The Unity of God and the Wisdom of Christ: The Religious Enlightenments of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson

Birch, Jonathan C. P.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-51276-5_7

Jonathan C. P. Birch⁴

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

292 Accesses

Abstract

In this chapter, we encounter Jesus through the prism of more materialist metaphysics, as we discuss the work of two important public figures of the late Enlightenment, and our focus shifts from Europe to North America: Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson. The thought of these men will be situated within the history of Socinian and Unitarian theology. Both figures provide further evidence that a heretical Christian theology was capable of nurturing or authorising progressive visions of social and political order, and that materialism as a view of the natural world did not preclude a view of that world as created. The power, persistence, and limitations of Priestley and Jefferson’s versions of rationalist Christianity will be demonstrated with reference to their radical but tendentious biblical scholarship; their repudiation of Greek philosophy; and their cognitive notions of faith as a form of justified (evidentially grounded) religious belief. Priestley’s critical analysis of ancient religious and philosophical cultures and Jefferson’s famous (or infamous) editorial work on the Gospels prove indicative of enduring modern trends, especially in Anglo-American thought, which promote versions of the historical Jesus as a progressive prophet of (liberal) modernity by way of sometimes invidious comparisons with other cultural and religious traditions.

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Notes

1.
See Tertullian , Prescription Against Heretics, chap. 7.
2.
See Toland , Socinianism Truly Stated.
3.
Servetus ’s interests and talents included theology , medicine , astronomy, and cartography; for an account of his life, thought, and fate, see Friedman, Michael Servetus .
4.
The most comprehensive history of Unitarianism in English, which treats different manifestations of anti-Trinitarian t hought as different strands of a single movement, is probably still Earl Morse Wilbur , A History of Unitarianism (2 vols.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945–1952.
5.
See Wilbur (ed. and trans.), The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932.
6.
Faustus Socinus was a refugee living in Poland when he developed his uncle’s ideas in conjunction with other sympathetic dissidents. The group were otherwise known as the Polish Brethren and often grouped together with Arians by outsiders: see the web-site run by the physician turned intellectual historian and Servetus expert, Marian Hillar at the Centre for Socinian Studies, accessed 3 August 2018: http://www.socinian.org. This is a useful resource on Eastern European non-conformism , which locates the development of Socinianism in Transylvania as well as Poland ; and see Wilbur, Unitarianism (vol. I), especially chaps. xvii, xxix–xxxi.
7.
For an early English translation, see The Racovian Catechisme, Amsterdam [sic]: Brooer Janz, 1652; and see Wilbur, Unitarianism (vol. I), chaps. xxxi–xxxii.
8.
See Wilbur, Unitarianism (vol. I), chaps. ii–viii.
9.
See ibid., chap. i.
10.
For an account of this phenomenon, see J. Z. Smith , Drudgery Divine : On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 4–25.
11.
See ibid., pp. 7–9.
12.
John Corbet , A Discourse on the Religion of England , London, 1667, p. 17. Smith renders the phrase ‘ Pagano -Papism’ (Drudgery Divine, p. 20), but I cannot find this in the original sources.
13.
Corbet , Religion of England, sect. 8.
14.
Ibid., sect. 9.
15.
Sheehan charts the origin of this in Enlightenment Bible .
16.
See Sherwood , ‘The God of Abraham and Exceptional States, or the Early Modern Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible’, The American Academy of Religion (vol. 46.2), June 2008, pp. 312–343; and in a specifically English context see Crossley , Harnessing Chaos: The Bible in English Political Discourse (rev. edn.), London: Bloomsbury, 2016; in chap. 1 Crossley actually distinguished between a ‘liberal’, a ‘Neoliberal’, and a ‘radical ’ Bible .
17.
For the scriptur al and philosophical arguments of Servetus , see his Two Treatises.
18.
For recent discussions of the synergy between Platonic and other Greek philosophy and Trinitarianism , see John Anthony McGuckin, ‘The Trinity in the Greek Fathers’, in Peter C. Phan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 49–69; Daly Tuggy, ‘History of Trinitarian Doctrines’, SEP, especially sect. 1, Winter 2016, accessed 6 August 2018: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/trinity-history.html; and Hillar, From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
19.
See Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘Biddle , John’, DNB, 4 October 2007, accessed 02 May 2019: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-2361.
20.
See ibid., np., sect. ‘Final imprisonment and death’.
21.
See John Biddle, XII Arguments Drawn out of the Scripture, London, 1647.
22.
See Biddle, A Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity, According to the Scripture…, London, 1648, art. ii.
23.
See Wilbur, History of Unitarianism (vol. 2), chaps. v–xv; and Champion , Harmless Freedom: John Biddle, John Knowles and the Reception of Polish Socinian Defences of Toleration, c. 1650–1665, London: Dr William’s Library Trust, 2013.
24.
See Wilbur, History of Unitarianism (vol. 2), chap. xii.
25.
See Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion : Rational Dissent in Eighteenth–Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and the journal Enlightenment and Dissent (1982–2016), edited by Martin Fitzpatrick and James Dybikowski, The Queen Mary Centre of Religion and Literature in English, accessed 10 August 2018: http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/journal–homepage/.
26.
For other sources, see Sherwood , ‘Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible’. Taylor also emphasises Unitarian thought as key to the modern shifts in the meaning of Jesus, the Bible and religion : see Secular Age, pp. 238, 291–292, 431. For Israel’s discussion of ‘Socinianism and the Social, Phycological, and Cultural Roots of Enlightenment’, see Contested, chap. 5.
27.
For a range of the recent (and enduring) scholarship on Jefferson see Maurizio Valsania ’s bibliographic essay ‘Thomas Jefferson ’, Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford University Press, 2017, n.p., sect. ‘Introduction’, accessed 10 August 2018: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0196.xml.
28.
