Rolling over in their grave, they are…
I wonder if Thomas Jefferson provides commentary on some of the books. Prior to the book of Revelation, Jefferson could enlighten readers with this little gem:
It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the book of Revelation] and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. I was therefore well pleased to see in your first proof sheet that it was said to be not the production of St John but of Cerinthus a century after the death of that apostle. Yet the change of the author’s name does not lessen the extravagances of the composition and come they from whomsoever they may I cannot so far respect them as to consider them as an allegorical narrative of events past or subsequent. There is not coherence enough in them to countenance any suite of rational ideas. You will judge therefore from this how impossible I think it that either your explanation or that of any man in the heavens above or on the earth beneath can be a correct one. What has no meaning admits no explanation and pardon me if I say with the candor of friendship that I think your time too valuable and your understanding of too high an order to be wasted on these paralogisms. You will perceive I hope also that I do not consider them as revelations of the Supreme Being whom I would not so far blaspheme as to impute to Him a pretension of revelation couched at the same time in terms which He would know were never to be understood by those to whom they were addressed. In the candor of these observations I hope you will see proofs of the confidence esteem and which I entertain for you.
I am most happy to see at least one of our founding fathers who exhibited some common sense concerning religious texts.
I am an avid collector of ephemera and in a large collection I had purchased at auction I found an apocryphal writing by an old pioneer flatboater of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. He wrote of his apocryphal, but personal dream he had in 1805 about being taken to a smoldering lake of burning pitch and hung over the edge by a single strand of thread by the Lord himself. He went on to tell of his conversion and baptism in a local Ohio church in that same year. Luckily I found a descendant, who was Mormon, who just had to have the written account. It’s amazing the prices religious writings can demand. But the writer even had the pragmatism to point out that his dreams had been the result of an illness and high fever.
I am most happy to see at least one of our founding fathers who exhibited some common sense concerning religious texts.
I am an avid collector of ephemera and in a large collection I had purchased at auction I found an apocryphal writing by an old pioneer flatboater of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. He wrote of his apocryphal, but personal dream he had in 1805 about being taken to a smoldering lake of burning pitch and hung over the edge by a single strand of thread by the Lord himself. He went on to tell of his conversion and baptism in a local Ohio church in that same year. Luckily I found a descendant, who was Mormon, who just had to have the written account. It’s amazing the prices religious writings can demand. But the writer even had the pragmatism to point out that his dreams had been the result of an illness and high fever.