"In a world as compromised as ours, a soul so exalted was always destined for the Cross. Jefferson's Bible ends before the Resurrection, with Jesus crucified by the Roman occupiers, as the Gospels tell us he was. Jefferson’s austere editing turns the killing almost into an afterthought—a desiccated reiteration of Socrates' final encounter with hemlock, the simple consequence of having offended the wrong people. For Thurman, the Crucifixion was an emphatic lesson in creative weakness: by sticking out his neck and accepting the full implications of his own vulnerability, Christ had radically identified himself with the worst off. Those societal castoffs who could never get a break now had a savior, and a champion, and a model. This, for Thurman, is as great a teaching as anything that Jesus merely said. Where death, for Jefferson's Jesus, is an ending, for Thurman's it is a necessary precondition—just a start."
At The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham reads Peter Manseau's The Jefferson Bible: A Biography.
And Nicole Penn reviews Manseau's book at The Bulwark.
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