Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

"Unimportant points" in the last sentence was softened into "innocent questions," but it is clear by Jefferson's dismissive tone here and elsewhere that he did find such points entirely unimportant, if not downright ridiculous.

Jefferson was blistering in his attack on many of the eminent figures of the Christian faith in their role as "corrupters." "Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Corypheus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus," he asserted. Not far behind Paul were the Evangelists, ignorant and superstitious men who distorted their supposed Messiah's message. "If we could believe that he (Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor."

In a series of private reflections to Adams, Jefferson upheld the opinion of the philosopher William Enfield that the Jewish moral philosophy of Jesus's era had reached a "low state" of "wretched depravity," and that Jesus saw himself as essentially an agent of moral reform. But "In extracting the pure principles which he taught," Jefferson reiterates,

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 them. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their Logos and Demi-urgos, Aeons and Daemons male and female, with a long train of Etc. Etc. Etc. or, shall I say at once, of Nonsense.

The solution was to separate the sayings of Jesus, at least those that seem in accordance with what we can glean of his character, from the miraculous doings ascribed to him by the apostles. This Jefferson did for himself, literally taking a razor to the New Testament and excising everything which seemed to him dubious.

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 8vo. [octavo] of 46. pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted upon by the unlettered apostles, the Apostolic fathers, and the Christians of the 1st. century.

Indeed he had done it twice: first in 1804, creating a document he called "The Philosophy of Jesus," and then again, far more extensively, in 1820. This final work, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels," remained unpublished until 1903, when it was printed by the U.S. Congress for perusal by its members, and since that time it has enjoyed considerable popularity among agnostics and freethinkers. Needless to say, Jefferson himself was cagey about these activities of his, only confiding in trusted friends like Adams, Priestley, and Rush. It was his lifelong policy, reinforced by bitter experience in the political arena, to keep his unorthodox religious notions to himself.