For Christians around the world, this week is Holy Week, which began yesterday with Palm Sunday and will conclude this coming Sunday with Easter, which is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day after his death on the cross.

Thomas Jefferson was a big fan of Jesus.  He wrote a short book entitled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, which Jefferson largely cut and pasted (literally) from the Bible.  His so-called “Jefferson Bible” emphasizes Jesus’ teachings, parables, and portions of his recorded life, but it omits almost all of the miracles throughout the gospels—events of which Jefferson was highly skeptical.  Notably, Jefferson’s account of Jesus’ life ends with a verse simply stating that the disciples “rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.”  In the Jefferson bible, there is no resurrection; for Jefferson, there is no Easter.

The man who wrote the American Declaration of Independence was a genius by all accounts.  And he stands in a long tradition of thinkers who endorse Jesus’ moral teachings but reject the full biblical account of his miraculous life, death and resurrection.  But this is a bit strange, because the same Jesus who told the parable of the Good Samaritan and delivered the Sermon on the Mount, of which Jefferson and his ilk are so fond, also told his disciples, referring to himself, that “The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.”

As you know, C.S. Lewis has no tolerance for the Jeffersonian view.  “[E]ither this man [Jesus] was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

What do you think?

Have a wonderful day.