Jefferson Bible

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Handwritten title page of the "Jefferson Bible"

The so-called Jefferson Bible , originally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth , is a book by Thomas Jefferson that presents the life story and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth . It consists of excerpts from the New Testament , which Jefferson rearranged, omitting all passages that tell of supernatural phenomena or that, in his opinion, contained historical errors. Jefferson created the original edition by cutting out and rearranging individual verses from several Bibles in Greek , Latin , French and English . This made Jefferson an early proponent of historical Jesus research , even if the work was not published during his lifetime.

Structure and content

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Two pages of a book with Bible verses newly compiled by Jefferson

Jefferson divided the four Gospels and mixed them up by putting the events in a chronological order and combining them into a single narrative, which he divided into 17 chapters, each with numbered verses, based on the structure of the Bible. Its version begins with the birth of Jesus according to Lk 2,1-7  SLT and ends with a combination of Joh 19  SLT and Mt 27.60  SLT , the description of his burial and the closing of the grave.

The resurrection is not part of the account. Nor is there any reference to miracles , prophecies, or angels in Jefferson's version . The concepts of heaven and hell do play a role, however, and some events in the Old Testament, such as the Flood, are mentioned as times. The references to God persisted, but the mentions of the Trinity did not, and Jesus is not clearly characterized as divine or referred to as God's Son.

Origin and publication history

Jefferson created a first version in 1804. He reported on his work on it in letters to friends, including Benjamin Rush and John Adams . He called the book Philosophy of Jesus . In a letter to Charles Thompson dated January 8, 1816, he described it as the most beautiful piece of ethics he had ever seen and proof that he was a true Christian who followed the pure teaching of Christ. This teaching - as he wrote a few years later - had to be filtered out of the extravagant descriptions of his biographers, to whom many claims had been added over time that could not be justified by the actually transmitted words of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. In keeping with the philosophy of the Enlightenment , Jefferson removed all reports of events that he did not consider rationally explainable, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the historical person Jesus.

Between 1819 and 1820, Jefferson assembled his final version of the book at his Monticello home by razor- picking from six different copies of the Bible - two Greco-Latin, two French, and two English in the King James Version Cut out passages and pasted them into a blank book. He gave her the title The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth .

The note "for the use of the Indians" on the title page of the first draft, which was later rejected, became the occasion for the occasional opinion that Jefferson had compiled the Bible verses for proselytizing the Indians. However, other sources indicate that Jefferson had intended the book for his personal use and only planned to share it with his closest friends. Jefferson never tried to get the book published, on the one hand because he was of the opinion that his religious beliefs were his private affair, and on the other hand because he feared that his unorthodox treatment of the Bible would be used against him by his political opponents.

Cyrus Adler, who was the Smithsonian Institution's librarian from 1892 to 1909 , learned about the book from a Jefferson biographer, which was then in the possession of Jefferson's great-granddaughter Carolina Randolph. In 1895 the Smithsonian Institution bought the Jefferson Bible for their library, where it has been kept ever since, as well as the two English-language Bible editions that Jefferson had used.

In 1902, the United States Congress decided to have 9,000 lithographs of the "Jefferson Bible" produced, which, despite complaints from Christian institutions, were given to all new members of Congress as a welcome gift in the following years.

Cover of the "Jefferson Bible"

In 2009 a project to restore and preserve the book began in collaboration with the National Museum of American History . The pages were released from their binding, stabilized and re-bound. All book pages were digitized in order to make them accessible to the public. The restored edition was presented in an exhibition in May 2012. Several print editions of the "Jefferson Bible" have now appeared; the text is also available in the public domain on the Internet.

In 2018 the journalist Tobias Huch published the first German translation of the Jefferson Bible in a modernized language.

Expenses (selection)

  • The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English by Thomas Jefferson. Washington, GPO 1904 (with an introduction by Cyrus Adler).
  • The Jefferson Bible. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Beacon Press 2001, ISBN 0-8070-7714-3 (with an introduction by Forrest Church).
  • The Jefferson Bible, Smithsonian Edition. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Smithsonian Books 2011, ISBN 978-1-58834-312-3 .
  • The Jefferson Bible: The Real Heart of the New Testament . Riva Publishing House . ISBN 978-3-7423-0572-5 (modern translation by Tobias Huch )

Web links

Wikisource: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth  - Sources and full texts (English)
Commons : Jefferson Bible  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Thomas Jefferson's Bible Is Sent to the Conservation Lab. In: Smithsonian.com. March 10, 2011, accessed June 10, 2012 .
  2. ^ Paul Leicester Ford (ed.): The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XI. Correspondence and Papers 1808-1816. Cosimo, 2005, ISBN 978-1-61640-214-3 , p. 498.
  3. ↑ Jefferson in a letter to William Short dated October 31, see Paul Leicester Ford (Ed.): The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XII. Correspondence and Papers 1816-1826. Cosimo, 2005, ISBN 978-1-61640-216-7 , pp. 141-142.
  4. ↑ D. James Kennedy; Jerry Newcombe: What If America Were a Christian Nation Again? Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville 2003, ISBN 978-0-7852-7042-3 .
  5. ^ Forrest Church: The Gospel according to Thomas Jefferson. In: The Jefferson Bible. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Beacon Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8070-7714-3 , pp. 18-20.
  6. ↑ National Museum of American History Embarks on Conservation of Jefferson's Bible. (No longer available online.) In: Press release of the National Museum of American History . March 11, 2011, archived from the original on June 27, 2012 ; accessed on June 10, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / americanhistory.si.edu
  7. ^ G. Wayne Clough: Secretary Clough on Jefferson's Bible. The head of the Smithsonian Institution details the efforts American History Museum conservators took to repair the artifact. (No longer available online.) In: Smithsonian magazine. October 2011, archived from the original on April 8, 2013 ; accessed on June 10, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.smithsonianmag.com
  8. ↑ riva publishing house: The Jefferson Bible The life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth . Munich, ISBN 978-3-7423-0572-5 .