Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
No. I'm just aware of it as a counter-example. Or maybe he was an accommodationist.
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Jefferson's revision of the New Testament removed all the miracles from the text. It was intended to humanize the Gospels (and by extension Christianity) by ridding it of Jesus' alleged divinity and presenting only moral teachings.
Jefferson was not a fan of organized religion. He wrote to his friend Charles Thomson in 1817: "Say nothing of my religion; it is known to my god and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life. If that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one." He considered himself Christian but explicitly denied any claims of Christ's divinity. As most Christian denominations today build their doctrine on a claim of Christ as God, that would make him non-Christian in any modern sense.