Controversies centre on, but are not restricted to, his stance on the indigenous p eoples of America, the institution of slavery , and his personal relationships with the slaves he owned (reputedly fathering a child with one); in reverse order of these themes, see Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997; Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (eds.), Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson : History, Memory, and Civic Culture, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999; Lucia Stanton, ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012; Ari Helo, Thomas Jefferson’s Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress: The Morality of a Slaveholder, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999.
29.
Valsania, ‘Thomas Jefferson ’, n.p.
30.
Ibid., np.
31.
Written as a series of ‘queries’ that Jefferson had been prompted to address, Notes on Virginia was Jefferson’s only book-length publication. It serves as a study of the political economy of Virginia , its geography, its flora and fauna, as well as an introduction to Jefferson’s own philosophy .
32.
This was originally called ‘Bill No. 82: A Bill For Establishing Religious Freedom ’. It is available at Monticello with all the edits by the Virginia General Assembly before it was passed in 1786, and a commentary by Nancy Vervell and John Ragosta , ‘Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom ’, 2 February 2018, accessed 26 February 2018: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/virginia-statute-religious-freedom.
33.
For a study of the Jefferson family, see Susan Kern , The Jeffersons at Shadwell, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
34.
This is now a world heritage site: see Monticello, accessed 5 August 2018: https://home.monticello.org/.
35.
Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., ‘Thomas Jefferson , a Brief Biography’, hosted at Monticello, February 2003, accessed 26 February 2018: https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/thomas-jefferson-brief-biography.
36.
See Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., ‘Jefferson & Slavery’, Encyclopaedia of Thomas Jefferson , hosted at Monticello, February 2003, accessed 26 February 2018: https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-slavery.
37.
See Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, query xiv: ‘On the administration of justice and description of the laws’, where he judges African Americans ‘in reason much inferior’ to ‘the whites’, while in imagination they are ‘dull, tasteless, and anomalous’ (p. 149).
38.
See Paul Finkelman , ‘The Monster of Monticello ’, The New York Times, 30 November 2012, accessed 26 February 2018: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/the-real-thomas-jefferson.html.
39.
See Jefferson’s letters: ‘To Thomas Cooper’, 10 September 1814, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson [vol. 7 of 43 at the time of writing]: 28 November 1813 to 30 September 1814, J. Jefferson Looney (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 649–655; ‘To William Short’, 8 September 1823, in ‘Founders Online’, National Archives, The US National Archives and Records Administration, accessed 26 February 2018: http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-3750; and ‘To John Holmes’, 22 April 1820, accessed 16 February 2018: http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1234.
40.
See David N Mayer, ‘Jefferson, Thomas ’, EOE (vol. 2), pp. 285–290.
41.
Jefferson is featured in Marc DiPaolo (ed.), Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013; and specifically, in Tim H. Blessing’s essay, ‘Revolution by Other Means: Jefferson, the Jefferson Bible, and Jesus’, pp. 25–42.
42.
Jefferson had a healthy respect for some Greek philosophy but deplored its entanglements with Christianity.
43.
Pelikan, Jesus, p. 192.
44.
Jefferson’s materialism is expressed in many texts, for instance in his exchange with John Adams : ‘To John Adams’, 15 August 1820, in ‘Appendix’ to Dickinson W. Adams with Ruth W. Lester (eds.), Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: ‘The Philosophy of Jesus’ and The Life and Morals of Jesus’, Eugene Sheridan (intro.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 315–416: 399–401.
45.
This is probably most conspicuous in what Jefferson does not say about the life of Jesus (see below).
46.
See Jefferson , ‘To Thomas Leiper’, 21 January 1809, in Founders Online, National Archives, accessed 1 February 2018: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-9606.
47.
The so-called Jefferson Bible was the second of Jefferson’s attempts to redeem scripture by removing all offending passages: the project left only a fraction of the New Testament , all drawn from the Gospels: see The Life and Morals of Jesus, in Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 60–122 (all references hereafter use this pagination range). For a more recent edition, which there was no time for me to draw on, see M. Andrew Holowchak, Thomas Jefferson’s Bible: With Introduction and Critical Commentary, New York: De Gruyter, 2018.
48.
Jefferson, ‘To William Short, April 13 1820’, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 391–394: 391–392.
49.
On the liberal and reforming tradition in America, see Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004; and Jim Wallace, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, New York: HarperOne, 2005.
50.
For the radical tradition in America, see Burns , Radical Historical Jesus; and Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus ACTED UP, Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2002; and with Thomas Bohacheet, Queering Christianity : Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.
51.
On apocalypticism in America see Crawford Gribben , Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–2000, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; and with Kenneth G. C. Newport, Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context, Waco, Texas: Baylor, 2006.
52.
Whereas Reimarus located natural theology within a dualist metaphysical tradition, Jefferson rooted his natural theology in a monist materialist metaphysic associated with the ancient Stoics , for whom Jefferson had great respect: on his admiration for non-Christian moralists from the ancient world, see the letter Jefferson ‘To Robert Skipwith’, 3 August 1771, in Julian P. Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1: 1760–1776, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 76–81; ‘To Peter Carr’, 19 August 1785’, in Boyd (ed.), Papers of Jefferson, Vol. 8: 25 February–31 October 1785, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, pp. 405–408, and ‘10 August 1787’, in Boyd (ed.), Papers of Jefferson, Vol. 12: 7 August 1787–31 March 1788, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, pp. 14–19. Among modern thinkers, his reference points include Viscount Bolingbroke (discussed below). The latter featured prominently in a complication of texts, ancient and modern, which Jefferson thought of as embodying the highest standards of human wisdom; this collection of some of Jefferson’s favourite writings was only published after his death: see Gilbert Chinard (ed.), The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson: His Commonplace Book of Philosophers and Poets, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1928.
53.
Paine, Age of Reason, pt. I, sect. 8.
54.
Ibid., sect. 8.
55.
Ibid., sect. 8.
56.
See O. Chadwick , The Secularisation of The European Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, especially chap. 7.
57.
See Sheridan’s ‘Introduction’ to Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 3–42: especially 4–16. For a monograph on the history and development of Jefferson ’s religious beliefs, see Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson , Grand Rapids: Wm. Eerdmans, 1996.
