After reading several letters in which he describes how Jesus was maltreated by the priestly class and other letters in which Jefferson describes how he was abused by the clergy, one cannot help but wonder whether Jefferson identified his own plight with that of the earlier misunderstood sage …

Jefferson returned to the theme throughout his life. “I am not afraid of the priests,” he wrote in 1816. “They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain.”

“I abuse the priests indeed,” he wrote in 1815, “who have so much abused the pure and holy doctrines of their master, and who have laid me under no obligation to reticence as to the tricks of their trade. The genuine system of Jesus, and the artificial structure they have erected, to make them the instruments of wealth, power and pre-eminence to themselves, are as distinct things in my view as light and darkness: and while I have classed them with soothsayers and necramancer, I place him among the greatest of the reformers of morals, and scourges of priest-craft that have ever existed. They felt him as such, and never rested until they had silenced him by death.”

The Pious Infidel
by Steven Waldman

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/230/story_23040_1.html