Thomas Jefferson Used A Blade To Abridge The Bible and Called it Jefferson Bible

Thomas Jefferson, like other Founding Fathers of America, is a deist. He believed in God, but not in religion. In 1804, he abridged the King James Version of The New Testament. He used a razor to remove passages with mystical content which he found unrealistic but left the moral teachings of Jesus intact. Thomas Jefferson admired Jesus Christ as a philosopher and a prophet. Only 10% of the New Testament remained. He compiled what is left on the New Testament and published the book as Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth.

Thomas Jefferson was not bothered by the Revelation 22:19 verse (And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which is described in this scroll.) because he is a Deist and a freethinker. Thomas believed that Jesus Christ's moral teachings should be followed by mankind, but he believed that theocracy was unacceptable because Christ's teachings are used to control people and as a tool to amass great amounts of wealth for their own whim.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus. [The Jefferson Bible] is a paradigma of the doctrines of Jesus, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject.''

Written by Kent McGrath, Lucis Philippines contributor.