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Jan. 7th, 2008
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
Jan. 7th, 2008 12:38 pmI heard about this (also known as "The Jefferson Bible") some while ago, but finally got to seeking out a text of it. It's a project of Thomas Jefferson's, to strip out of Christianity what he saw as the superstition, rumour and irrelevant gubbins. He goes through the Gospels and extracts what he considers to be the plausible facts of the life and accounts of the teachings of Jesus, arranges them in a sensible order, and thus generates what he considers a useful work of moral precept. So there's no resurrection, no miracles, no prophecy, no genealogy and that sort of stuff.
Jefferson says of it "A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." We would describe his religion as Christian deism, although I don't know if he did so himself.
His biographer Merrill Peterson summarized this belief as: "First, that the Christianity of the churches was unreasonable, therefore unbelievable, but that stripped of priestly mystery, ritual, and dogma, reinterpreted in the light of historical evidence and human experience, and substituting the Newtonian cosmology for the discredited Biblical one, Christianity could be conformed to reason. Second, morality required no divine sanction or inspiration, no appeal beyond reason and nature, perhaps not even the hope of heaven or the fear of hell; and so the whole edifice of Christian revelation came tumbling to the ground."
Of course plenty of people at the time said that you weren't be a real Christian if you rejected the various supernatural doctrines -- among them, his opponents in the US Presidential election. But back then, voters presumably weren't significantly put off by that, as he won (eventually).
Jefferson says of it "A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." We would describe his religion as Christian deism, although I don't know if he did so himself.
His biographer Merrill Peterson summarized this belief as: "First, that the Christianity of the churches was unreasonable, therefore unbelievable, but that stripped of priestly mystery, ritual, and dogma, reinterpreted in the light of historical evidence and human experience, and substituting the Newtonian cosmology for the discredited Biblical one, Christianity could be conformed to reason. Second, morality required no divine sanction or inspiration, no appeal beyond reason and nature, perhaps not even the hope of heaven or the fear of hell; and so the whole edifice of Christian revelation came tumbling to the ground."
Of course plenty of people at the time said that you weren't be a real Christian if you rejected the various supernatural doctrines -- among them, his opponents in the US Presidential election. But back then, voters presumably weren't significantly put off by that, as he won (eventually).