A Man, His Bible and His Country

In 1886, Cyrus Adler, a student at Johns Hopkins University found something unusual in a private library. He discovered two King James Bibles that had been cut up; not chaotically but sliced neatly to remove very specific passages.  A note attached to the books told him that one of America’s founding fathers had used the clippings to make another book. Later, serving as the Smithsonian’s librarian and curator of world religions, he tracked down that created book and in 1895, purchased it for $400.  He had purchased The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth  from Carolina Randolph, the great- granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson.  

In 1820, well into retirement and six years before he died, Jefferson decided to make a second attempt at creating his own devotional text. He took Bibles in four languages, English, French, Greek and Latin and cut out the passages from the four Gospels that he wanted and lined up the verses in the different languages in parallel. He took out all the miracles and anything he considered to be “contrary to reason.” Jefferson kept the basic moral teachings of Jesus which he considered the best of any religious leader or philosopher in history. He told only a few close friends that he had done this. Some historians think he may have read from this every night during the last years of his life.

Then in 1904, by act of Congress, his version of Scripture was printed in bulk and newly elected senators were given copies. That supply of books ran out in the 1950s. 

The National Museum of American History has recently completed a complicated restoration of Jefferson’s original book and it can be seen through July 15 in Jefferson’s Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Whatever one thinks of Jefferson’s editing of the Bible, his real contribution to religion in America was in helping to define the church – state relationship. And I think that believers and non-believers of all stripes owe him and the other like-minded founders, a debt of gratitude because of it. His work in promoting the idea that state and federal governments of the US should not establish or interfere with religion is one of the foundational ideas of American democracy and though certainly not enforced perfectly down through the years by our legal system, it has helped define us as Americans.

Outside of authoring the Declaration of Independence (as if that wasn’t enough), one of the most well known phrases that Jefferson wrote is the “wall of separation between church and state.” It was a part of a letter that President Jefferson had written in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, a minority religion in Connecticut at the time, who were concerned about their rights in the new nation.  The phrase has been used by the Supreme Court in deciding church – state legal cases.

I visited Monticello recently and the epitaph that Jefferson wrote for himself is carved into the tombstone over his grave. It lists the three accomplishments of which he was most proud. The first is as author of the Declaration of Independence and the third is as the father of the University of Virginia. The second is as the author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. We take it for granted that there ought to be freedom of worship in the US, but it wasn’t always so,  and the echoes of Jefferson’s ideas on this matter resound loudly two hundred plus years later and still inform our own debates today.


The Thomas Jefferson's Bible website at the National Museum of American History site is just below. By clicking on the link, you will be taken away from this site to the museum site.
Thomas Jefferson's Bible.