The Jefferson Bible by Thomas Jefferson

The Life Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted 

Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English

Published by Smithsonian Books, with Essays by Harry R. 

Rubenstein, Barbara Clark Smith and Janice Stagnitto Ellis

2011 First Edition Hardcover Facsimile

Like New. The book is clean, covers attached, uncreased spine, secure binding, crisp inner pages, unmarked, no writing, no highlighting, no stains, no fading, no ripped pages, no edge chipping, no corner folds, no crease marks, no remainder marks, not ex-library. Very faint to indiscernible signs of wear on the plastic protective cover from use, storage and handling.

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The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the  Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by  Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson compiled the manuscripts but never published them. The first,  The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second,  The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting, with a razor and glue, numerous sections from the  New Testament  as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all  miracles by Jesus  and most mentions of the  supernatural, including sections of the four  gospels  that contain the  Resurrection  and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine.

Using a razor and glue, Jefferson cut and pasted his arrangement of selected verses from a 1794 bilingual Latin/Greek version using the text of the  Plantin Polyglot, a French Geneva Bible and the  King James Version of the gospels of  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke, and  John  in chronological order—putting together excerpts from one text with those of another 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 he chose in his  Table of the Texts from the Evangelists employed in this Narrative and of the order of their arrangement. Consistent with his  naturalistic  outlook and intent, most supernatural events are not included in Jefferson's heavily edited compilation. Paul K. Conkin states that "For the teachings of Jesus he concentrated on his milder admonitions (the Sermon on the Mount) and his most memorable parables. What resulted is a reasonably coherent, but at places oddly truncated, biography. If necessary to exclude the miraculous, Jefferson would cut the text even in mid-verse." Historian  Edwin Scott Gaustad  explains, "If a moral lesson was embedded in a miracle, the lesson survived in Jeffersonian scripture, but the miracle did not. Even when this took some rather careful cutting with scissors or razor, Jefferson managed to maintain Jesus' role as a great moral teacher, not as a  shaman  or faith healer." Therefore,  The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth  begins with an account of Jesus' birth without references to  angels  (at that time),  genealogy, or  prophecy.  Miracles, references to the  Trinity  and the  divinity  of Jesus, and Jesus'  resurrection  are also absent from his collection. 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.

After completion of the  Life and Morals, about 1820, Jefferson shared it with a number of friends, but he never allowed it to be published during his lifetime. The most complete form Jefferson produced was inherited by his grandson,  Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and was acquired in 1895 by the  National Museum  in Washington. The book was later published as a  lithographic  reproduction by an act of the  United States Congress  in 1904. Beginning in 1904 and continuing every other year until the 1950s, new members of Congress were given a copy of the  Jefferson Bible. Until the practice first stopped, copies were provided by the  Government Printing Office. A private organization, the Libertarian Press, revived the practice in 1997. In January 2013, the  American Humanist Association  published an edition of the  Jefferson Bible, distributing a free copy to every member of Congress and President Barack Obama. A Jefferson Bible For the Twenty-First Century  adds samples of passages that Jefferson chose to omit, as well as examples of the "best" and "worst" from the  Hebrew Bible, the  Quran, the  Bhagavad Gita, the  Buddhist  Sūtras, and the  Book of Mormon. 

The Smithsonian published the first full-color facsimile of the  Jefferson Bible  on November 1, 2011. Released in tandem with a  Jefferson Bible  exhibit at the National Museum of American History, the reproduction features introductory essays by Smithsonian Political History curators Harry R. Rubenstein and Barbara Clark Smith, and Smithsonian Senior Paper Conservator Janice Stagnitto Ellis. The book's pages were digitized using a Hasselblad H4D50-50 megapixel DSLR camera and a Zeiss 120 macro lens, and were photographed by Smithsonian photographer, Hugh Talman.