58.
Jefferson, ‘To John Adams ’, 22 August 2013, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 347–349: 347.
59.
Ibid., 347.
60.
Jefferson, ‘To Edward Dowse’, 19 April 1803, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 329–330: 330.
61.
A classic European counterpart would be Ernest Renan , Life of Jesus [Vie de Jésus, 1864], London: Watts, 1935. For a discussion see Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism, chap. 5.
62.
See Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution , 1785–1800, London: Pimlico, 1998.
63.
See Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
64.
Although these philosophes did on occasion argue that Christ was no friend of religious coercion: see Menozzi , Les Interprétations politiques, pp. 11–12, 32–46.
65.
See John Towill Rutt (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley (vol. 1 of 2), London, 1831–1832, p. 373.
66.
See L. H. Butterfield, Leonard C. Farber, and Wendell D. Garrett, (eds.), Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (vol. 3 of 4.), Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1861, p. 189.
67.
See Smith, Drudgery Divine, pp. 1–7, especially n. 5.
68.
See ibid., pp. 2–7.
69.
See Robert Barrie Rose, ‘The Priestley Riots of 1791’, Past and Present (vol. 18), 1960, pp. 68–88.
70.
Priestley died before the 1813 amendment to the Blasphemy Act of 1697, extending religious toleration to Non-Trinitarian Christianity .
71.
See Jenny Graham, Revolutionary in Exile: The Emigration of Joseph Priestley to America 1794–1804, Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1995.
72.
See John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1800, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977; Grayson Ditchfield argues for the theological motivation of the riot, rooted in disputes over the Trinity , in ‘The Priestley Riots in Historical Perspective’, Unitarian Historical Society: Transactions (vol. 20.1), 1991, pp. 3–16.
73.
Priestley was a (very) public face of religious dissent and an opponent of political privilege in the Church of England . He became a hate figure for those who associated a domestic reformist agenda with a revolutionary one overseas: see ArthurSheps , ‘Public Perception of Joseph Priestley , the Birmingham Dissenters , and the Church-and-King Riots of 1791’, Eighteenth Century Life (vol. 13.2), May 1989, pp. 46–64. The British response to the French Revolution is an important context for Jonathan Atherton ’s PhD thesis: Rioting, Dissent and the Church in Late Eighteenth Century Britain: The Priestley Riots of 1791, University of Leicester, 2012.
74.
See Ronald Dixon, ‘Was Dr. Priestley Responsible for the Dinner which Started the 1791 Riots?’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society (vol. v), 1931–1934, pp. 299–323; and Edward Robinson, ‘New Light on the Priestley Riots’, The Historical Journal (vol. 3.1), 1960, pp. 73–75.
75.
See Martin Fitzpatrick , ‘Priestley Caricatured’, in A. Truman Schwartz and John G. McEvoy (eds.), Motion Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley , Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1990, pp. 161–167.
76.
See Arthur Sheps , ‘Public Perceptions’; and Clive Elmsley, Britain and the French Revolution , London: Longman, 2000.
77.
See the succinct description, before the expansive article, in Robert E. Schofield , ‘Priestley, Joseph (1733 –1804)’, DNB, 2013, accessed 10 August 2018: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22788.
78.
See Schaffer , ‘Priestley’s Questions: An Historiographical Survey’, History of Science (vol. 22.2), 1 June 1984, pp. 151–183.
79.
SeeSchofield , The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley : A Study of His Life and Works from 1733–1773, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvanian State University Press, chaps. iii–v.
80.
See ibid., chap. ix.
81.
See ibid., chaps iii–vi.
82.
See ibid., chaps. i–ii.
83.
See Schofield, ‘Priestley’, n.p., sect. ‘Early life and education’.
84.
This is perhaps best illustrated by Jefferson ’s role in the foundation of the secular University of Virginia (1819). Today the university presents itself as ‘highly selective’, but religion plays no part in that selective process: ‘accepting only the best students and those who show the exceptional promise Jefferson envisioned’ (University of Virginia, ‘Facts and Figures’, accessed 09 April 2019: http://www.virginia.edu/facts. For a study of Jefferson on education, see Cameron Addis, Jefferson’s Vision for Education, 1760–1845, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003.
85.
See David L. Wykes, ‘Joseph Priestley , Minister and Teacher’, in Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (ed.), Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher and Theologian, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 20–48; and Schofield, Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley , chap. ii.
86.
See ibid., pp. 54–56.
87.
See Schofield, ‘Priestley’, np., sect. ‘Early life and education’.
88.
See ibid., n.p.
89.
See Priestley, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity Religion (2 vols.), London: J. Johnson, 1782.
90.
See Priestley, A Harmony of the Evangelists in Greek ; to Which Are Prefixed Critical Dissertations in English, London: J. Johnson, 1777; and A Harmony of the Evangelists in English; With Critical Dissertations, an Occasional Paraphrase…, London: J. Johnson, 1780.
91.
See Priestley , Socrates and Jesus Compared, London: J. Johnson, 1803.
92.
See Priestley, A General History of the Christian Church from the Fall of the Western Empire to the Present Time, Northumberland: Andrew Kennedy, 1803, pp. 380–381. The context is Priestley’s unabashed support for the system of toleration in the United States , inclusive of Roman Catholics.
93.
Priestley’s early education was within the context of dissenting Christianity , so he was accustomed to seeing religion and society from an atypical point of view, and may not have approached Christian origins with the same philosophical trappings of the orthodox Anglican position against which his community was defined: see Schofield, ‘Priestley’, np., sect. ‘Early life and education’.
94.
Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, London, 1777, p. xvi.
95.
Priestley’s commitment to materialism is evident in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, London: J. Johnson, 1777.
96.
Although Priestley thought the two doctrines could be defended independently: see Dybikowski , ‘Joseph Priestley, Metaphysician and Philosopher of Religion ’, in Rivers and Wykes (eds.), Joseph Priestley , pp. 80–112: 81.
97.
