Category: history

Take The Jefferson Quiz; Buy the Jefferson book

Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President is now live on Amazon.

One way we are getting the word out about the book is The Jefferson Quiz. Go check it out and test your Jefferson knowledge. You can see the answers and  the results of others who have taken it after you are done.

Read the book on any digital device or computer you own. Click here to see how to do it.

If you have any questions about the book, leave them in the comments section here or at the site designed to support the book – Getting Jefferson Right.

About the book, Messiah College chair of history, John Fea, said:

*Getting Jefferson Right* is an intellectual and historical take down of David Barton’s pseudo-history of Thomas Jefferson by two Christian professors who teach at a conservative Christian college. Michael Coulter and Warren Throckmorton have done their homework. Anyone who reads this book must come to grips with the untruths and suspect historical interpretations that Barton regularly peddles in his books, speaking engagements, and on his radio program. I have yet to read a more thorough refutation of Barton’s claims.

–John Fea, Chair of the History Department, Messiah College and author of *Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction*

(Earlier I had mentioned a problem with images in the book. Those are now resolved. Anyone who bought the book without the images will get an email from Amazon with instructions on how to get their copy updated. People buying the book now should be fine.) 

Government to ministers: Preach or pay

Spoof alert – Taketh not this first part seriouslyeth.

Washington, DC (HUH) – Today, Barack Obama pledged to introduce legislation which would allow the President to set days of public prayer and thanksgiving. Obama said he had come to recognize the importance of prayer to the nation and he believes the President should set the tone.

However, a clause in the proposal has some religious leaders nervous. According to the Bill for Appointing Days of Public Fasting and Thanksgiving, ministers who decline to preach a sermon , “suited to the occasion,” on government appointed feast days will be fined if they cannot produce “a reasonable excuse” for the lack of sermonizing.

This has conservatives up in arms with complaints about the heavy hand of the government in religious matters. David Barton of Wallbuilders spoke out against the proposal. “I have concluded that Obama is the most Biblically hostile President ever, and this is just one more example,” Barton claimed.

Continue reading “Government to ministers: Preach or pay”

David Barton’s bad media day

No TGIF for David Barton last week.

First, the Wall Street Journal published a book review of The Jefferson Lies by Alan Pell Crawford which briefly takes apart the book. Crawford begins by agreeing with Barton that Jefferson’s connection to his slave Sally Hemming’s children has not been established. However, from there on, the review identifies problem after problem with The Jefferson Lies.

Continue reading “David Barton’s bad media day”

The Jefferson Lies: Does the Jefferson Bible include the miracles of Matthew 9?

These days I am working toward completion of Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. A prominent focus of the book is David Barton’s new book, The Jefferson Lies. With GJR coming out, I intend to write more about both books going forward.

I have had many headslapping moments reading The Jefferson Lies. One of them is the subject of today’s post. In TJLs, Barton includes a chapter on what is commonly called The Jefferson Bible. In our book, co-author Michael Coulter and I fully explore the development of both of Jefferson’s efforts to extract what Jefferson considered to be the gold from the dross of the Gospels for his own use. The only surviving version of those efforts was titled by Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & Latin. The term “Jefferson Bible” has become a short hand for this book completed sometime between 1820 and 1824 (we describe evidence in the book which seems to place the binding of the Life and Morals of Jesus closer to 1824).

In TJLs, Barton claims that Jefferson did not remove all of the supernatural and miraculous aspects of the Gospels. He claims this was not Jefferson’s intent. Despite the fact that Jefferson said on several occasions that such an extraction was his intent, Barton makes this claim based on passages he says Jefferson included. Most of the passages Barton offers as proof are verses about the afterlife. Truly, Jefferson did believe in an afterlife with rewards and punishments as appropriate. Jefferson did not believe in the atonement of Jesus but rather that good works in this life were necessary for a happy afterlife. In that sense, there is a supernatural element in Jefferson’s extraction. However, Barton includes as evidence of miracles, three miracles from Matthew 9 which are not in either the 1804 or 1820 version. Barton writes:

That abridgement also contained the miraculous resurrection of Jarius’s (sic) daughter (Matthew 9:1), the healing of the bleeding woman (Matthew 9:18-26), and the healing of two blind men (Matthew 9:27-34), all of which are clearly acts of a miraculous or supernatural character.

The footnote for this paragraph leads to Charles Sanford’s book on the religious views of Jefferson. Consulting that book, I find that Sanford does list those verses but when one examines the 1804 and 1820 extractions from Jefferson, Matthew 9 is not included in the 1804 version at all, and in the 1820 version, only Mt. 9:36 (where Jesus was moved with compassion on the people gathered around him) is there.

Apparently, Barton did not check the versions but rather simply accepted the erroneous citation of Sanford. And these are not only verses which Barton includes which were not included. We fully document all of this in the GJR book. There are several prominent instances like this in TJLs — where Barton cites a source but that source turns out to be in error or quite suspicious. When  we explore the source, we learn the story is not true or quite implausible.

This observation is relevant to fact checking. Barton and defenders almost always make a point to note how many footnotes he uses while criticizing books with fewer notes. However, many footnotes do not a fact make if the citation is unverified or in error. We may not get all of them in GJR, but we do get some major ones.

Stay tuned…

Ron Paul’s death-penalty-for-gays pastor interviews Monumental co-producer

Remember Philip Kayser? He is the Omaha, NE pastor that endorsed Ron Paul in the Iowa GOP primary who teaches that U.S. civil law should reflect the Old Testament book of Leviticus. In December, 2011, I wrote about his views on the death penalty for adulterers, disobedient children, gays, etc., which led to at least two national stories about Kayser’s endorsement. Very soon after those stories appeared, Kayser’s endorsement was pulled from Ron Paul’s website.

In book on the death penalty, Kayser wrote:

Difficulty in implementing Biblical law does not make non-Biblical penology just. But even on Bahnsen’s strictest interpretation of the death penalties, the results would not be as dire as people often predict. For example, while many homosexuals would be executed on Bahnsen’s interpretation, it would not be nearly as many as critics try to imply, because homosexuals would likely keep silent about their lifestyle…

Other Levitical sins (adultery, idolatry, disobedient children, etc.) are addressed in his book, which I examined briefly here.

Rev. Kayser here interviews Marshall Foster, now famous as a guest and co-producer of Kirk Cameron’s movie Monumental, about the biblical foundations of liberty, something that sounds a lot like Cameron’s movie. Cameron is offering material from Foster for sale on the Monumental website.

Marshall Foster Interview from Biblical Blueprints on Vimeo.

Biblical Blueprints is the ministry of Rev. Kayser. In 2011, Marshall Foster was the special guest and keynote speaker of the Providential History Festival, held yearly in Nebraska. The Providential History Festival is underwritten by Kayser’s Dominion Covenant Church and Christian reconstruction groups like the Chalcedon Foundation.

Mr. Foster may not agree with Rev. Kayser on the death penalty (I have seen nothing on that) but he is enough in sync that he appears to support Kayser’s approach to history. Kirk Cameron said at the end of his movie that he wants monumental to be a movement. With Mr. Foster involved, I think it is fair to ask what the movement is about.