Displacing Jesus: An Immanent Reading of Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth

Charles A. Wilson

Jan 2024 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

Displacing Jesus studies the inner workings of Thomas Jefferson's editing and shortening of the Gospels of the New Testament, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It uncovers the immanent moves of his editorial project and shows how he makes judgments on what to include and exclude from the Gospels. As the book analyzes Jefferson's gospel, it reconstructs his cut-and-paste project as a displacing of the biblical story of Jesus into a war on Jewish authorities. Ignoring nearly all traditional religious themes, the new gospel reframes the story into a battle against the narrow and hypocritical morality of the leaders of Second Temple Judaism. Surprisingly, Jefferson's editing does provide a robust, if not traditional, theology and a Christology centered in the passion of the Shepherd-Sage who performs his death for Wisdom. Displacing Jesus ends by connecting Jefferson's creation in The Life and Morals with theological themes, with the history of his views on religion, and with comments on how new insights into Jefferson's gospel can inform contemporary Jefferson research.

About the author

Charles A. Wilson is Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Feuerbach and the Search for Otherness (1989) and the two volumes of Inventing Christic Jesuses (Cascade Books, 2017, 2018).