Sermons

  

Jefferson's Bible

By the Rev. Jeff Merkel

Given at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks, March 12, 2006.

Brian and I were talking about Jesus and religion not too long ago, and Jefferson's Bible came up.  I had the book on my shelf, but it needed reading.  Knowing I was a pastor for 25 years, Brian asked me if I'd like to look at Jefferson's "edit" of the Gospels and the Jesus which emerged. 

First, some background.  (A lot of background, actually.) Two thousand years ago, Rome was working its empire in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean, and Jews had lively synagogues in every major city.  Their conviction that there was one God, Yahweh, a history-shaping, justice-seeking, ethically demanding being, intrigued and attracted thoughtful Greeks and Romans.  While their own "pagan" pantheon of gods was storied and colorful, the Greek and Roman gods seemed all too human to honor or aspire toward.  Many people affiliated with the synagogues though it was not possible for them to "join." 

In the region of Palestine, where the Jewish leaders had an uneasy peace with the empire, a man named Yeshua in Hebrew or Jesus in Greek, lived an itinerant life of teaching about life, and troubling the delicate balance of power between Jewish religion and Roman politics.  Not surprisingly, he ended up dead.  Apparently, he was abandoned by all his followers in his death.  But as the years passed, his teachings continued in communities of the poor and outcaste.  There's no better way to enshrine a person than to kill them and let their friends tell the story.  But this kind of political martyrdom was happening all over the place in those days.  Why was Jesus different? 

This probably has more to do with a man named Paul than with Jesus or the people who knew him.  Paul never met Jesus; the story is that he actually worked to kill the Jesus movement at first.  But in time he came to see the great opportunity of the Jewish tradition reaching out into the Greek and Roman world through the Jesus movement. 

Paul's modus vivendi was being a traveling preacher; his genre was epistles, or letters.  In them, Paul most significantly dealt with the scandal of Jesus being executed as a common criminal.  He explained it away by using the "sacrifice for sin" thinking at the heart of Jewish teaching.  In this teaching, sins or failings are overlooked by a demanding God when people show they are willing to make amends by giving something to God.  (Ironically, that system was precisely what Jesus was attacking in his famously violent  "cleansing of the temple" protest.)  Jesus, as Paul's formulation goes, died to take away your sins and your condemnation to death for them, which you, as a mere mortal, couldn't really pay enough to God to alleviate.  Because he was sinless, Jesus can pay the price. And then, his resurrection confirmed that God was still in charge of it all.  And if you receive this as truth by faith, you will be "saved."  There you have it, mainline Christian teaching in a nutshell. 

What was compelling about it to the Mediterranean world was that you could participate in the intellectual, ethical and moral seriousness of the Jewish fellowship without eating kosher – no shellfish, no pork, no cheeseburgers etc – and without keeping the 600 other random daily statutes.  Possibly, most important of all, you could follow the Jewish God without the absolute requirement, as adult males, of being circumcised.

So, let's get the dates.  Jesus died around 30.  Paul did missionary work in the Mediterranean while fighting off the Jewish tendencies of the Jerusalem disciples  between the mid 40's and the mid 50's,  fifteen to 25 years after Jesus death.  Note that Paul wrote not one word about the life of Jesus, only about theological issues  –  what Jesus' death and resurrection should mean for believers  –  as well as practical issues of what a life in Christ would look like.  The deficiency of having no eyewitness account of Jesus was corrected by the writing of the first Gospel, appearing in 70 ad, the gospel of Mark.  This literary invention took many Jesus-anecdotes which were floating around in the Christian community at Rome and put them into a narrative framework.  So, it's unlikely because of the late date and the way it was composed that "Mark" or any of the other gospel writers knew Jesus personally. 

Mark's literary framework was taken for granted by the next two Gospels to be written, Luke and Matthew, around 85 ad, with notable exceptions at the beginning and end of the narrative.  Namely, where Mark had Jesus appear on the scene as an adult being baptized, Luke and Matthew create out of whole cloth divergent, miraculous infancy stories.  Again, where Mark had Jesus buried in a tomb, and the tomb is discovered simply empty, Luke and Matthew bring in more miracle-narratives:  earthquakes opening the land, heavenly angels, appearances of a re-animated Jesus, and so on. 

What bears mentioning here, in addition, is that Matthew and Luke both know of and use a lost text in which Jesus teaches how to be a good person in his new order.  We don't have this text, but we can pull it out from the parallel sayings omitted from Mark but present in Matthew and Luke.  Scholars call it "source" or in German "Quelle," or Q.  This is our first hint of the Here's our first hint of Jefferson's Bible. 