See Priestley, Philosophical Necessity Illustrated.
98.
See John W. Yolton , Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth‐Century Britain, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
99.
See Priestley, Institutes of Natural and Revealed (3 vols.), London: J. Johnson, 1772–1774.
100.
See Calvin, Institutes.
101.
Calvin did acknowledge natural knowledge of God apart from Scripture (Institutes, bk. 1, chaps. 1–5); but Priestley went much further in deriving the nature of God through the use of reason apart from Scripture (Institutes, vol. 1, pt. i, chap. i).
102.
See Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chaps. ii–v; vol. 3, pt. i, chap. i (especially sect. i); Calvin, Institutes, bk. 1, chaps. 6–13; Aquinas , ST, pt. i, q. 1.
103.
See Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. i, (especially sects. ii–iii). Priestley does not attribute the loss of knowledge of things divine to ‘the fall’ (typically based on a historical-literal reading of Genesis 3), nor does he assume the same level of damage that original sin has caused to our capacity to know God without grace (some for Aquinas , more still for Calvin ; for Luther the damage was absolute). For Priestley , who did not have any doctrine of the Holy Spirit , the grace of God is naturalised and manifest in the evidence that revelation affords (see below).
104.
See Priestley, Institutes (vol. 3), pt. i, chap. i (especially sect. i); and throughout An History of the Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ: Proving That the Christian Religion Was at First Unitarian (4 vols.), Birmingham: J. Johnson, 1786.
105.
See Priestley , Corruptions of Christianity (vol. 1), pp. 140, 142.
106.
See Priestley, Institutes (vol. I), pt. ii, chap. v.
107.
See Priestley, Early Opinions (vol. 1), sects. i–iv.
108.
See ibid. (vol. 1), sects. v.
109.
The subtitle to Priestley’s work was Proving that the Christian Religion Was at First Unitarian .
110.
This is not to say that the conflict model of Christian origins proposed by, for example, Ferdinand Christian Bauer (1792–1860) was free from ideological influences, not least the idealist philosophy of G. W. F. Hagel: see Horton Harris, The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F. C. Baur, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
111.
For a study of eighteenth-century views of Priestley , as a provocative dissenter , see Arthur Sheps , ‘Public Perceptions’.
112.
Priestley, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity (vol. 1 of 2), London: J. Johnson, 1782, p. xi.
113.
Ibid., ‘Preface’, p. xi.
114.
Ibid., pt. i, p. 1.
115.
This is the subtext in Toland , Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mohometan Christianity (1718), collected along with the original, clandestine French edition [Christianisme Judaqique et Mahometan] in Champion (ed.), Nazarenus, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 1991.
116.
See Priestley, Corruptions of Christianity (vol. 1), pp. 7–19; taken alongside some of his later writing, for example, Unitarianism Explained and Defended (Philadelphia: John Thompson, 1796), there can be no doubt about the alignment of his views and those he ascribed to the Ebionites .
117.
See Corruptions of Christianity (vol. 1), p. 113.
118.
All these lines of attack are evident in Priestley in A General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God ; and Against the Divinity and Pre-existence of Christ…, Birmingham: J. Johnson, 1783.
119.
Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. ii, sect. iii, p. 170.
120.
Ibid., p. 170.
121.
Ibid., p. 170.
122.
Ibid., p. 170.
123.
See Priestley, Lecture III: ‘History Teaches Virtue by Exhibiting the Conduct of Divine Providence’, in Lectures on History, and General Policy (vol. 1 of 2), Philadelphia: P. Byrne, 1803.
124.
This is found early in the tradition with Martin Luther’s two notorious tracts of 1543: On the Jews and Their Lies [Von den Juden und ihren Lügen], in Franklin Sherman (ed.), Luther’s Works (vol. 47 of 55): The Christian in Society IV, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971, pp. 123–306; and On the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ [Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi], in ‘Appendixes (A)’, Gerhard Falk, The Jew in Christian Theology : Martin Luther’s Anti-Jewish Vom Schem Hamphoras, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992.
125.
Priestley makes this case most fulsomely in Letters to the Jews: Inviting Them to an Amicable Discussion of the Evidences of Christianity (2 vols.), London: J. Johnson, 1786–1787.
126.
Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. ii, sect. v, p. 208.
127.
Ibid., p. 208.
128.
Ibid., p. 208.
129.
See Priestley, Letters to the Jews, vol. 1.
130.
See ibid., (vol. 2).
131.
This project can reasonably be associated with Toland in Nazarenus.
132.
See Aquinas , ST, pt. ii/ii, q. 1, art. 1; Luther, Preface to The Letter of St. Paul to the Romans [Vorrede auff die Epistel S. Paul: an die Romer], Andrew Thornton (trans.), Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed 10 August 2018: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/prefacetoromans.html; Calvin, Institutes, bk. 3, chap. 2, sect. 7. It is true that Luther and the Reformed tradition emphasise the Christocentric source to a greater extent than the more theocentric Thomas, but this difference is easily overstated.
133.
There is a cognitive, epistemological dimension to Aquinas’s view of the nature of faith . The empiricist orientation of Aquinas’s epistemology means that he does not identify faith with knowledge, since the object of knowledge cannot typically be perceived by the believer, but the belief that our faith commitments consist of an assent to God as revealed in the Bible means that this faith brings with it a higher degree of conviction than mere opinion: see ST, pt. ii/ii, q. 1, art. 2. By contrast, Calvin does understand faith to be a form of knowledge, albeit not among those ‘things falling under human sense’ (Institutes, bk. 3, chap. 2, sect. 14). Both identify the movement to faith with the work of the ‘Spirit ’, but the ecclesiological focus of the work of the Spirit in the teaching of the Church that is present in Aquinas (art. 7–8), is attacked by Calvin (especially sects. 2–3). Luther frames faith in terms of radical trust in the grace of God, rather than in any epistemological stance (see Preface).
134.
