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Stephen Mitchell,
The Gospel According to Jesus, Part Two
He took up the project again in 1816, when he was seventy-three,
eight years after the end of his second term, pasting in the Greek text
as well, along with Latin and French translations, in parallel columns.
The "wee little book" which he entitled The Life and Morals
of Jesus of Nazareth, remained in his family until 1904, when it was
published by order of the Fifty-seventh Congress and a copy given to
each member of the House and Senate.
What is wrong with the old Gospels that made Jefferson want to
compile a new one? He didn't talk about this in public, but in his
private correspondence he was very frank:
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
our diamonds from dunghills. (To John Adams, January 24, 1814)
We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists; select, even
from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms
into which they have been led by forgetting often, or not understanding,
what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his
dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not
understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime
and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. (To
John Adams, October 12, 1813)
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