Excerpted from “Jesus Without the Miracles: Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas” by Erik Reece, published in Harper’s, December 2005, p.33:

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson took a scissors to the King James Bible. Jefferson cut out the virgin birth, all the miracles – including the most important one, the Resurrection – then pasted together what was left and called it The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth....

To read the Gospel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. In that context, the actual teachings seem almost mundane. But to read Jefferson’s version is to face a relentless demand that we be much better people – inside and out – than most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspected, to this unfortunate conclusion: The relevance of Christianity to most Americans – then and now – has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here....

To live by Jesus’ teachings would be to live virtuously as stewards of the land; it would be to create an economy based on compassion, cooperation, and conservation; it would be to preserve the Creation as the kingdom of God....

Like Jefferson’s gospel, Thomas’s ignores the virgin birth. Thomas’s Jesus never performs a miracle, never calls himself the Son of God, and never claims that he will have to die for the sins of humankind. Instead he tells parables, he issues instructions, and, most alarmingly, he locates the kingdom of God in that one place we might never look – right in front of us....

Thomas’s Jesus is especially hard on the rich. As in the canonical Gospels, he says that a man cannot serve two masters and that the poor will be the first to find the kingdom of God. He warns against lending with interest. He tells a parable of the rich man whose friends were too preoccupied to come to dinner, and so he sent his servants out to “bring back whomever you find.” ....

The problem with the established Church, Emerson charged, is that it teaches our smallness instead of our largeness....

When I first discovered the Gospel of Thomas, I was shocked to find a Christianity that I could accept and one that, moreover, could serve as a vital corrective to my grandfather’s view that we live helplessly, sinfully, in a broken world. According to Thomas’s Jesus, humankind never suffered an irredeemable Fall. The world only appears to be a realm of separation from the Creator and from one another. When Thomas’s Jesus tells his followers that “Adam came from a great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you,” he is implying that Adam’s first sin was to take on the knowledge of good and evil – the knowledge that continues to divide the world into us and them. The stunning message is that such divisions are arbitrary, destructive, and, finally, unnatural. Thus Adam’s sin, ironically, was simply ignorance. True, that ignorance proved to be congenital, but it wasn’t terminal and it didn’t demand divine intervention. What it demanded was a realization on the part of each individual that he or she still possesses a divine light lodged within the heart, and that light con reveal the world to be a beautiful, undivided wholeness.

This teacher of reconciliation was the same Jesus whom Thomas Jefferson hoped to recover through his own gospel project. And whereas Jefferson found in Jesus’ teaching an ethic for how we should treat others, Emerson found in it an alchemical light that transforms flesh into spirit. In some uncanny trick of history and geography, the ancient Gospel of Thomas combines these two visions of Jesus to give us what I would call a truly American gospel.

By pulling the kingdom of God out of the sky and transposing it onto this world, Thomas’s Jesus returns us, in effect, to Jefferson’s agrarian America, where the farmer intuits the laws of God through the laws of nature.

Read together, these twin gospels suggest that it is time we inverted Pascal’s famous wager to say not that we should believe in heaven because we have nothing to lose, but rather that we should believe first in this world, because in losing it we may lose everything.


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Additional Note from SJH - I experienced the same type of discovery in reading the Romantic Poets, particularly William Blake in works like America, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.