The Bible Without Miracles

Thomas Jefferson preferred Jesus’s teachings to his supernatural acts—and edited his copy of the New Testament accordingly.

- By James Parker

Was Thomas Jefferson an atheist? Plenty of people thought so. Jefferson never identified himself as such, of course. But it was his microscopes, his French friends, his whole swinging, freethinking Enlightenment vibe … “I hope he is not an un believer, as he has been represented,” worried the Nonconformist English clergyman (and chemist) Joseph Priestley, after Jefferson came to hear him speak in Philadelphia in 1797. Others could smell the godlessness like brimstone; if Jefferson became president, thundered a Federalist opponent in 1798, “the Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.” Two years later, as news of Jefferson’s election victory spread, there were reports that pious housewives in New England were burying their family Bibles for protection, or hiding them down wells.

As it turned out, Jefferson attacked only one copy of the Bible: his own. Not with fire, but with a razor. And not in an act of dizzy desecration, but with a kind of serrated— slightly crazed?—reasonableness. He cut and he pasted. He edited and he redacted. He called the resulting text—a collage of verses from the New Testament— The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. We know it as the Jefferson Bible.