Aquinas explicitly argues for faith as propositional (see ST, pt. ii/ii, q. 1, art. 3), but his position also emphasises trust (art. 1); according to Calvin we obtain salvation ‘when we recognize God as a propitious Father through the reconciliation made by Christ , and Christ as given to us for righteousness, sanctification, and life’ (Institutes, bk. 3, chap. 2, sect. 2).
135.
This might be thought to stem from Priestley’s Unitarian view of God with its low/no doctrine of the Spirit , but could still be the grace of God in the hearts of men and women, since Priestley identified what the orthodox ‘ mistakenly’ took to be a divine person in his own right (the second person of the Trinity ) with the power of God to act in the world (which Priestley affirmed), thus bringing the meaning of ‘Spirit’ in the New Testament into line with its meaning (as Priestley understood it) in the Old Testament : see Corruptions (vol. 1), pt. 1, sect. 7.
136.
Compare this with Aquinas and Calvin on the ‘certainty’ of faith : ST, pt. ii/ii, q. 1, art. 4; and Institutes, bk. 3, art. 14.
137.
Priestley, ‘Introduction’ to pt. ii of the Institutes (vol. 1), p. 126.
138.
Ibid., p. 127.
139.
Ibid., chap. iii, sect. i, p. 218.
140.
Ibid., p. 218.
141.
Ibid., pp. 214–215.
142.
Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. iii, sect. i, p. 218.
143.
Priestley rejected the notion that miracles could never serve to establish the truth of doctrine, and cites Pierre Bayle’s article on Spinoza as evidence , where the latter is reputed to have told friends that, ‘if he could be convinced of the Resurrection , he would break his whole system in pieces, and readily embrace the common faith of Christians’ (Bayle , quoted by Priestley, ibid., pt. ii, chap. ii, sect. i, p. 191). But this seems more like an argument for the persuasive psychological force of miracles rather than a necessary connection between their performance and the truth of a particular doctrine.
144.
See ibid., pt. i, chap. i, sect. i.
145.
See Hume, Enquiry, sect. x. Hume ’s stature on this topic has grown over time within Anglophone philosophy . He was a relative latecomer to the British critique of miracles and was neither as provocative nor entertaining as his predecessors.
146.
Hume , Enquiry, sect. x, pt. 1.
147.
Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. ii, sect. iii, pp. 199–200.
148.
Hume , Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1779], J. M. Bell (ed.), London: Penguin Books, 1990, pt. ix.
149.
See Spinoza, TPT, chap. 6. For Augustine’s epistemic approach to miracles, see City of God, bk. 11, chaps. 6–8; bk. 12, chaps. 8–10.
150.
Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. ii, sect. i, p. 190.
151.
To compare with Spinoza, see TPT, chap. 6.
152.
See Priestley, Institutes (vol. 1), pt. ii, chap. ii, sect. 5; chap. iii, especially sect. 2.
153.
Ibid., sect. ii, p. 231.
154.
As we saw in chap. 5 of this study, this was the position adopted by Reimarus , but he was preceded in this by that modern Maronite Thomas Morgan , and succeeded by a string of Christian theologians in the nineteenth century, and it continued into the twentieth century: see Harnack What is Christianity?, Lecture 1.
155.
Schleiermacher, Christian Faith [Der christliche Glaube, 1830], H. R. Mackintosh and J. Stewart (eds.), Mackintosh, et al. (trans.) London: A&C Black, 1928, p. 368.
156.
Schleiermacher , On Religion : Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers [ber die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, 1799], John Oman (ed. and trans.), London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1893, Speech 5, p. 165.
157.
Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism, p. 61.
158.
Schleiermacher, quoted by Moxnes, ibid., p. 61.
159.
The epigraph is on the front cover of Priestley ’s Socrates and Jesus.
160.
Ibid., ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
161.
See Rousseau, Emile, bk. iv, within the ‘Creed of a Savoyard Priest’, pp. 228–320: 272–273; Aquinas compares Jesus to Socrates (and Pythagoras) as oral sages in ST, pt. iii, q. 52, art. 4.
162.
Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
163.
See Rousseau, Emile, pp. 228–320.
164.
This had been a theme for Priestley in the Institutes, and it is developed in Socrates and Jesus, especially sects. 1, 2, and 4.
165.
See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. 6.
166.
See Matthew 3:17, Mark 1:11, and Luke 2:22. Priestle y may object that it does not say explicitly in any account that Jesus himself heard this voice.
167.
See Matthew 17:3–6, Mark 9:4–7, and Luke 9:30–36. Matthew’s account is distinctive in that the disciples actually hear the voice of God and ‘fall to the ground in fear’; the others are silent on this.
168.
See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. 1, p. 5. Priestley ’s target here seems to have been the French scholar Charles Rollin (1661–1741), though he does not cite his specific source.
169.
This is one theme in Pagden , Enlightenment, chap. 3, and Israel , Contested, chap. 26.
170.
See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. iii.
171.
Ibid., sect. iv, p. 15.
172.
See Xenophon , quoted by Priestley in ibid., p. 16.
173.
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
174.
See ibid., sect. v.
175.
See ibid., sect. v.
176.
The dialogue in the question is the Phaedo (see ibid., sect. 5).
177.
Ibid., sect. v, p. 21.
178.
Priestley ’s discussion is cursory: he dismisses the idea that because ‘every thing else in nature has its contrary, death must have it also’ (ibid., sect. v, p. 23), with the use of counterexamples (e.g. that a bitter substance must eventually become sweet); he rejects Plato ’s argument that knowledge is ‘only the recollection of what we knew before in a former state’ (pp. 23–24) for want of evidence ; the one argument he judges to carry any weight, from the simplicity of mental substance , he thinks ‘too subtle a nature to give much satisfaction’ (p. 24), and it can be countered by good arguments for the compound structure of the mind.
179.
Ibid., sect. v, p. 22.
180.
Ibid., sect. v, p. 21.
181.
Priestley makes this clear in his introductory comments to pt. i of the Institutes (vol. 1), p. 3.
182.
See ibid., pt. i, p. 108.
183.