Okay, so Matthew and Luke are in the mid 80's.  By the mid 90's, the Gospel of John appears, in which Jesus is said to pre-exist all things that were created, with God, before time, and where Jesus is shown to "take on" a human form, but one in which his divine Glory is forever shining through.  Freighted speeches like "I am the bread of life, I am the true vine" fall from his mouth, where "I am" is meant to signal to Jewish readers the name "Yahweh" ("I am who I am") revealed to Moses in Exodus.  By the nineties fo the first century there are more epistles, not written by Paul, in which Jesus is similarly exalted beyond the human, and not surprisingly, there is the beginning of a male-dominant leadership structure to the community, along with signs of infighting and paranoid condemnations of outsiders and apostates, and, as well, a strange fixation with end times and the terrifying apocalyptic events which will precede the end.

By the time the Emperor Constantine (306-337 ad) has figured out that to convert to Christianity would be very useful to consolidate his power, the so called followers of Jesus looked pretty much like an empire of their own making.  Bishops assembled and drew up a creed, the Nicene Creed, and proceeded to destroy all written work which didn't undergird that creed.  What didn't make the cut, when the Christian bible was assembled, included a number of interesting writings,  now referred to as Gnostic gospels.  One of the most interesting of these resembles very closely the document I discussed a minute ago, Quelle, or Q, which describes the moral and ethical center of the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Like Q, this document is all about values familiar to readers of wisdom literature, such as "Love your enemies, blessed are the poor, be just, be virtuous, live from compassion deep in your heart, what the world values is not what you should value,  be gentle and care for those who are in need.

This document is the Gospel of Thomas.  It was lost from the 4th century Nicene Creed era until 1945,  and then, not surprisingly, the unsettling manuscript wasn't made available to readers until 1978.  However, gradually since then, it has broken into Christian scholarly circles with the force of a bulldozer.  This is why:  if the gospel of Thomas can be convincingly dated earlier than the Gospel of Mark, say in the mid 50's or early 60's, when Paul was giving his portentous spin to the death of Jesus  it would give a strong and fateful challenge to the godlike, imperial Jesus  which churches have proclaimed  and felt the need to enforce  through dogma, inquisition, and warfare down through the centuries.  Whether it is earlier than the existing gospels or not, since the Gospel of Thomas has appeared, the historical process of burying the historical figure of Jesus under preexisting theological notions and first century superstition is being reversed.  From Thomas emerges a human figure who lived deeply and thoughtfully, committed in his daily life to justice for all people,  treating women and children as equals,  ignoring or resisting backward religious notions or superstitions,  telling stories to challenge each person to think through what he or she is doing with their one, precious life.

This is where the other Thomas comes in.  Thomas Jefferson.  By the way, in an interesting twist, the name "Thomas" is Aramaic for "twin."  Jefferson in the late 18th century is the intellectual and spiritual twin of Thomas' gospel.  Thomas Jefferson, born in the 1740's, was raised in Virginia, then a colony of the Church of England, which later became the Episcopal Church.  His parents died early, and he was partly raised by an learned rector, who was also famously greedy and aggressive about his state rendered take home pay, winning a case for higher pay in court against the celebrated lawyer Patrick Henry.  In later life, Jefferson almost never had a good word for the clergy, calling them "soothsayers and necromancers" and inveighing against their play for status.  The colonies were a ferment of religious agitation at this time, with so called "great awakenings," these large cultural movements of feverish turning from sin to salvation, famously evoked by Jonathan Edwards sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God..."  It was a time of frontier revivals which split families and towns, wild-eyed itinerant preachers living off their circuits of converts, not to mention states legislating against certain religious beliefs and for others,  against Jews, against Catholics.  In Virginia, only Anglicans could hold office, and there were required tests of faith in a half-dozen of the colonies to keep out Jews and pagans.  Also were found civil punishments for ecclesiastical sins, like denying the trinity, or refusal to acknowledge public sin... 

Jefferson, schooled in the European enlightenment, was repulsed by the level of tyranny, ignorance and superstition being passed off as true religion.  And he waited for the right moment to clear the decks.  As he wrote in his only published work, Notes on the State of Virginia in 1787  "Millions of innocent men women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned;  yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.  What has been the effect of coercion?  To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." 

Jefferson's most famous articulation of his take on "Gospel" or "good news" came in the Declaration of Independence.  "We hold these truths to be self-evident  (that is, not revealed by God or any religion, but inhering in human nature itself) that all men are created equal  (that is, no person accrues greater importance by being well born, or being ordained, or being politically powerful) that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights  (that is, at the heart of the human condition are rights, simply rights: not sins, not sacrifice, not salvation)  that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  This indeed is good news for people who will labor to throw off the yoke of overseas monarchy, and need to be vigilant lest it be replaced  by the oppression of churchly powers. 

