[346][347] Jefferson believed that Jesus' message had been obscured and corrupted by Paul the Apostle, the Gospel writers and Protestant reformers.[345] Peterson states that Jefferson was a theist "whose God was the Creator of the universe ... all the evidences of nature testified to His perfection; and man could rely on the harmony and beneficence of His work."[348] In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote that what he believed was genuinely Christ's, found in the Gospels, was "as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill".[342] By omitting miracles and the resurrection, Jefferson made the figure of Jesus more compatible with a worldview based on reason.[342]
Jefferson was firmly anticlerical, writing in "every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon."[349] The full letter to Horatio Spatford can be read at the National Archives.[350] Jefferson once supported banning clergy from public office but later relented.[351] In 1777, he drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. 