One can add Rousseau to that: see Emile, bk. v, pp. 228–330.
184.
Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. vii, p. 33.
185.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 33.
186.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 33.
187.
See ibid., sect. vii.
188.
See ibid., sect. iii.
189.
See Rousseau, Emile, bk. iv, within the ‘Creed of a Savoyard Priest’, pp. 228–320: 272–273
190.
See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. vii.
191.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 42.
192.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 42.
193.
Luke 23:34 quoted by Priestley, ibid., sect. vii, p. 43.
194.
Rousseau quoted by Priestley, ibid., sect. vii, p. 43.
195.
See ibid., sect. vii.
196.
Ibid., sect. vii, pp. 36–37.
197.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 37.
198.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 37.
199.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 37.
200.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 37.
201.
Ibid., sect. viii, pp. 46–47.
202.
Ibid., sect. viii, p. 45.
203.
See d’Holbach , Ecce Homo, chap. vi.
204.
See Harvey Chisick on the limits of d’Holbach’s radicalism in ‘Of Radical and Moderate Enlightenment’, in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, pp. 61–79.
205.
See Burn, Racial Historical Jesus, intro. and chap. 1 where Ernst Renan is presented as the major influence among European biblical scholars; and see Jim Bisset, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
206.
See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. viii, p. 47.
207.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 41.
208.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 41.
209.
This depends, of course, on which Gospel we read. The Gospel of John tends to personalise the cosmic significance of Jesus: e.g. John 1:1–14, 8:58, 12:32, 14:6. The lower Christologies operative within the synoptic Gospels still suggest world historical change is afoot, but the weight is on the message delivered and the ultimate authority for that message (God) rather than on its messenger: the so-called apocalyptic discourses are examples of this in Mark 13, Matthew 24–25, and Luke 21.
210.
See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus, sect. ix, pp. 48–51.
211.
For example, Priestley is sceptical about single attestations concerning Socrates which are found in Plato ’s writings alone (ibid., sect. v); on the other hand, he freely makes use of single attestations from John ’s Gospel concerning Jesus: e.g. sect. vii, where the focus is on Jesus’ friendship with Lazarus , the man he raised from the dead, and yet the details cannot be found in any other New Testament source (see John 11:1–44).
212.
Ibid., sect. ix, p. 58.
213.
The evangelists narrated ‘the facts recorded of him, and the discourses ascribed to him’ (ibid., p. 59).
214.
Time and again Priestley talks about theological ‘knowledge’ as the distinguishing characteristic that separated Jesus (and the wider Jewish and Christian traditions) from Socrates and the rest of heathen antiquity (see ibid., sects. i, iv–v, vii, ix).
215.
See ibid., sect. v, pp. 25–26.
216.
Ibid., sect. xii, p. 38.
217.
Ibid., sect. vii, p. 38.
218.
It is churlish to deny that Jefferson ought to be considered a philosopher because he failed to produce any strikingly original technical contributions to its various branches. He was a philosopher in the classical sense of the term, and a publically engaged one at that: perhaps the closest that a modern democracy can get to a ‘philosopher king’. The case for Jefferson as a philosopher, against the judgement of one of the finest Jefferson scholars of the twentieth century (Gilbert Chinard ), is well made in Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, New York: Colombia University Press, 1943. In more recent scholarship, see Mark A. Holowchak’s Jefferson’s Political Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Utopia, Leiden: Brill, 2017; and Thomas Jefferson: Moralist, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017.
219.
See Thomas Jefferson Randolph , ‘To Henry S. Randall’, n.d. in Henry Stephens Randall (ed.), The Life of Thomas Jefferson , New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858, pp. 671–676: 672.
220.
See John M. Mason , The Voice of Warning, to Christians, on the Ensuing Election of a President of the United States, New York: G. F. Hopkins, 1800.
221.
See Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 3–42: especially 4–16.
222.
And for broadly the same reasons I gave concerning Thomas Hobbes on this same issue (see chap. 4).
223.
‘Deism ’ because of his belief in a creator God but denial of supernatural revelation ; ‘Christian ’ because he self-identified as one (see his letter ‘To Benkamin Rush’, 21 April 1803, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 331–336: 331) and because Jesus and the Gospels were so central to his moral faith .
224.
See Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, p. 36.
225.
See ibid., pp. 39–40.
226.
See Jefferson, ‘To John Adams ’, 11 April 1823, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 410–413.
227.
See Priestley, Letters to the Jews.
228.
For a contemporary response from an English Jew , politely declining Priestley ’s invitation, see David Levi , Letters to Dr. Priestley in Answer to Those he Addressed to the Jews, London, 1787.
229.
See Jefferson, ‘To William Short’, 4 August 1820, in ‘Appendix’ pp. 394–399.
230.
See Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.
231.
Some of Bolingbroke’s reflections on reason and religion are collected in The Works of the Late Right Honourable Henry. St John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke (vol. 6 of 8), London: J. Johnson et al., 1809.
232.
Bolingbroke, Works (vol. 6), ‘The Rise and Progress of Monotheism ; That First and Great Principle of Natural Theology or the First Philosophy ’, pp. 185–263: 235.
233.
As we saw in chaps. 3 and 5, there were elements of this sentiment in Lessing’s pedagogical project, which sought to transcend the authority of the Bible generally and the Old Testament specifically.
234.
Jefferson, ‘To John Adams ’, 5 July 1814, J. Jefferson Looney (ed.), Papers of Thomas Jefferson (vol. 7): 28 November 1813 to 30 September 1814, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 451–455.
235.
See Jefferson, ‘To Joseph Priestley’, 9 April 1803, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 327– 329.
236.
See Jefferson, ‘Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merits of the Doctrines of Jesus’, Compared with those of Others’, which he appended to his letter ‘To Benjamin Rush, 21 April 1803’, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 332–334.
237.
