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To: E Rocc
The deists of early american were judeo-christian deists.

Witness: Jefferson's translation of the bible and high regard for Jesus Christ.
112 posted on 08/28/2003 5:13:45 AM PDT by xzins (In the Beginning was the Word)
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To: xzins
The deists of early american were judeo-christian deists.

Witness: Jefferson's translation of the bible and high regard for Jesus Christ.

Jefferson's translation of the Bible left out quite a lot. Particularly Revelations, for very firm reasons:

"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams... I cannot so far respect [the extravagances of the composition] as to consider them as an allegorical narrative of events, past or subsequent. There is not coherence enough in them to countenance any suite of rational ideas... What has no meaning admits no explanation... I do not consider them as revelations of the Supreme being, whom I would not so far blaspheme as to impute to Him a pretension of revelation, couched at the same time in terms which, He would know, were never to be understood by those to whom they were addressed."

--Thomas Jefferson
to Alexander Smyth, 1825.

As for Jefferson, he considered Jesus a great moral teacher but there is no evidence that he believed him to be a divine figure, let alone the literal Son of God. There is evidence of what he thought of Christian belief surrounding his conception:

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

-Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823.

-Eric

115 posted on 08/28/2003 5:39:55 AM PDT by E Rocc (Separation between church and state: It's not just the law, it's a good idea.)
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