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September 19, 2006
John Adams on the Bible
Jonathan Rowe at Positive Liberty has a few quotations from John Adams on the Bible. This one from a November 4, 1816 letter to Thomas Jefferson is an interesting example of one element of his views.
We have now, it seems a National Bible Society, to propagate King James’s Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better, to apply these pious subscriptions, to purify Christendom from the corruptions of Christianity, than to propagate these corruptions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!
In other quotations Adams shows a rudimentary concepts of redaction criticism and source criticism although I suspect his speculations on when the Book of Deuteronomy was composed are wrong. It does appear that he saw many of these issues in terms of what we would today consider textual criticism.
Go read all of Jonathan's post and remember that there are those today that think all of our founding fathers were precursors to themselves, fundamentalist Christians.
Update: Fixed typo
Posted by DuaneSmith at September 19, 2006 09:51 AM | Read more on Religion |
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Comments
Thanks for the link.
Arg. I hate typos. Reading your post, I think I typed "though" when it should have been "through." I'm at work now and don't have the book of quotations in front of me. I'll check it when I get home.
That's why I like the "cut and paste" feature we can use when quoting online sources. Unfortunately, when quoting a book, we have to type it out by hand.
Posted by: Jon Rowe at September 19, 2006 12:08 PM
Jon,
Heck, I read it as it said what it was intended to say and didn't even notice the error.
Posted by: Duane at September 19, 2006 02:17 PM
Thanks. Yes, catching typos can be very challenging. I'm getting better at it. But I still don't have an eye to be a copy editor. Alas, bloggers must be their own editors.
Posted by: Jon Rowe at September 19, 2006 07:15 PM
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