The project is moving forward incrementally to the finish line. I'm currently formatting the book into 6"x9" size for publication. I could also stand the services of an editor – please contact me if you're interested in the project. To hold your interest a bit longer, this is the current version of my foreword to the paper version.
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Foreword to the 21st Century Edition
“When a person has completed 95% of his journey, he is only halfway there.”
- Japanese Proverb
“The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.”
- Don Williams Jr
This project started off as a ‘quick’ audio book project in the spring of 2009, to make Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth more accessible to modern people put off by the antique English. My initial idea was that since it is only a few pages and also familiar subject matter, I should be able to knock out an audio book version of Thomas Jefferson’s pared-down version of the life of Jesus in a matter of a few hours.
I have a background in broadcasting, and I’m a writer by profession. The audio book should have been a simple thing to record, but I was completely frustrated. No matter how I approached the subject the original text by Jefferson just refused to roll off my tongue. After a couple of days I had a pitiful example of an audio book, and even with careful edits it sounded forced, unnatural and therefore uncomfortable to listen to. It was like William Shatner reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets – not what I wanted.
I decided that since I had difficulty wrapping my tongue around this nearly Shakespearean selection of scriptures, that I would put my tongue around a more comfortable version of the same scripture passages. If I could do a modern parallel of the same text and perform an audio book from a new manuscript, would that not be even better?
However, I discovered that for a project of this size, most modern translations of the Bible would be prohibitive based on copyright and fair use issues. This project is about twice as many verses (over 1000) as the fair use limit of the traditional scripture publishers would allow (commonly 500) without royalty arrangements. Since cost is an obvious factor I began a search to find a suitable translation, or one that I could paraphrase for this purpose.
I found the World English Bible (WEB) [http://ebible.org/]. This is a freely copy-able version of the Bible that is in turn based on the American Standard Version (ASV), which has fallen into the Public Domain.
Using the WEB, I pulled the same collection of verses together in the same order as Thomas Jefferson. While this was a large leap forward, I felt that it still did not completely cross the chasm of time as completely as other versions of scripture. It was an improvement on the original Jefferson version, but still lacked the last full measure of casual modern English. I found ample room for a streamlined sentence structure, reduced punctuation, and other enhancements that would make reading less of a tune-out for today’s Internet-driven readership.
I compared a few sample sections of the WEB to the New American Standard Bible (NASB – the Lockman Foundation), the New International Version (NIV – Zondervan) and the New Living Translation (NLT – Tyndale House Publishers). I was constantly intrigued in the similarities and the differences among these versions.
It was during this process that I felt driven to continue with a complete paraphrase of the WEB version of these verses to move toward a highly readable, easily understood, and completely unique approach.
This therefore is a paraphrased edition of the “Jefferson Bible”, based on the World English Bible, and should NOT be considered a ‘scholarly interpretation’ or a ‘translation’ of scripture. I have used a great deal of the same vocabulary as the WEB, but I changed the sentence structures around and removed some redundant phrases (that were probably necessary in Greek but not in today’s English). I also updated the general format. I kept the same chapter and verse organization but organized it into a paragraph structure that is easier to read.
There may be passages where this paraphrased text may be similar to other versions of scripture, but this is unintentional. There are after all, many versions of scripture that all come from the same source texts and similarities abound.
I am not a deist. I do not necessarily subscribe to all of Thomas Jefferson’s reasons for collecting these scriptures together for us. But I do understand Jefferson’s aversion to trusting the early church fathers, and he felt that much of the material he was leaving out was simply added by the early church or edited in by the four evangelists for emphasis. (For more historical perspective read the postscripts.)
I do applaud his result however – a very streamlined version of the life of Jesus that is separated from the distractions of the controversies (miracles, questions of divinity, angels and so on). The result is a presentation of a streamlined collection of the sermons of Jesus, his parables and his teachings. I feel that while this is not the entire gospel, it is a starting place for many who are curious about the teachings of Jesus, but feel highly skeptical of things like angels and miracles. I’m inclined to let normal human curiosity move the reader toward other translations or a full version of the New Testament from here.
I hope that this small book can be used to kindle more interest in the life of Jesus. To that end I am releasing this book and all related materials (PDF files and audio books) under the Creative Commons license for either commercial or noncommercial use.
Timothy Pontious
Indianapolis
May 2009
