The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
Thomas Jefferson, one of the great founders of the United States, in conjunction with James Madison, wrote the First Amendment to the US Constitution which establishes:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Although many of the foundering fathers believed in deism, they recognized the danger of religion and its ability to potentially corrupt the nation state. In response to this profound acknowledgment, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was instituted. As Jefferson noted in his famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in January 1, 1802:
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”
In fact, there is not a single mention of Christianity, God, Jesus, or any Supreme Being in the US Constitution; which clearly speaks to the secular foundation of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s rationality, secularism, belief in materialism and science was to such an extent that he actually edited the bible to remove all references to the supernatural, conflicting statements that lead to misinterpretation, and in order to achieve a proper time line, as noted below:
The Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth as it is formally titled, was Thomas Jefferson’s effort to extract the doctrine of Jesus by removing sections of the New Testament containing supernatural aspects as well as perceived misinterpretations he believed had been added by the Four Evangelists….Jefferson arranged selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order, mingling excerpts from one text to those of another in order to create a single narrative. Thus he begins with Luke 2 and Luke 3, then follows with Mark 1 and Matthew 3. He provides a record of which verses he selected and of the order in which he arranged them in his “Table of the Texts from the Evangelists employed in this Narrative and of the order of their arrangement.”
The Jefferson Bible begins with an account of Jesus’s birth without references to angels, genealogy, or prophecy. Miracles, references to the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and Jesus’ resurrection are also absent from the Jefferson Bible. The work ends with the words: “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. There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.” These words correspond to the ending of John 19 in the Bible.
