, With Martinists, Swedenborgers, & Rosecrusians, with the Epopts & Magi of Illuminism &c."

That didn't happen. Ambiguous as his legacy might be, nobody classes Jefferson with the epopts of Illuminism. Past 1895 the big red ledger into which he glued his scriptural slicings was in the United states of america National Museum. After an act of Congress in 1904, every new fellow member of both houses was issued a government-printed copy of the Jefferson Bible, a practise that would proceed for half a century. Representative John Fletcher Lacey, who put forward the bill, called the Bible "a consolidation of the beautiful, pure teachings of the Saviour in a meaty form, mingled with simply so much of narrative as a Virginia lawyer would hold to be credible in those thing-of-fact days."

And today? With disinformation fizzing in the ether, and nonsense dominant, and reason tottering on its throne? Surely we need the Jefferson Bible more than than ever: an exemplary demonstration of rationalism and intellectual autonomy. Calmly the sage bends over the text; calmly he carves away what doesn't make sense. Merely a text similar this produces its own anti-text, made of everything that'due south been left out: a Jefferson Bible in negative, with a just-the-miracles Jesus hurtling wordlessly from one holy disruption to the next. Censorship past affair-of-factness is censorship still: The repressed, the removed, doesn't go away. Personally, not being Thomas Jefferson, I demand Jesus and his miracles and his divine nature—I need the celestial reverb that they requite to his words. Mystery, wonder, confusion—they're the essence. Similar the yeast that leavens the bread, like the treasure buried in the field. Have a razor to that, and yous're in problem.


This commodity appears in the November 2020 impress edition with the headline "The Bible Without Miracles."

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/peter-manseau-jefferson-bible/616476/

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