Thomas Jefferson wrote a Bible

 

Thomas Jefferson helped to create a Bible

While several signers of the Declaration of Independence were deeply involved in religious life and the distribution of scripture, the signer most famously associated with "creating" a Bible—specifically by editing and reassembling the New Testament—was Thomas Jefferson. The work he produced is universally known as the Jefferson Bible, though its formal title was The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jefferson’s project was not a "Bible" in the traditional sense of a full translation of the Old and New Testaments. Instead, it was a highly selective compilation of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Jefferson, a product of the Enlightenment, sought to separate what he called the "diamonds" of Jesus’s moral teachings from the "dunghill" of what he perceived as later corruptions, superstitions, and supernatural claims added by the Apostles and the early Church.

The Creation of the Jefferson Bible

Jefferson began the preliminary work for this project during his presidency in 1804, but he completed the most famous version, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, during his retirement at Monticello around 1819–1820.

Methodology and Content

To create the book, Jefferson used a razor or penknife to literally cut passages out of printed Bibles in four languages: Greek, Latin, French, and English. He then pasted these snippets into a blank book in parallel columns.

Exclusions: Jefferson systematically removed all mentions of miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and supernatural events. This included the Annunciation, the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus walking on water, and, most significantly, the Resurrection. The Jefferson Bible ends with the stone being rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb.

Inclusions: He focused entirely on the ethical and moral teachings of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount and various parables, which Jefferson believed represented the finest system of ethics ever devised.

Purpose and Privacy

Jefferson did not intend for this work to be published or used as a public liturgical text. He created it for his own private devotion and reflection, describing it in a letter to John Adams as a document for his "own use." The existence of the manuscript was not widely known to the public until after his death. In 1904, the United States Congress actually commissioned the printing of 9,000 copies of the Jefferson Bible to be distributed to members of the House and Senate, a tradition that continued for several decades.

Other Signers and the Bible

While Jefferson is the only signer to "create" a version of the Bible through editing, other signers were instrumental in the publication and distribution of the Bible in America:

Robert Aitken and the "Bible of the Revolution": While not a signer himself, Robert Aitken was the printer for the Continental Congress. In 1782, the Congress (which included many signers) officially endorsed his English Bible—the first to be printed in America—to ensure a supply of scripture after the war with Britain cut off imports.

Benjamin Rush: A signer and physician, Rush was a founder of the Philadelphia Bible Society in 1808, the first of its kind in the United States, dedicated to distributing Bibles to those who could not afford them.

John Jay: Though he did not sign the Declaration (he was serving in the New York provincial congress at the time), Jay was a prominent Founding Father who served as the second president of the American Bible Society.