Huff Post: In 1804, over three consecutive evenings, President Thomas Jefferson completed a private spiritual project. Using the King James Bible, he took a penknife to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, cutting out the Scripture he liked and pasting it into his own blank book. He called the book The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth and, fitting Jefferson’s own worldview, it ignored Jesus’ miracles and resurrection and scoffed at the idea of God’s having a son.
The so-called Jefferson Bible, the original of which is now owned by the Smithsonian Institution, has long been studied as an example of one founding father’s belief in God and his dislike of what he saw as the “corruption of schismatizing followers” of Christianity. Lesser known are the reimagined Gospels produced by two equally famed writers who followed Jefferson.
In 1846, around the time he was writing David Copperfield, Charles Dickens pennedThe Life of Our Lord, a recounting of the life of Jesus to share with children. The book, adapted from the Gospel of Luke, was secretly passed down by his descendants and remained unpublished until 1934. Meanwhile, Leo Tolstoy — in the midst of a spiritual crisis in 1886 — created his own condensed Bible, a 12-chapter recounting of Jesus’ life. The Gospel in Brief not only shortened the story but rewrote entire parts.
Instead of laboring separately, what if the three men could have come together?
That’s the scene imagined in “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord,” which opened this week at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Part comedy and part thought-provoking, emotional theater, the play imagines the men joining in an attempt to write the perfect Gospel. Voracious debate about earthly life and the cosmic world ensue.
Categories: American History, Americas, Belief, Catholics, CHRISTIANITY, Church