Americans have long been a people of the book. John Winthrop quoted from the Bible in his “city on the hill” sermon in 1630, and American political leaders have been quoting from it ever since.
But we craft new Bibles too, from the Book of Mormon of the Latter-day Saints to the Christian Scientists’ “Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures” and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Woman’s Bible.” Jefferson was out in front of all of these efforts. Here, too, he was a declarer of independence.
When the Jefferson Bible goes on display in November, Americans will have another opportunity to debate not only their third president’s faith (or lack thereof) but also the religious character of the nation and the true meaning of Christianity. This seems as good a time as any to ponder whether the “sum of all religion” is, as Jefferson once put it, “fear God and love thy neighbor.”
Perhaps one of Jefferson’s descendants served on the liturgical commission when the cut and paste Daily Office lectionary was compiled (you know…the one that, for example, razors out Romans 1:26-27).
Assuming Jefferson promulgated this in Washington DC, it must have particularly scandalized the sizable Catholic community of the time, which included many medical professionals trained there. Just four years later a controversy developed in DC over miracles about which tracts were widely distributed in the city. In the medical community there, a Catholic-associated sub-group held fast to the interpretation of certain healings as miraculous, for example that of Ann Carbery (http://www.mrsmattinglysmiracle.com/). Chief Justice John Marshall signed a document verifying that her healing was of a miraculous nature. One wonders if Jefferson’s blunt attempts to foist Enlightenment values on the new nation with his Bible re-do engendered the considered response by Catholic believers.
Of course his ‘quote’ of the Great Commandment was quite inaccurate also: not ‘fear God’, but ‘[i]love[/i] the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’. And the second, which ‘is like unto it’, is not merely to love thy neighbor but to love thy neighbor [i]as thyself[/i], which really is quite a different thing! Jefferson must have been counting on Biblical illiteracy among the citizens to slip this past them.
No. 2 – my understanding of Jefferson’s efforts is that they were for himself and that there was no “promulgation”, no attempt to “slip this past” anyone in particular, and no uproar in the Catholic Community. I think it also clear that “Enlightenment values” were prevalent among the Founders. I have not read that this condition caused any great foment between Catholics and Protestants in the New Republic.
I have a copy of the “Bible”. It is published by the Unitarian affiliated Beacon Press in Boston.
Actually it it is the New Testament only and is a “harmony” of the Gospels at that. In making his arrangement Jefferson cut out those parts that, to his mind were supernatural or did not admit of modern (18th Century) enlightenment thinking. It was arranged in four parallel texts: Greek, Latin, French and English. He titled it “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”
The book ends quoting from John and Mathew:
[blockquote]John 19:40-41 Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury. 41 Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. 42 There laid they Jesus.
Matthew 27:60 and [“he” omitted] rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.[/blockquote]
So Jefferson’s so called “Bible” ends with Jesus dead and rotting in a tomb and that is the end of that. A moral exemplar for the rest of us maybe, but nothing more than that.
It’s interesting that perhaps Jefferson did his Bible revision just for himself – if so, why is it well known?
I offer two different websites which give some detail about the Carbery cure, including the information that a pamphlet war about miracles was taking place in DC, within about 5 years of when Jefferson made his Bible revision:
http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2002/ll_wonder.html
http://www.quondamwashington.com/2009/01/missus-mattinglys-miracle-cure.html
(Note that one article has a comment after it which states there is a complete account of this miracle in the archives of the Georgetown convent, which was begun about the time of the Revolutionary War. So it was not merely lore, much less urban legend.)
It’s conceivable there was no cross-feed between Jefferson’s miracle-deleting Bible version and the issues surrounding belief in miracles in DC within a five-year time period, but I somehow doubt that. It was not a large community, and it was very self-referencing after the RW.
Mrs. Schori has done an even more fantastic job on the Book.
Scratching my head. We leap from Jefferson to K. Schori? I’m just saying…
Pavlov provided an explanation, No. 7.