>I think what Jefferson did was to cut out the passages of the Gospels where Jesus is quoted directly and paste them on blank pages of a notebook.
IOW, he wanted to see what Jesus himself said.
TJ was a Deist. He was hardly a Christian.
I think his attitude was that he didn’t trust the early Christians and wanted to avoid any distortions they may have made—but his knowledge of what Jesus said was dependent on the disciples having written down and preserved the sayings of Jesus, so how could he know if they were all authentic?