The Jefferson Bible. Percival Everett

I should have seen that one coming.

      PE: How is it that you have had several children with such an inferior creature?

      TJ: First of all, she is an octoroon.

      PE: Having a raped ancestor improves one’s lot.

      TJ: Well, because of that she is quite fetching.

      PE: You have at least one son by her. Is he fetching?

      TJ: Whenever I tell him to. [Laughs]

      PE: He is more removed from his blackness than his mother. He is, pardon my math, one-thirty-second black. And he is still not equal to you.

      TJ: You said it. He has some black blood. How could he be equal to me or any white?

      PE: Sally Hemmings is your slave.

      TJ: She is.

      PE: She is the mother of your children.

      TJ: She is.

      PE: Do you love her?

      TJ: She is my slave.

      PE: Does she love you?

      TJ: She does what I tell her. You seem bothered by all this.

      PE: I might have been, but I expected this . . . May I question you about something else?

      TJ: Shoot.

      PE: Would that I could.

      TJ: That’s very good.

      PE: What’s with the dumbwaiters on either side of the fireplace?

      TJ: I invented the dumbwaiter. These go down to my wine cellar. I put them in so that I wouldn’t have to rely on the house slaves coming into the drawing room when I’m having sensitive meetings.

      PE: Why would that bother you?

      TJ: I don’t want them hearing things.

      PE: One, you don’t believe that they could understand what you’re talking about, and two, whom would they tell?

      TJ: You blacks like to parrot sounds. You’re pretty good at it. And none of you practice any discretion about where you choose to regurgitate what you’ve heard.

      PE: And so, the dumbwaiter.

      TJ: The dumbwaiter.

      PE: Finished with your Bible yet?

      TJ: How did you know about that?

      PE: A slave told me about it. But anyway, you know there are those who claim that it’s very generous to call your Bible a translation.

      TJ: Is that so?

      PE: I’ve heard that it’s more or less a paraphrase of the parts you agree with. I think the implication is that your Greek isn’t good enough to actually translate the Gospels. I hear you’re fond of the parables.

       [Here I must interrupt to admit to extreme unfairness to Jefferson. I have already discussed Jefferson’s deprecation regarding his “wee” text, but this is my introduction and I can do what I want.]

      TJ: [Visibly disturbed] Who has suggested this to you?

      PE: If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. So, what’s the problem you have with Jesus and Paul and the gang?

      TJ: That Paul screwed it all up by making the religion about Jesus.

      PE: In your Bible, you never admit to the deity of Christ. You never mention the virgin birth and there are no miracles. I mean, the old boy doesn’t even rise from the dead. What gives?

      TJ: I’ll tell you what gives. The teachings of Jesus are well worth remembering, but the rest of it is superstition. That’s why we have such priestcraft and this abundance of dogma.

      PE: You have trouble with dogma.

      TJ: I do.

      PE: And with untested supposition.

      TJ: I do.

      PE: Okay, well, I want to thank you for your time. And if you don’t mind, I’ll see myself out.

      TJ: Lars!

      * * *

      The sadness is this. In spite of that fact that Thomas Jefferson was an intellectual in his time and was so beautifully shaped in his thinking by the Enlightenment, he still practiced and perhaps set into motion the duplicity that marks American political posturing, thought, and action. The one trait that has remained constant from Jefferson to Bush is convenient thinking. I accuse myself here of being indulgent and gratuitous in my depiction of Jefferson, but I have not been untruthful, nor, I think, unfair. Jefferson’s notions of racial difference shaped American racial attitudes and he helped this country justify racism by coughing up the word scientific. I ask only that you read Jefferson’s writings with an eye to what he wanted to achieve, appreciating all the while that he often wrote well.

      So, I have shamelessly used this opportunity to make some kind of political statement, though even I am at a loss to coherently restate it. Jefferson’s paradigma of the Gospels is what it is. Interesting not so much for the talent it took to do it, or even for the quality of the writing, but for the fact that he took the time to do it at all. Regardless of one’s assessment, however, the work is a product of an individual who sought a level of intellectual engagement with the world that we cannot imagine in our leaders today.

       Percival Everett

       Moreno Valley, California

       July 2004

      Thomas Jefferson explained some of his perspectives on the Christian religion in the following letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush. Also included here are a syllabus Jefferson attached to the letter exploring the teachings of Jesus in a historical context; and a related letter that he sent to William Short seventeen years later, after he had completed his version of the four Gospels.

       Washington, April 21, 1803.

       Dear Sir,

       In some of the delightful conversations with you in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you that one day or other I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other. At the short interval since these conversations, when I could justifiably abstract my mind from public affairs, the subject has been under my contemplation. But the more I considered it, the more it expanded beyond the measure of either my time or information. In the moment of my late departure from Monticello, I received from Dr. Priestley his little treatise of “Socrates and Jesus Compared.” This being a section of the general view I had taken of the field, it became a subject of reflection while on the road and unoccupied otherwise. The result was, to arrange in my mind a syllabus or outline of such an estimate of the comparative