Another Comment on Thomas Jefferson

     As yet another connection to class, I read something interesting about Thomas Jefferson in Marcus J. Borg's book Jesus that I'm reading for my Religion class.  He writes "Thomas Jefferson's way of seeing Jesus provides a striking example.  While president, he spent some evenings with the gospels and a pair of scissors cutting out the parts that in his judgment did not go back to Jesus.  What remained was the moral teaching of Jesus, purified of the miraculous, provincial, and time-bound elements, including much of the theology.  The result was The Jefferson Bible, a collection of the moral wisdom of Jesus" (13).  For one thing, it seems like a pretty bold move to take the Bible and cut whatever you want out of it.  So I think it speaks to the person of Jefferson a little bit.  It does make sense that he would do something like that, after learning about how much he valued books in architechture.  It would be somewhat helpful to read Jefferson's Bible and see how the New Testament looked after his procedure.  Seeing Jesus' writing without all the contextual elements, just as his moral wisdom could make things very clear.  But it also could make things harder to understand since you'd be missing a lot of social context from that time period among other things.  I'd have liked to sit at the table with Jefferson during his presidency and asked him what he thought about certain verses or why he removed certain parts.  It was a really random snippet of information in a completely different book from other AmCon readings, but I think it could be used as a dense fact to point to aspects of Jefferson's character and ideologies as a scholar and as a moral human being.