Judge not ... If he’d had a word processor and several online versions of the bible would it have been OK to cut and paste?
Strikes me that he might have been trying to distill the fundamental truths he’d found in the bible - perhaps for dolts like me that haven’t read the bible in years but might in a short compendium find salvation. Huh. Ya never know. ;-)
As one commentator says: "According to Jefferson, when Jesus left the man who had been blind since birth (John 9) the man was still blind, Malchus was left with his ear cut off and Lazarus was left rotting in the tomb."
He wanted a book that contained only direct quotes.