In 1804, over three consecutive evenings, President Thomas Jefferson completed a private spiritual project. Using the King James Bible, he took a penknife to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, cutting out the Scripture he liked and pasting it into his own blank book. He called the book The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth and, fitting Jefferson's own worldview, it ignored Jesus' miracles and resurrection and scoffed at the idea of God's having a son.
The so-called Jefferson Bible, the original of which is now owned by the Smithsonian Institution, has long been studied as an example of one founding father's belief in God and his dislike of what he saw as the "corruption of schismatizing followers" of Christianity. Lesser known are the reimagined Gospels produced by two equally famed writers who followed Jefferson.
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