Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters desperately wants the Bible — well, a bible — in state classrooms.

As the Oklahoman newspaper reported last week, Walters’ play here is actually a good bit greasier than a straightforward Christian nationalist effort to impose his own religion in the state’s 43,000 classrooms. It turns out that Walters also established a series of odd criteria for the taxpayer-financed texts, and only one publisher seems to hit all the grace notes: the Donald Trump-endorsed grifter edition of the King James, which sells for $60, or roughly $57 more than another King James Bible on the market. Trump receives royalties from the sales.

Superintendent Walters has requested $3 million in public funds for his tribute to the Lord of Mar-a-Lago. MAGA is popular in Oklahoma, and many who subscribe to MAGA readily tolerate abuses more typical of fringe cults. So maybe Walters will succeed in giving Trump yet another public payday.

If Walters actually wanted to fulfill his stated desire to expose students to the Bible’s role in literature and U.S. history, however, a different bible might serve his goal well. The Jefferson Bible, the personal labor of the author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the U.S., would be a boon to public discussion of the role of religion in the nation’s founding.

Thomas Jefferson’s peculiar retrofit of the New Testament was a result of a multi-decade rumination. But the bulk of the work was accomplished, he said, in two or three winter nights in the White House in 1804. Using a blade, Jefferson cut out the sections of the New Testament that he valued, leaving the bulk of the book behind. In an 1813 letter to his friend and former rival, John Adams, Jefferson said he cut “verse by verse out of the printed book,” to separate “diamonds” from the “dunghill.” He called the result “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” Adams, the nation’s second president, wasn’t outraged; he encouraged the effort.

Harvard University historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of acclaimed books on Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, said in an email that the Jefferson Bible “was Jefferson’s attempt to present Jesus’s teachings without references to miracles and Jesus’s divinity, which (Jefferson) thought had been added to the story of Jesus and caused unnecessary conflicts over religion. He knew there were (and would be) many religious faiths in the United States and thought his version of the Bible would be of value to all American citizens, regardless of their personal religious beliefs.”

Jefferson was a big fan of Jesus’s moral instruction, but not so much of the package around it, which, as he wrote to William Short, was marred by “a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.”

A common strain of right-wing opinion contends that the North American continent was set aside by a Christian nationalist God for use by European migrants who belonged to Christian sects. Facts are of little use against such a blunt proposition. But neither Jefferson nor his bible offer much to support that magical view.

“Not only was Jefferson not an evangelical Christian, Jefferson wasn't really a Christian,” Jefferson biographer Joseph Ellis said in a telephone interview. “Jefferson did not believe that Jesus was the son of God. Jefferson did not believe that when you died, you go to heaven or hell. Jefferson thought that Jesus was a great man like Socrates, that there was much to learn from him and the values that he espoused. But the evangelical view of Jesus was not at all Jefferson's view.”

Jefferson seems to have completed his bible, derived from multiple editions, around 1819. Ever wary of the infelicitous label of “infidel,” which was applied to him throughout his political career, Jefferson kept news of the project within a tight circle. According to the Smithsonian Institution, Jefferson’s bible remained in his family until his great-granddaughter sold it to the Smithsonian in 1895. In 1904 the Government Printing Office published a facsimile of the Jefferson Bible and distributed copies to members of Congress. (Don’t be too surprised. Not long before that, Robert Ingersoll became the nation’s most famous orator by delivering speeches debunking the Bible.)

My own copy of the Jefferson Bible measures 5-by-7.5 inches. It’s less than one inch thick, and much of that consists of added commentary about Jefferson. The text that Jefferson extracted from the Gospels is extraordinarily compact.

The introduction to my Jefferson Bible is written by Forrest Church, a Unitarian Universalist minister who died in 2009. Church wrote that he discovered the Jefferson Bible because his father, U.S. Senator Frank Church of Idaho, was given a copy by the U.S. government when he became a senator in 1957.

I doubt the religious skepticism that informs the Jefferson Bible is the sort of thing red-capped extremists are pining for with their 1950s nostalgia. Moreover, Jefferson, that shifty genius, is a morally dubious character on which to pin a national awakening.

Yet the life, times, bigotry and doubts of Thomas Jefferson remain worthy of national discussion. By any measure, Jefferson is a giant compared to Walters or Trump and their soiled ilk. If Oklahoma is going to trample the Constitution and impose the bible on its public-school students, let it be the Jefferson Bible.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

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