Thomas Jefferson, United States founding father and deist, took it upon himself to compose a private view of Christianity by crafting a book which extracted teachings from the New Testament, careful to exclude all miracles and the supernatural including Christ’s resurrection and the like. The full breathtaking title of Jefferson’s 1804 version was The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, being Extracted from the Account of His Life and Doctrines Given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; Being an Abridgement of the New Testament for the Use of the Indians, Unembarrassed with Matters of Fact or Faith beyond the Level of their Comprehensions.

Most Bible Christians would be appalled at Jefferson’s scissors and glue reconstruction of Holy Scripture, especially since Holy Scripture, in several places, warns of adding, subtracting or modifying it. And yet, one could argue that the fathers of the Reformation, starting with the views of Martin Luther, did exactly that when assembling the Protestant Bible. In addition to removing several books of the canonical Old Testament including the deuterocanonical books of Judith, Maccabees and Wisdom, Martin Luther also tried to exclude Hebrews, James (which he lampooned as the Epistle of Straw), Jude and Revelation, presumably since these books did not line up with the sola fides pillar of the Reformation he was in the process of erecting. Sola scriptura, the second pillar, apparently required some truncating to level nicely with the first.

More recently, there are Christian movements afoot that would discredit those parts of the Bible composed by Saint Paul—the so called Pauline epistles. It should be enough that the apostle’s name has been formed into its own adjective¹ but these writings also constitute about two thirds of the New Testament. So why are denominations crafting this canonical extreme makeover? Recall that Paul’s letters to various churches around the Mediterranean are attempts to get Christians back in line where they deviated from orthopraxy. So when Paul exhorts wives to submit to their husbands, exhorts husbands to love their wives (Ephesians), condemns homosexuality (Romans), excommunicates the immoral brother or commands other directives that force us to conform to the truth, new denominations are compelled to “toss out” portions of scripture that don’t jive with their modern spirit of tolerance and political correctness. In the extreme, we might one day create a new Christian denomination that tosses out the baby of religion with the bathwater of sacred scripture altogether. And presto, atheism.

What might surprise the average reader of the New Testament is that Jesus had to deal with this same issue during his Earthly ministry. Remember that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead since they only recognized the Torah (or the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament) as authoritative, excluding histories, Psalms, and prophetic books. Nevertheless Jesus was able to clarify the doctrine anyhow using only the Torah as reference—brilliant! But it probably did not sway them anyway.

To be fair, the idea of making a unilateral decision as to what parts of the Bible belong in one’s orthodoxy is not just the problem of Jefferson, Luther, Calvin, Sadducees, deists, agnostics, atheists and reformers, it’s everyone’s problem—today—even if we leave the Bible physically intact. Even if we call ourselves Catholic.