One of the biggest cons and contaminations in contemporary Christianity is the idea that
“I am saved because through the death or blood of Christ”
This was something fabricated by people who established the Christian religion many years after his death, but never implied or stated by Jesus.
In fact, Jesus was guiding his followers to achieve this when he was ALIVE, and it only required completing a very specific set of guidelines that he had set for his followers to follow. He never said “my blood will save you”. His guidelines and instructions to follow are what saved people not his death. It’s also how he accumulated such an enormous following during his life. It was through verifiable and demonstrable results of said guidelines. Full-blown accessing of heaven within all of us, available now. He didn’t tell anyone to worship him or to make him their lord and savior. Once again, more contaminations and distortions of his teachings by people in the years following his death. Jesus directed all worship and praise to God the Father, and rejected any praise by saying “Only God is Good” in response. A response that also makes a distinction between himself and God. Becoming one with God is what he was teaching all his followers to achieve, not some exclusive title he was carrying for himself. Nor was it a claim of exclusive divinity. He outright said he wanted others to also become one with God.
We can go on for days about how Christianity was ruined by people who established the religion and distorted it during the 2000 years since his death. It’s time those distortions are finally abandoned in mainstream Christianity. (Hence the name of this website). It should be understood that while Jesus established its teachings he did not formally create the institution or religion of Christianity which came years after his death and was unsurprisingly vulnerable to corruptions and unscrupulous modifications to the teachings of Jesus.
I know it will definitely take some time since so many Christians and pastors are so addicted to this narrative of his death being why you can access the kingdom of God, but that outright contradicts the teachings of Jesus. They are perpetuating 2000 years of misinformation.
Jesus’ death isn’t how you access that oneness with God within all of us. His teachings are. Jesus was specific about what he asked of his followers: make peace with others, willingly accept the Holy Spirit, and help those in need whenever you can. Some of these steps are hard, but none of them are optional. They are what made possible the spiritual transformations his early followers experienced, pre-crucifixion.
Yet many Christians skip these steps entirely. Once someone believes “Jesus died for my sins” or declares him their savior, everything he taught suddenly becomes optional. That makes little sense. If his death were going to save everyone automatically, there would have been no reason for him to teach anything at all. Belief in Jesus means little without the actions he called for.
The ideas that “God sacrificed his son” and that “his blood has saved me” came later, as part of the religious narrative built around Jesus. They have no basis in his own teachings, or in the path to salvation he was already showing his followers while he was alive. At best, these additions began shifting the blame for killing a remarkable spiritual teacher onto God, when that responsibility belongs to the people who killed him.
Few people saw the corruptions of Christianity more clearly than Thomas Jefferson, and his views line up closely with the message of this site.
Jefferson believed that Jesus’ teachings, which were simple, moral, and practical at their core, had been buried over the centuries under layers of doctrine, theology, and institutional power. He rejected the idea that Jesus was God, dismissed the Trinity as a later invention, set aside the miracle stories, and distrusted churches that used faith to gain authority. He was especially critical of the Apostle Paul, whom he saw as the first to reshape Jesus’ message into something Jesus never taught. A view that has been thoroughly investigated and supported on this site.
In a letter to Benjamin Rush dated April 21, 1803, Jefferson put it plainly:
“To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”
Jefferson went further in the same letter, calling himself a Christian “in the only sense in which he wished any one to be,” meaning devoted to what Jesus actually taught rather than to the doctrines later built around him. He was serious about it. Late in life, he took a razor to several copies of the New Testament and kept only Jesus’ moral teachings, leaving out the miracles and the claims of divinity. The result, which he titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, is now known as the Jefferson Bible.
The major corruptions Jefferson identified
1. Turning Jesus into God
Jefferson saw Jesus as an extraordinary moral teacher, but not as God. In his view, Jesus’ followers had raised him to divine status after his death, and in doing so they buried the message he actually taught. That’s why Jefferson rejected both the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ’s divinity: he thought they had replaced Jesus’ teachings instead of preserving them.
2. The Apostle Paul’s influence on Christianity
Jefferson saved his sharpest criticism for Paul. In a letter to William Short dated April 13, 1820, he called Paul:
“the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus.”
A coryphaeus was the leader of the chorus in Greek drama, so Jefferson was casting Paul as the lead voice of the corruption. He believed Paul had introduced ideas Jesus never taught, and that those ideas came to define Christianity. This was Jefferson’s own historical judgment, and scholars continue to debate it. <relevant article>
3. Priests using religion to accumulate wealth and power
In an October 12, 1813, letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote that to find what Jesus really taught, one had to strip away the “artificial vestments” priests had wrapped around it. Over the centuries, he argued, religious authorities had reshaped Jesus’ words into:
“instruments of riches and power to them.”
To Jefferson, Jesus’ message was simple and ethical at heart. The churches had buried it under philosophy and doctrine, and that complexity served a purpose: it made ordinary believers dependent on the very authorities who had created it.
4. Miracles and supernatural doctrines
Jefferson rejected numerous supernatural elements of traditional Christianity, including:
- The virgin birth of Jesus.
- Jesus’ supernatural miracles.
- The bodily resurrection.
- The doctrine of original sin.
He considered many supernatural Gospel accounts to be later embellishments or misunderstandings, rather than reliable expressions of what Jesus actually taught.
5. Religious coercion and interference in government
Jefferson rejected the idea that religious institutions should hold governmental power or force anyone to accept a particular set of beliefs. In his well-known 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, he spoke of building a:
“wall of separation between Church & State.”
For Jefferson, faith belonged to the individual conscience. No government and no church had the right to impose it.
Source: Jefferson’s Religious Beliefs
6. Doctrines portraying God as cruel or unjust
Jefferson was just as hard on John Calvin, especially Calvin’s teachings on divine sovereignty and predestination. In an April 11, 1823, letter to John Adams, he argued that the God described in Calvin’s theology bore no resemblance to a benevolent creator. Jefferson went so far as to call it:
“a daemon of malignant spirit.”
His objection went beyond Calvin. Jefferson believed that some Christian doctrines described God in ways that contradicted God’s own goodness, attributing to the creator a cruelty no good being could have.
Jefferson’s Solution: Remove the Corruptions, Preserve the Teachings
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820)
Jefferson’s most direct answer to the corruptions he saw was a book he made himself. Often called the Jefferson Bible, it was his personal reconstruction of the Gospels. Working from New Testament editions in four languages, he cut out passages by hand and pieced them into a single narrative focused on Jesus’ life, parables, and moral teachings. He left out the supernatural, including the resurrection. His account ends with Jesus laid in the tomb.
As the Smithsonian explains, Jefferson’s aim was to separate what he saw as Jesus’ genuine teachings from the additions and misunderstandings that came later. What remained was the moral message without the supernatural framework around Jesus’ death and resurrection. That doesn’t prove traditional atonement theology false, and Jefferson’s book wasn’t an attempt to. What it shows is that Jefferson valued Jesus’ ethical teachings on their own, with or without that theology.
In the end, Jefferson believed Christianity had become preoccupied with doctrine, miracles, and religious authority, when Jesus’ message of morality, benevolence, and right conduct belonged at its center. His criticism was never a rejection of Jesus. It was a rejection of what others had made of him.
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