These words are within 2 verses of the end of the entire Bible. The dire consequences awaiting the one who dares add to or take away anything from the book stand like a security seal over it. What “the book” is: the book of Revelation, the sealed scroll brought forward in chapter 5, or the entire Bible, has been much discussed. Standing, as it does at the very end of the Bible, the warning seems to cast a shadow all the way back to Genesis, whatever its specific antecedent in this passage might be. The Bible certainly sees itself as a perfect entity, complete in itself, and containing all any person needs to be complete (Jude 3, II Timothy 3.16-17).
Some of us, however, are not convinced.
As early as the third century some preferred to exclude the book of James as being too “Jewish.” More recently some have attempted to “demythologize” the scriptures by removing the miraculous, to “gender neutralize” the Bible by editing out all the patriarchal pronouns, and the Jesus Seminar meets regularly to vote on what Jesus did and did not say. I guess John’s Cave Deum at the end of the Bible won’t deter some folks.
Perhaps the best known cut-and-paster of our sacred book is our third president, Thomas Jefferson who bought two New Testaments and did, literally cut-and-paste the passages he approved onto a notebook. If you go to Monticello today you can buy a copy of Jefferson’s Bible. What is missing from Jefferson’s Bible are references to the miraculous, and specific references to Jesus’ divinity and death/burial/resurrection event. It isn’t that Jefferson wasn’t a man of faith. He believed deeply in God, the divine intelligence that created and logically ordered the universe, and who made human rights inalienable. He respected Jesus as a great moral philosopher – certainly the greatest. In a letter to Benjamin Rush (April 21, 1803) he wrote: I am a Christian in the only sense he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others…, but this is not the confession of Martha in John 11.27: Yes Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who was to come into the world.
Martha’s confession is a reply to Jesus’ question I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me shall live even if he dies; and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? Had Jesus asked this question to Mr. Jefferson, at least at the time he was pasting together his Bible, our most beloved son of Virginia would have answered “No.” In this he was not alone among the founding fathers. George Washington was likely not a believer in a divine Jesus, and Benjamin Franklin stated plainly in a letter to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale University (March 9, 1790): As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, is the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see.
I read something recently about Mr. Jefferson I hadn’t known before. John Meacham, in his book American Gospel (Random House, 2006), reports that on July 3, 1826, the day before he died, Jefferson was heard repeating the Song of Simeon from Luke 2.29-32 which begins “Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace…” It was a passage he had cut out of his Bible, but he quoted it nonetheless. Another passage important to him at his death was that very passage from John 11, I am the Resurrection and the Life…, cited above. He instructed Reverend Frederick Hatch to use it in his burial service.
When death and eternity became a reality he faced personally, and not an abstraction he contemplated generally, Jefferson reached for the very passages he had previously rejected.
So also do we sometimes edit the Bible – perhaps not with glue and scissors, but with neglect. We turn to familiar passages to soothe us, and never to the ones that challenge us. “All scripture” Paul tells Timothy in II Timothy 3.16-17, is there to make us “complete, thoroughly prepared.” We have to be careful what we edit out. It just might be the very thing we need, the only thing that will serve.
