The Daily Beast<\/em><\/p>\nIf you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History in\u00a0Washington, D.C., you\u2019ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: \u201cWe must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.\u201d He removed what he felt were the \u201cmisconceptions\u201d of Jesus\u2019 followers, \u201cexpressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.\u201d And it wasn\u2019t hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists\u2019 embellishments as \u201cdiamonds\u201d in a \u201cdunghill,\u201d glittering as \u201cthe most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.\u201d Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.<\/p>\n
When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by \u201cchurch\u201d: the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesus\u2019 death. If Jefferson\u2019s greatest political legacy was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching was his religious legacy. \u201cI am a real Christian,\u201d Jefferson insisted against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. \u201cThat is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n
What were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations. Jesus\u2019 doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus\u2019 teaching. That\u2019s why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.<\/p>\n
Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I had hoped to have my response to this article finished already, but traveling back from Connecticut has prevented that. I will have my response posted tomorrow, but I thought it would be a good idea to post the article first so that\u00a0tomorrow\u2019s post will have some context and\u00a0those of you who have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3437,"featured_media":6377,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theamericanjesus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Jesus-442x600.jpg\" "\\"Jesus-442x600\\"")
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