Last week I left you hanging by a thread. What would happen to this unique “cut-and-paste” Bible? How on earth was $3,277 too high a cost to publish such a masterpiece of bricolage?
As do many good ideas, it died on the House floor. When Iowa Congressman John Fletcher Lacey took to it in defense of his proposal in joint with Professor Cyrus Adler, his fellow Republican, Charles H. Grosvenor of Ohio, rose to complain, but Lacey replied, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth as compiled by Thomas Jefferson makes a small volume, compiled textually from the four Gospels. This is a work of which there is only one copy in the world; and should it be lost, it would be a very great loss.”
Grosvenor responded quite scurrilously. The two tussled a bit more. “Though it is a blue-penciled and expurgated New Testament, it has not been prepared in any irreverent spirit,” Lacey declared. “The result is a consolidation of the beautiful, pure teachings of the Saviour in a compact form, mingled with only so much of narrative as a Virginia lawyer would hold to be credible in those matter-of-fact days… No greater practical test of the worth of the tenets of the Christian religion could be made . . . “
Strong words. The bill passed, and much mayhem ensued. Critics lambasted the idea that the U.S. government should find itself in the printing and publishing business. Why now, why be published eight decades after its creation? Christian ministers complained the loudest, for example, Kerr Boyce Tupper of Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church, who lambasted the Jefferson Bible for what he took to be its unchristian, thus immoral character (though he had not read it). The national Presbyterian Preacher’s Association protested formally, this apparent “attack on the Christian religion.” Others, such as the Reverend Dr. J. Addison Henry, defended it: “I have heard that the Jefferson work does not contain a single derogatory word against the Christian religion.” But Jewish organizations protested, too, and so did American publishers, if only because they felt their business model being impinged upon.
Both Adler and Lacey were dumb-struck. Lacey complained, “There isn’t even a semi-colon in it that is not found in the Bible,” he said. The storm passed. The bill passed. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1904. Adler stayed out of the fray, and the book was published with as bland a sub-title as can be imagined: Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English, by Thomas Jefferson.
Thus ends the first, last and only case in American publishing history in which the names of Jesus Christ and a U.S. President shared a title. Glory be.
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