Imagine, for a moment, if news broke that Barack Obama had cut up a Bible, separating it into "diamonds" to be distinguished from the rest of the "dunghill". I am guessing that the media's collective head would explode, as would any number of politicians, Rep & Dem alike.
A President did this very thing, however...drafter of the Declaration of Independence and our third President, Thomas Jefferson. The 46 page book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth", generally referred to as the
Jefferson Bible, was based on his lifetime of research, contemplation and inquiry. He sums up his efforts in an 1813 letter to John Adams:
In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … 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, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. 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, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.
While it has been
written about in main-stream media and was once ordered printed by Congress and distributed to all members (in 1904, what fun it would be to do that again), it remains relatively little known and seldom discussed. This is, I think a great shame, as his issues then are every bit as relevant now...perhaps more so, as we seem to be in a period where one can not discuss such things (at least not rationally). One either believes lock, stock, and barrel or does not believe at all. Anyone who might wish to discuss something between those two points gets shouted down by one or both of the extremes. Such is discourse at the start of the 21st century.
In an 1803 letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson said that his edited version sought to determine whether the ethical teachings of Jesus could be separated from that which was attached to "Christianity" over the centuries. He wrote, "To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself."
Such contemplation was of importance to Jefferson, whose
Statute for Religious Freedom (and its embodied Separation of Church and State) was one of only three achievements he instructed to be included in his epitaph. We are reduced now to breathless (and/or incorrect) articles on
which church the president "pick" and why he has not yet done so.
It is a sad commentary that men (and women) of conscience are not able to discuss such matters, reducing the debate to rabble-rousers on both sides. Yeats, of course, was right, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity." It is, none-the-less, a shame.
If you would like to read it,
GoogleBooks iteration is what you would expect, but
this version allows easy side-by-side comparisons of Jefferson's edits against the KJV.
Alternatively, there is Robert Heinlein, "Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything."
Labels: bookish, history, random bits