fayfreethinkers.com

Getting Jefferson Right: New Book Exposes Barton History Errors
July/August 2012
People & Events

Two scholars at a conservative Christian college in Pennsylvania have just issued a new book that exposes the numerous errors and misconceptions put forth by “Christian nation” advocate David Barton.

Barton, a Texas-based historical revisionist popular with the Religious Right, recently wrote a new book titled The Jefferson Lies. In the tome, Barton attempts to prove that Thomas Jefferson was a conservative Christian who didn’t really support church-state separation.

The Barton book is riddled with errors and distorts the historical record, say Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor, and Michael Coulter, a humanities and political science professor, at Grove City College.

Throckmorton and Coulter’s book Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims About Our Third President, was issued in e-book form and as a download in May through the website gettingjeffersonright.com.

Throckmorton and Coulter examine several Barton claims and find them wanting. They give the real story, usually backing up their claims with words from Jefferson’s own writings.

Examples include:

• Barton says Jefferson helped found the Virginia Bible Society. In fact, Jefferson made a one-time contribution to the Society because a business associate asked him to. In reality, Jefferson wasn’t too keen on Bible societies, telling friends he opposed meddling in the religions of other countries.

• Barton asserts that Jefferson added the phrase “In the Year of Our Lord Christ” to official government documents. This is false. The documents referred to were called “sea letters,” a type of passport that enabled ships to move between nations. By the terms of a Treaty with Holland ratified in 1782, Jefferson was obligated to use language on pre-printed forms provided by that nation. Officials in Holland added the “Lord Christ” language.

• Barton claims that while Jefferson was a state legislator in Virginia, he proposed a bill that would have punished anyone who worked on Sunday. In reality, Jefferson was part of a committee charged with the task of revising Virginia’s law after the Revolution. Rather than start from scratch, the committee took 126 existing laws and revised some of them. The committee’s work actually liberalized the Sabbath law. They added a huge loophole allowing work done “in the ordinary household offices of daily necessity, or other work of necessity or charity.” The law Barton sees as favoring Christianity actually liberalized a provision that had been much more stringent.

http://au.org/church-state/julyaugust-2 ... ok-exposes

See also: http://www.liarsforjesus.com/

.

Barton's The Jefferson Lies pulled from shelves by Publisher

"David Barton, an evangelical activist and writer often cited as a “historian” by conservative political figures like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, stirred up such a firestorm of controversy with his latest book “The Jefferson Lies” that his publisher now claims to have “lost confidence” in the text, opting Thursday evening to pull it from stores.

The announcement by Christian mega-publisher Thomas Nelson comes after readers of The History News Network at George Mason University elected Barton’s latest work as “the least credible history book in print.” It was also challenged by an assemblage of “10 conservative Christian professors” in the recently released book, “Getting Jefferson Right,” which accuses Barton of grossly misrepresenting the nation’s third president.

The author of “Getting Jefferson Right,” Warren Throckmorton, fact-checked Barton’s book and found a number of basic historical facts that Barton got wrong, like Barton’s claim that Jefferson invested in an American printing of the Bible, when in fact he only bought one copy.
....
Rawstory

Barton gets a smack. Saw it on Facebook:

***
"David Barton is fond of declaring that the language of our United States Constitution was strongly influenced by the language of the Bible. Barton told James Robison on Trinity Broadcast Network, "You look at Article 3, Section 1, the treason clause - direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim.”

The Bible translation in use at the time of writing of the Constitution was the Authorized Version of 1611, commonly known as the King James Version. Because Barton cites chapter and verse in his second example, the comparison is quite easy.

Constitution, Article II, Section 1, fifth paragraph: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

Deuteronomy 17:15, KJV: “Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee; thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother.”

Even if one permits the substitution of “President” for “king,” there is simply no way in which the former can be regarded as a verbatim (word for word) transcript of the latter. They differ in intent as well as in language, for the Constitution refers to formal, legal citizenship in a nation, while the Deuteronomy passage refers to blood membership in a clan or tribe.

The reference to the treason clause is a bit more difficult to pin down. The clause in its entirety reads: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

“The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.”

Using Abingdon’s Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (a standard reference work for those searching for particular Bible quotes) I find three uses of the word “treason.”

I Kings 16:20 “Now the rest of the acts of Zimri, and his treason that he wrought, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?” (The context is a rather complex one of political intrigue within Israel. It has nothing to do with external enemies.)

II Kings 11:14 “And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, and all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets: and Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried, Treason, Treason.” (The context is a succession struggle, also internal within Israel.)

II Chronicles 23:13 “And she looked, and, behold, the king stood at his pillar at the entering in, and the princes and the trumpets by the king: and all the people of the land rejoiced, and sounded with trumpets, also the singers with instruments of music, and such as taught to sing praise. Then Athaliah rent her clothes, and said, Treason, Treason.” (This is the Chronicles version of the story from II Kings cited above.)

Clearly none of these provides the basis for Barton’s claim that the treason clause is a “direct quote out of the Bible.” It is possible that Barton is referring to the provision in Jewish law, as first cited in Deuteronomy 17:6, that requires the testimony of two or more witnesses in order to enforce the death penalty. “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death.” This is one of the earliest recorded instances of the requirement in a legal code for the testimony of at least two witnesses in a criminal proceeding.

The clear source of the treason clause in the Constitution, however, is the British Act of Parliament known as the Treason Act 1695, which repeated the two-witnesses rule from the Treason Act 1547, the Treason Act 1554, and the Sedition Act 1661. To these instances of settled English law, with which Jefferson would have been very familiar, the writers of our Constitution added the provision that the witnesses must be witnesses to “the same overt act.”

Other researchers have documented at length and in depth the numerous errors, lies, and distortions in David Barton’s work. These two examples are miniscule compared to the work of others. As a faithful Christian, however, I particularly deplore the misuse of Scripture for political ends and so wish to lift these up as examples of Barton’s failure to heed the commandment against bearing false witness.

Marian L. Shatto
MAR, magna cum laude
Lancaster Theological Seminary, 1991
***

LINK