The Jefferson Bible: A Biography by Peter Manseau (review)

In this brief volume Peter Manseau, the curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, tells two fascinating stories. First, he discusses why and how Thomas Jefferson carefully cut verses from four translations of the New Testament (in Greek, Latin, French, and English) and arranged them in four parallel columns to depict a version of the life of Jesus shorn of miracles and revelation. The result was an almost entirely rationalistic account of Jesus’s life, with no supernatural elements, no resurrection, no ascension, and no claim of divinity. Here was a Jesus for the Age of Enlightenment, and Manseau traces the evolution of Jefferson’s religious journey from his education by Anglican ministers, his confrontation with rationalist professors at the College of William and Mary, and his close reading of Viscount Bolingbroke and Joseph Priestley to his own meticulous examination of the four Gospels. This project occupied Jefferson for almost two decades; in 1803 he cut verses from two English translations of the New Testament and pasted them onto blank pages to produce what he called “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth.” Although this scrapbook no longer exists, Dickinson W. Adams reconstructed it from the extant list of verses and published it as Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: “The Philosophy of Jesus” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus” (Princeton, 1983), which also includes much of Jefferson’s correspondence concerning religion. In 1820 Jefferson completed his larger project, the parallel text version of “The Life and Morals of Jesus.” Neither compilation did Jefferson consider a work for public consumption; rather, he used them for private meditation, and the verses, pasted onto pages and bound together for convenience, were—as far as scholars knew—lost for decades.

And here begins the second story Manseau relates: how Jefferson’s later collage of scriptural extracts was discovered and presented to the world by Dr. Cyrus Adler, a director of the division of religion at the Smithsonian Institution. Earlier in his career, in 1886, Adler had come across two bibles in a Baltimore bibliophile’s collection that had verses cut from them. A newspaper clipping attached to one of the volumes associated them with Jefferson’s 1820 compilation. His curiosity piqued, Adler followed one clue after another until about 1894, when he tracked Jefferson’s original to a surviving great-granddaughter, Carolina Ramsay Randolph. On behalf of the Smithsonian, Adler bought the volume for four hundred dollars. The following year, he displayed it, along with other religious artifacts, at the Smithsonian’s exhibit at the famous 1895 Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, labeling it “The Jefferson Bible.” The artifact attracted much attention, but soon it was back, unheralded, in a Smithsonian storeroom, until in 1900 an Iowa congressman, John Fletcher Lacey, asked to see it. Thrilled once he thumbed through it, Lacey began a campaign to have Congress publish the volume. Eventually, in 1904, the Government Printing Office printed a photographic reproduction of Jefferson’s cut-and-pasted original. Copies were provided for the members of Congress, who distributed them to constituents.

Finally, Jefferson’s private volume had become available to the public, and as Manseau shows in illuminating detail, it has been reprinted dozens of times since, in a variety of versions, with a variety of introductions, and put to a variety of uses, some of them contradictory. Manseau’s accounting of the post-discovery history of Jefferson’s volume is well told, and together with the National Museum of American History’s beautifully prepared full-color facsimile reproduction of The Jefferson Bible (Washington, D.C., 2011), with helpful introductory essays, and Dickinson W. Adams’s 1983 volume, we now have a perfect trinity of books on Jefferson’s religious thought.