"Jefferson's Secret Bible"
The Smithsonian Channel ran it a few months ago. I'm sure it will be on again, or it may be hanging around the Internetz.
Outstanding! About half the show deals with the restoration of the ORIGINAL Jefferson Bible. It stayed (quietly!) in Jefferson's family until 1895, when the Smithsonian bought it from Jefferson's great-granddaughter.
Jefferson assembled his "Bible" from four different New Testaments - in English, French, Greek and Latin. He cut these apart and pasted the snippets onto blank paper. When he finished, he had the whole thing bound in high-quality leather.
It's amazing the book has stayed in such good shape. And watching the painstaking restoration of it is really interesting.
Jefferson's Secret Bible
Relatively few people know that along with authoring the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson also compiled his own text, drawn carefully from passages extracted out of the New Testament, that he titled "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." The book, which focused on the ethical teachings of Jesus, was a private undertaking for Jefferson and never made public in his lifetime. Now, experts at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History are meticulously conserving this fragile volume, page by brittle page. Along the way, they discover subtle hidden clues to Jefferson himself.
http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/show.do?show=140747
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