Nobody is “brilliant” who takes a pair of scissors to God’s Word.
So if he were a”Deist” why would he bother doing that?
You’ve never cut and pasted a verse before?
Judge not ... If he’d had a word processor and several online versions of the bible would it have been OK to cut and paste?
Strikes me that he might have been trying to distill the fundamental truths he’d found in the bible - perhaps for dolts like me that haven’t read the bible in years but might in a short compendium find salvation. Huh. Ya never know. ;-)
"God's Word" was written by a bunch of different "people", over many centuries, in a wide variety of languages, suffering through a wide variety of translations, omissions, additions, and twists of meanings.
Reasonable people understand this. Some pieces are useful for historical purposes; some for moral purposes; some for strategic purposes; some for entertainment; some for naught.
People have used the scriptures more to control and manipulate other people for their own selfish and devious reasons, than in the cause of freedom. I would trust Thomas Jefferson more than any of the religious clerics he regularly chastised.