See Priestley, The Doctrines of the Heathen Philosophy Compared with Those of Revelation , Northumberland, PA, 1804. Jefferson wanted comparisons of ‘Pythagoras, Socrates , Epicurus, Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, Antonius’ (‘Syllabus’, p. 332). Priestley treats all these figures to an extended discussion apart from Cicero, whose genuine opinions Priestley finds hard to discern and whose religious doctrines he seemed unimpressed with (pp. viii–ix).
238.
For a wide-ranging discussion of Priestley ’s American phase, see Graham, Revolutionary in Exile. Priestley’s chief critic in the United States was another English immigrant: see William Cobbett, Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Joseph Priestley…Philadelphia, 1794.
239.
Jefferson, ‘Syllabus’, p. 334.
240.
Ibid., p. 334.
241.
Ibid., p. 333.
242.
Ibid., 333.
243.
Adams and Lester, ‘Reconstruction of “The Philosophy of Jesus”’, in Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 45–53: 45.
244.
Jefferson, ‘To John Adams ’, 12 October 1813, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 351–355: 351.
245.
See Adams with Lester, ‘Reconstruction of “The Philosophy of Jesus”’, pp. 45–53: 45.
246.
See ‘Jefferson to John Adams’, 12 October 1813, in ‘Appendix’, p. 351.
247.
Adams and Lester, ‘Reconstruction’, p. 45.
248.
The title page is handwritten: see The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, in Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 55–105: 55 (all references hereafter use this pagination range).
249.
See Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, p. 28, especially n. 87.
250.
Jefferson used this phrase on more than one occasion, the earliest of which seems to have been this reference to his beloved University of Virginia: ‘this institution of my native state, the Hobby of my old age, will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind, to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation’: ‘To Antoine Louise Claude Destutt de Tracy’, 26 December 1820, in Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Works of Thomas Jefferson (vol. 12 of 12): Correspondence and Official Papers, 1816–1827, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905, pp. 181–184: 183.
251.
See Adams and Lester, ‘Reconstruction’, p. 45. For the biography itself see Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (3 vols.), Philadelphia, 1858.
252.
These New Testament s were gifted to the University of Virginia by Matha Jefferson Trist Burke (his great-granddaughter) in 1913: see Adams and Lester, ‘Reconstruction’, pp. 45–46.
253.
See ibid., pp. 46–47.
254.
See Priestley, ‘Critical Dissertations Prefixed to the Harmonies of the Evangelists’, in J. T. Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (vol. 20 of 20), 1817–1831, pp. 3–118.
255.
See Brown , The Birth of the Messiah, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977, p. 37.
256.
See Jefferson, Philosophy of Jesus, pp. 61–62.
257.
See ibid., p. 60.
258.
See ibid., pp. 60–61.
259.
Working at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the foremost men of German theology and biblical hermeneutics, Schleiermacher , insisted on the priority of John for the construction of a biography of Jesus . His lectures were eventually published as Das Leben Jesu in 1864; by this time, however, D. F. Strauss had helped turn the tide against John as a reliable historical guide, in his monumental Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet.
260.
See Jefferson, Philosophy of Jesus, p. 67, referring to the love commandment from John 13:34.
261.
See ibid., pp. 73–75, referring to the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5:43–45.
262.
In fact, Matthew alone accounts for around half the entire text, with Luke well over a quarter. John makes up around 10%, while Mark is by far the least utilised source, with just three short entries: the reader can see the distribution of Gospel material for themselves in the handwritten contents page of the Philosophy of Jesus, pp. 57–59.
263.
Indeed, Jefferson f ollows the Johannine love command with Jesus’ Parable of the Tares from Matthew 13:24–43 (ibid., pp. 67–68); see also, pp. 97–101 where Jefferson groups together teachings on the coming Son of Man and other eschatological themes extracted from Matthew 13, 22, 25; Luke 12; and John 12.
264.
For Jesus’ affirmation of the general resurrection , see Jefferson, Philosophy of Jesus, p. 99, where he splices together passages from Matthew 22 and 25.
265.
This tradition continues: see van Inwagen , ‘The Possibility of Resurrection’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (vol. 9.2), 1978, p. 114–121; and Lynne Rudder Baker, ‘Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection’, Religious Studies (vol. 43.3), 2007, pp. 333–348.
266.
The sources for Jefferson ’s account of the Passion are provided by Matthew 26, 27; Mark 14; Luke 22–23; and John 18, in Philosophy of Jesus, pp. 101–104.
267.
See ibid., p. 103.
268.
See ibid., p. 104.
269.
Ibid., p. 104. In the Greek: καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς πᾶς ὁ λαὸς εἶπεν· τὸ αἷμα αὐτοῦ ἐφ’ ἡμᾶς καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ τέκνα ἡμῶν (Matthew 27:25).
270.
Jefferson, ‘To William Short’, 31 October 1819, in ‘Appendix’, pp. 387–391.
271.
See Adams with Lester, ‘The Life and Morals of Jesus: A History of the Text’, in Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 125–126.
272.
See ibid., p. 125.
273.
The classic account of nineteenth-century scholarship is Schweitzer’s Quest.
274.
Richard Samuelson, ‘Jefferson and Religion : Private Belief and Public Policy’, in Frank Shuffelton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 143–154: 146.
275.
See Jefferson, Life and Morals, pp. 134–137.
276.
See ibid., p. 137.
277.
See ibid., pp. 142–153.
278.
See ibid., pp. 176–179.
279.
See ibid., pp. 240–243.
280.
See ibid., pp. 218–221.
281.
See ibid., pp. 220–223.
282.
See ibid., pp. 258–259.
283.
See ibid., pp. 262–265.
284.
See ibid., pp. 246–249.
285.
See ibid., pp. 240–243.
286.
See ibid., pp. 208–209.
287.
See ibid., pp. 252–253.
288.
See ibid., pp. 204–205.
289.
See ibid., pp. 138–139.
290.
See ibid., pp. 138–139.
291.
See ibid., pp. 212–213.
292.
See ibid., pp. 162–165, 204–205, 268–271.
293.
See ibid., pp. 256–257.
294.
See ibid., pp. 142–143.
