Row 12: "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." Row 13: "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." Row 14: "Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." Row 15: "History... furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." — all attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

These should be handled honestly, because Jefferson's anti-clerical and anti-supernaturalist convictions were real, strong, and extensively documented — not a fabrication or misattribution. Jefferson produced his own edited redaction of the Gospels, *The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth* (the 'Jefferson Bible'), physically cutting out every miracle, the virgin birth, and the resurrection with a razor, retaining only Jesus's ethical teaching, which he called in an 1803 letter to Benjamin Rush 'the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.' Rows 12 and 13, from his private correspondence, reflect his genuine, sustained contempt for what he saw as centuries of priestly corruption layered onto that original ethical teaching — doctrines like the Trinity, which he elsewhere mocked as 'Athanasian arithmetic' and 'incomprehensible jargon.' This is not atheism: Jefferson was a Unitarian rationalist-deist who believed firmly in a creator God and considered himself, by his own repeated statement, a genuine follower of Jesus's *ethics* — his target was specifically the supernatural claims and post-apostolic doctrinal accretions (Trinity, miracles, substitutionary atonement, priestly authority) that he believed had corrupted an originally pure moral teaching, tied to his broader Enlightenment-era anxiety about clerical political power constraining reason and civil liberty (Row 15 reflects exactly this concern, echoing his 1813 letter to Alexander von Humboldt about clerically dominated societies). Row 14 is a different kind of claim altogether and is frequently lifted out of its actual context: it is not a theological statement but a narrow, technical legal-historical argument from Jefferson's 1814 letter to Thomas Cooper, contesting the common claim (traceable to Sir Matthew Hale and repeated by Blackstone) that 'Christianity is part and parcel of the common law of England.' Jefferson argued, using philological evidence, that this claim rested on a documented mistranslation — English judges had rendered the Latin phrase 'ancien scripture' (old writing/legal text) as 'Holy Scripture,' smuggling a false pedigree into legal doctrine. Whatever one thinks of Jefferson's philology (later legal historians have contested some of his specific claims), this is a technical argument about the origins of English common law, not a claim that Christianity is false or without moral value — conflating the two is an equivocation on 'Christianity' as legal doctrine versus 'Christianity' as religious truth-claim.

Jefferson's own explicit judgment that Jesus's ethical teaching was 'the most sublime and benevolent... system of ethics' ever offered to humanity is itself significant testimony to the singular moral force of Christ's teaching from an otherwise deeply skeptical, classically educated critic — Jefferson's quarrel was never that Jesus taught something base or unworthy, but that he believed later followers corrupted it; that concession from a hostile witness is worth more, not less, than praise from a friendly one.