evidence: The 86-page book, now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, is bound in red Morocco leather and ornamented with gilt tooling. It was crafted in the fall and winter months of 1819 and 1820 when the 77-year-old Jefferson used a razor to cut passages from six copies of the New Testament—two in Greek and Latin, two in French and two in English—and rearranged and pasted together the selected verses, shorn of any sign of the miraculous or supernatural in order to leave just the life and teachings of Jesus behind. Jefferson, who had suffered great criticism for his religious beliefs, once said that the care he had taken to reduce the Gospels to their core message should prove that he was in fact, a "real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." [...] Meanwhile, news that the U.S. government would soon be in the Bible printing business ignited public alarm over Jefferson’s religious ideas such as had not been seen in nearly a century. "The so-called Jefferson Bible seems bound to make trouble," the Chicago Inter Ocean warned. "This is the more remarkable from the fact that it has been forgotten for nearly a century… So completely had the Jefferson Bible been forgotten that when the House of Representatives passed a resolution recently to print 9,000 copies comparatively few of the present generation knew that such a book existed." [...] Greek, Latin, French, and English by Thomas Jefferson