Pete Buttigieg’s search for ‘diamonds in a dunghill’

On the second floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Thomas Jefferson’s Bible sits on display behind a thick wall of glass. The glue stains along the book’s pages are evident, as are the blank sections of passages that Jefferson found unbelievable, prompting him to physically cut them out.

“There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams. “I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”