Jefferson worked from this principle of "natural law" (opposed to "divine law") to end the financing of the state church in Virginia after the revolution.  This effort, which succeeded after a struggle of many years, had a direct impact upon the American constitution, written in 1787.  Through the heroic struggle of Jefferson and Madison against many of the more publicly pious delegates, not only was "God" omitted from the document,  but included in the bill of rights, the first amendment:  "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

On Jefferson's tombstone is not recorded that he was the third president of the United states, or that he doubled the size of the nation through the Louisiana purchase, but that he authored the Declaration of Independence,  and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom (precursor to the first amendment)  and established the University of Virginia (the first non-denominational college in the US)

What we call "Jefferson's Bible" exists because there was a fundamentalist backlash against his radical ideas in the last years of the 18th century.  Part of the turn against religious freedom had to do with angry clergy losing their official status and government paychecks.  Part of it had to do with the reign of terror during the French revolution, which, like the American Revolution, was first a transformation in ideas before it took arms.  In France, however, the hostility to the church was vicious and diabolical, and American clerics pointed to it as an example of evil godlessness overcoming a people. In fact, historians believe that, had the constitution been written in 1797 instead of 1787, the freedom of religion clause wouldn't have stood a chance. 

In the thick of all this, during his term in office in 1802, Jefferson, who was widowed early in his life, was accused of courting a married woman 35 years earlier,  not to mention loving Sally Hemings, a slave who lived at Monticello, and raising a family with her.  Some biographers suggest that Jefferson actually identified with Jesus,  a thoughtful compassionate visionary  utterly misunderstood and ravaged  by mean-spirited moralizers and power-brokers. 

In any event, in conversation with the French Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestly  and the Philadelphia surgeon and Unitarian Benjamin Rush,  Jefferson began to talk about his view of Jesus, as the author of "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."  He insisted on preserving confidentiality around his beliefs, since, as president, he was the focus of so much invidious speculation on the part of clerics and religious leaders, but wrote up a page long syllabus of how he understood Jesus, and asked Priestly to work on a version of the gospels which would explicate this view.  Jefferson saw Jesus as a powerful, persuasive, and courageous teacher of the ways of human happiness and peace.  He understood intuitively that Jesus had died before he could himself write his own testament, and was therefore at the mercy of disciples who either misunderstood or wilfully misinterpreted his life's work. 

Unfortunately, Priestly died before he could respond to Jefferson's desire,  so Jefferson ordered a couple of bibles from Philadelphia,  and in the dark, emotionally tumultuous second year of his term as president,  did a 46-page cut and paste of the four gospels,  an edit which he called "the Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth."  It wasn't until about 15 years later, in correspondence with his former Federalist opponent John Adams, who had himself by then rejected the Christian religion as it was practiced in Massachusetts,  that Jefferson returned to his task, added parallel texts in Greek Latin and French, and called the final version,  "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."  This is the book which we call the Jefferson Bible. 

What Jefferson cuts is all the supernatural stuff, the angels, the miracles, the voices from heaven, the correct predictions of future events, the citations of Hebrew scripture to prove the rightness of emerging actions, the "son of God" language, and so on.  Jesus is born, but to a man and woman, not through a miraculous virginal event.  He dies at the hands of the Romans, but when he's laid in the tomb and the stone is rolled against it, the story ends.  The great parables are here, but not some of the stories, like the woman at the well, famous for its oddness as Jesus makes a disciple of an outcast woman.  As a familiar reader of Christian writings, I miss the meals, the last supper, the feeding of 5000 people, since meals mean so much to us.  I also miss the halt, lame and blind who are so much a part of Jesus life as he reaches out to touch them and they are rendered whole.  But Jefferson was doing a cut and paste, less subtle than a rewrite.

Anyway, what is remarkable about all of this is that Jefferson, in effect, created what is there at the very beginning of the Jesus movement.  His gospel is about Jesus as a sublime teacher, challenging people to take their lives seriously, to live against the grain, to think clearly and passionately and lovingly about the world around them, to be beholden to no one.  This is also what the Gospel of Thomas, which the church tried to annihilate after 325, proclaims:  a Jesus unfettered by tradition or institution, needing no professional interpreter, only the passionate, truthful, seeking heart.  As a third witness, if you need one, there is Q, or Quelle, the source behind the sayings of Jesus at the heart of the gospels of Luke and Matthew. 

We live in a time very like Jefferson's, actually very like Jesus' as well, when the forces of fear, religious fantasy, and churchly power are on the march.  However, when I talk to many Alaskans about what is at the heart and center for them, I find a preponderance of people who find their roots in the land, the natural world, the seasons, not to mention a sense of despair if not loathing at the changes we have wrought to the natural world around us. 

Also I find a strong communal narrative about coming north to get free, to be free of something, to find what is essential.  How does Thoreau put it: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

I think Jefferson is important for us.  He saw the nation as the locus of the great good of human reason.  But he did not turn aside from the authentic spiritual teacher in Jesus when facing the personally difficult chaos of birthing that nation.  As skeptics and seekers and truth tellers, we in this nation and in this particular fellowship have wonderful traditions to work within while facing our challenges.  So, don't be afraid to bring out the razor for the cutting and pasting of orthodoxy, cutting out Jesus the imperial magician, and all would be imperial magicians, including our president, and pasting in the teacher (one of many) of the way of peace, justice and truth.