[quote]new2training wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
Jefferson owned a Bible. He just removed the parts that discussed miracles and retained a sort of Christianity that was consistent with his deism, but still largely Christian.
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”-- Jefferson
“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.” --Jefferson
“I am a sect unto myself” --Jefferson
By coincidence, I was listening to NPR last night and heard an interesting interview with a guy who wrote a book entitled “Founding Faith.” He discussed, among other things Jefferson’s Bible.
Looks to be a very interesting read. Seems to be balanced and well-informed.
Exerpted from Founding Faith by Steven Waldman
“Modern conservatives who can’t bear to think that the Declaration of Independence was written by a Bible-defacer have spread the rumor that Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible as an ethical guide to civilize American Indians. The so-called ‘Jefferson Bible’ was really a tool to introduce the teachings of Jesus to the Indians,” declared Rev. D. James Kennedy. Actually, Jefferson’s editing of the Bible flowed directly from a well-thought out, long-stewing view that Christianity had been fundamentally corrupted -by the Apostle Paul, the early church, the great Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and by nearly the entire clerical class for more than a millennium. Secularists love to point to the Jefferson Bible as evidence of his heathen nature; but that misses the point, too. Jefferson was driven to edit the Bible the way a parent whose child was kidnapped is driven to find the culprit. Jefferson loved Jesus and was attempting to rescue him."
"Jefferson had studied early Christian history and was particularly influenced by Joseph Priestley’s book, The History of the Corruptions of Christianity, which he read “over and over again.” In Jefferson’s view, Christianity was ruined almost from the start. “But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church and state.” The authors of the canonical Gospels were “ignorant, unlettered men” who laid “a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications.” The Apostle Paul made things worse. “Of this band of dupes and imposters, Paul was the great Corypheaues, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.”
"Jefferson himself was not an agnostic on this point. He applied reason and critical scientific thought to the world and concluded that God does exist. Read this extraordinary letter from Jefferson to Adams April 11, 1823, and it’s possible to see how his anti-Christian, rationalist approach nonetheless led him to a deep love of God. "I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it’s distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. "
End Quote from Book
[/quote]
Jefferson, Priestly etc were product of their time. Heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, they were doing what had happened since time began…to reinterpret, manipulate and reason away biblical truths. Good men caught up movements which allowed them to express themselves in new (but in my estimation) incorrect ways. Same story, different time.