295.
See ibid., pp. 244–245.
296.
The crucial verse is Matthew 27:27: ‘then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers’ (Jefferson, Life and Morals , p. 289).
297.
The retention of Matthew 27:22 makes that clear: see Jefferson, Life and Morals, p. 289.
298.
Jefferson, ‘Syllabus’, p. 333.
299.
See Jefferson, Philosophy of Jesus, p. 103; Life and Morals , pp. 284–285.
300.
For Matthew ’s version see Jefferson, Philosophy of Jesus, p. 95; and Life and Morals of Jesus, pp. 250–251.
301.
Jefferson used the phrase in his letter ‘To the Danbury Baptist Association’, 1 January 1802’, in Barbara B. Oberg (ed.), Papers of Thomas Jefferson (vol. 36): 1 December 1801 to 3 March 1802, Princeton: University Press, 2009, p. 258.
302.
Jefferson, ‘To John Hancock, 11 October 1776’, in Boyd (ed.), Papers of Thomas Jefferson (vol. 1), p. 524.
303.
See Jefferson, Philosophy of Jesus, pp. 89–90; and Life and Morals, 224–227.
304.
See Jefferson, Life and Morals, pp. 258–263.
305.
See ibid., pp. 266–269.
306.
Jefferson, ‘Syllabus’, p. 334.
307.
Wayne Meeks, Christ Is the Question, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, pp. 7–8.
308.
See Robert W. Funk , Roy Hoover and the Jesus Seminar (eds.), Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, New York: Polebridge Press, 1993; and the also Funk et al., The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, New York: Harper SanFrancisco, 1998; and Hoover (ed.), Profiles of Jesus, New York: Polebridge, 2002. The leaders of their Seminar also published individual studies: see Crossan , Historical Jesus; and Funk, A Credible Jesus, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2002.
309.
For an account of their quirky voting practices using coloured beads, see their own publication materials: ‘The Jesus Seminar’, The Westar Institute, accessed 10 August 2018: https://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/voting/.
310.
When it came to Jesus’ deeds, the proportion of authentic examples fell to 16%: for a retrospective summary of the project, see ‘The Jesus Seminar’, Westar Institute, accessed 7 August 2018: https://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/.
311.
The methodological principles and ideological sympathises are indicated in Funk et al., Five Gospels, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–34.
312.
They involved the dating of the sources, multiple attestation, and (more controversially) the criterion of dissimilarity (see Funk et al., Five Gospels, pp. 21–32).
313.
For a critical assessment of the standard criteria used by historical Jesus scholars (not merely the Jesus Seminar ), see Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne (eds.), Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, London: Continuum, 2012.
314.
For an account which eschews the ‘great man’ or ‘charismatic individual’ mode of explanation, see Crossley , Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (26–50 CE), London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
315.
A paradigm that runs (at least) from Johannes Weise in the nineteenth century in Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God [Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 1892], Richard Hyde Heirs and David Larrimore Holland (eds. and trans.), Rudolf Bultmann (fore.), Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985; on to Sanders in the twentieth century with Jesus and Judaism ; and into the current century with Allison’s Constructing Jesus.
316.
See Funk et al., Five Gospels.
317.
See ibid., pp. 3–4.
318.
See ibid., pp. 32–33, 161, 316–317, 472.
319.
See Adams and Lester, ‘Notes to “The Philosophy of Jesus”’, in Jefferson’s Extracts, pp. 107–122: 116.
320.
See Stephen J. Stein (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Edwards (vol. 5 of 26): Apocalyptic Writings, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
321.
See Taylor , Secular Age, p. 650.
322.
Bush was answering questions along with fellow Republican candidates at the Des Moines Register, Iowa, in 1999; during the course of the debate, five of the six candidates invoked the name of God , Christ or both: see Stephen Buttry, ‘Des Moines Register: Candidates Focus on Christian Beliefs’, CNN.com, 15 December 1999, accessed 10 August 2018: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/15/religion.register/.
323.
See Hanna Rosin, ‘Bush’s “Christ Moment” Is Put to the Political Test by Christians: Act of Faith or Partisan Ploy, It Draws the Faithful’s Attention’, Washington Post, 16 December 1999, accessed 7 March 2018: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/16/045r-121699-idx.html.
324.
See Sherwood , ‘Bush ’s Bible as a Liberal Bible (Strange Though That Might Seem’, Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds (vol. 2.1). pp. 47–58.
325.
Robert S. McElvaine , Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, New York: Crown, 2008, p. 134.
326.
Jefferson, quoted by McElvaine, ibid., p. 134.
327.
See Crossley , Harnessing Chaos. Crossley examines the significance of the Bible for era-defining politicians, Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013 ) and Tony Blair , and their legacies for subsequent frontline politicians; this is interweaved with an analysis of more radical perspectives, from the Occupy movement to the unexpected rise of Jeremey Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour party.
328.
From the liberal and reforming Christian works from scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar , to professional sceptics such as Bart Ehrman (e.g. How Jesus Became God : The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, New York: HarperOne, 2014); and the popular (‘in demand’) scholarship of N. T. Wright (e.g. the Christian Origins series,) and Richard Bauckham (e.g. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony [2nd edn.], Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).
329.
See Sherwood , ‘Bush’s Bible as a Liberal Bible’; and in British context, reflecting on the political and cultural response to the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible during the premiership of David Cameron and Michael Gove’s period as Secretary of State for Education , see Crossley , ‘The Gove Bible Versus The Occupy Bible’, Harnessing Chaos, chap. 9.
330.
See Rodney Stark , The Victory of Reason : How Christianity Led to Freedom , Capitalism, and Western Success, New York: Random Housel, 2005; and One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Stark’s studies are well researched counterparts to secular accounts of the successes of liberal modernity such as Pinker ’s Enlightenment Now, or Pagden’s more scholarly Enlightenment.

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Birch, J.C.P. (2019). The Unity of God and the Wisdom of Christ: The Religious Enlightenments of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson. In: Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51276-5_7

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