Thomas Jefferson and his Bible without History-Centrism

Thomas Jefferson was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States.

The White House, Washington, D.C. Year was 1804. Thomas Jefferson was frustrated. It was not the burdens of office that bothered him. It was his Bible.  Thomas Jefferson was convinced that the authentic words of Jesus written in the New Testament had been contaminated. Early Christians, overly eager to make their religion appealing to the pagans, had obscured the words of Jesus with the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Plato. These "Platonists" had thoroughly muddled Jesus' original message.

The 'Jefferson Bible' was Thomas Jefferson's attempt to extract an authentic Jesus from the Gospel accounts.  Who was the Jesus that Jefferson found? He was not the familiar figure of the New Testament. 

Thomas Jefferson assured his friend and rival, John Adams, that the authentic words of Jesus were still there.  In a letter to John Adams dated October 13, 1813, Jefferson described the task of separating these moral messages from the miracle-ridden historical accounts of Bible as "separating diamonds from the dung hill."  Thomas Jefferson dropped the entire issue of divinity of Jesus as inauthentic.

Thomas Jefferson composed a short monograph titled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. The subtitle explains that the work is "extracted from the account of his life and the doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John." In it, Jefferson presented what he understood was the true message of Jesus.  Jefferson set aside his New Testament research, returning to it again in the summer of 1820. This time, he completed a more ambitious work, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English.The text of the New Testament appears in four parallel columns in four languages. Jefferson omitted the words that he thought were inauthentic and retained those he believed were original. The resulting work is commonly known as the "Jefferson Bible."

Jefferson discovered a Jesus who was an ordinary man, a great teacher of common sense morality.  Its authenticity was not dependent upon the dogma of the Trinity or even the claim that Jesus was uniquely inspired by God. Jefferson saw Jesus as a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, (and an) enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law.

In Jefferson's Bible, there is no account of the beginning (no Genesis) and the end of the Gospel story (no second coming or judgment day). There is no story of the annunciation, the virgin birth or the appearance of the angels to the shepherds. The resurrection is not even mentioned.  Thomas Jefferson was convinced that the history-centric aspects of the Bible focused on establishing divinity of Jesus were inauthentic and excluded them from the Bible.

References:
(1) article by Marilyn Mellowes
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html

(2) Jefferson Bible, Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible