Volume 30, Number 18 · November 24, 1983
Jefferson's Jesus
By Garry Wills
Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels: "The Philosophy of Jesus" and "The Life and Morals of Jesus"
edited by Dickinson W. Adams
Princeton University Press, 438 pp., $30.00
Piety died hard in the eighteenth century, even for rationalists. Franklin's morning devotions are well known: 'Therefore I think it seems required of me, and my duty, as a man, to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING.' In Paris, Theophilanthropists said their prayers morning and night, while rationalist 'Druids' in Newburgh, New York, worshiped the sun as a symbol of Enlightenment. In the November 11, 1793, issue of the Moniteur, worship was directed to the 'sans-culotte Jésus,' rescued at last from the lies of priests. When Marat's heart was hung in an urn from the ceiling of the Cordeliers Club, celebrants sang 'O coeur de Jésus, O coeur de Marat.' More surprising than all such tales, for those of us brought up with a picture of Jefferson as the skeptic, is the fact—which Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels documents—that the third president, converted to a cult of Jesus while he was in the White House, spent the last years of his life reading himself to sleep over the Gospels.
Review, 2706 words
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