I love this review's description of the Jesus in passage below that Thomas Jefferson was not interested in: "Jesus the dusty thaumaturge, the wandering soul-zapper and self-styled son of God,"
Reading Thomas Jefferson’s Bible
The president preferred Jesus’s teachings to his supernatural acts—and edited his copy of the New Testament accordingly. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/peter-manseau-jefferson-bible/616476/
The message minus the mumbo jumbo: that’s what Jefferson was after. The teachings—the “precepts,” he called them—without the supernatural baggage. Jesus the ethicist, Jesus the philosopher, author of “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Of this Jesus Jefferson was indeed a fan. Of Jesus the dusty thaumaturge, the wandering soul-zapper and self-styled son of God, less so. Jefferson esteemed Jesus as he esteemed Socrates and “our master Epicurus”—as a beautiful mind. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John: cringing rustics who had fumbled the story, “forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him … giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.” Time to dig the real Jesus out from under “the dross of his biographers.” Cut away the walking on water, kicking-out of demons, laying-on of hands, teleportation, claims of divinity, resurrection, etc. Preserve only, in a thousand or so verses, the bare details and pure utterance of a dead-on moralist. “It is as easy to separate those parts,” wrote Jefferson to John Adams in 1814, “as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”
I have mentioned in other posts about how I was never satisfied with the Christian explanation of suffering. It turns out there is a word for that: Theodicy, (from Greek theos, “god”; dikē, “justice”), explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil.
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