Thomas Jefferson owned a razor blade, a pot of glue, and a complete disregard for theological consensus.
Sometime around 1820, the third President of the United States sat down with multiple copies of the New Testament — in English, French, Latin, and Greek — and began cutting. Physically cutting. He sliced out the passages he considered authentic teachings of Jesus and glued them into a new book, arranged chronologically. He left everything else on the cutting room floor.
No virgin birth. No water into wine. No walking on water. No resurrection.
Just the moral philosophy.
The Razor and the Glue
Jefferson called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. History calls it the Jefferson Bible. And whatever you think of the man — and there is plenty to think — the project itself is remarkable as a historical artifact.
He was not trying to disprove Christianity. He was trying to extract what he saw as the pure ethical core from what he considered later mythological additions. Jefferson believed Jesus was one of the great moral philosophers — on par with Socrates and Epicurus — whose original message had been "mutilated" by followers who added the supernatural elements after the fact.
His version of the Gospels reads like a philosophy textbook. The Sermon on the Mount is there. The parables are there. The ethical teachings are there. But the narrative ends with Jesus being placed in the tomb. Period. No third-day plot twist.
The Artifact
The physical book still exists. It sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Eighty-four pages of clipped scripture, pasted in columns, with four languages running side by side. It is one of the most fascinating artifacts of early American intellectual life.
Jefferson never published it during his lifetime. He made it for himself. It was a private intellectual project — a man working out what he actually believed by physically deconstructing the source material. The book was not discovered and published until well after his death, first printed by Congress in 1904.
For fifty years, every new member of Congress received a copy.
Why This Is Interesting
I am not sharing this to take a theological position. I find it interesting as a process. A sitting president took the most influential text in Western civilization and edited it down to what he considered signal versus noise. He did not write a rebuttal. He did not publish a pamphlet arguing against miracles. He took a blade to the primary source and rebuilt it from the parts he found defensible.
That is an extraordinary act of intellectual independence, regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions.
It also tells you something about the Founders that the sanitized version of history tends to skip. Jefferson was not an atheist — he described himself as a "sect of one" — but he was deeply skeptical of institutional religion and what he considered the corruption of an originally simple moral philosophy. He was a Deist in practice: he believed in a Creator, but not in divine intervention.
The man who wrote "all men are created equal" also believed the Gospels contained both timeless wisdom and what he called "so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture." He was comfortable holding both ideas simultaneously. That kind of comfort with contradiction is rare now. It was apparently rare then, too — which is why he never published the book.
The Pattern
What strikes me about the Jefferson Bible is how modern the instinct feels. The idea that you can respect a source, learn from a source, and still take a razor to the parts you find unsubstantiated — that is essentially what every critical thinker does with every information source now. We just do it with browser tabs instead of glue pots.
Jefferson was doing in 1820 what we now call "first principles thinking." Strip away the inherited framework. Go back to the raw material. Keep what survives scrutiny. Discard what does not. Rebuild from what remains.
He just happened to do it to the Bible.
The Artifact: The Jefferson Bible is not a religious statement. It is an editorial one. A Founding Father took the most sacred text of his culture and said: I will decide which parts I find credible. That act — the willingness to engage with the source material on your own terms — is worth examining regardless of where you land on the theology. The razor and the glue are the point.
