A very interesting long article in this month’s Harper’s.
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Jesus-Without-Miracles1dec05.htm
Here’s a few teaser passages:
Something similar was no doubt on the mind of another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, when he took a pair of scissors to the King James Bible two hundred years ago. Jefferson cut out the virgin birth, all the miracles—including the most important one, the Resurrection—then pasted together what was left and called it The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth (fifteen years later, in retirement at Monticello, he expanded the text, added French, Latin, and Greek translations, and called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth). In an 1819 letter to William Short, Jefferson recollected that the cut-and-paste job was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." Jefferson mentioned The Philosophy of Jesus in a few other personal letters, but for the most part he kept the whole matter private, probably guessing that the established Church would see the compilation as one more example of his “atheism.” Nor did Jefferson care to give Federalist newspapers another reason to remind him of alleged sexual relations with his slave Sally Herrings, an entanglement certainly out of keeping with the philosophy of Jesus.
…
“Thomas” is the Aramaic word for twin. That Thomas Jefferson’s version of Christianity actually found a twin gospel—one that included no miracles, no claims of divinity, but only the teachings of Jesus—hidden beneath an Egyptian cliff, and that this ancient gospel was also recorded by a man known as Thomas, makes for a remarkable story.
…This Jesus is obviously no savior, certainly no messiah, which alone would account for why early bishops would have ordered the Gospel of Thomas destroyed. But beyond that, they must have realized that while this teaching might serve the cause of the Jesus movement, an itinerant group of passers-by, it would never do as the basis for an established church. Unlike the Jesus of John’s gospel, this arresting figure does not glory in his own divinity or brood over his sacrificial fate to save mankind. You can save yourself, he tells the crowds: “If you bring forth what is with-in you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.” What everyone has within is some fragment of divine light. That spark is proof of our kinship to the Creator—of our own divinity. But human vanities blind us to it. We walk around wearing all sorts of lampshades until we finally convince ourselves that such a light never existed at all. The Jesus of Thomas’s gospel is simply trying to give us back something we already possess. Here is a crucial passage:
Jesus said, “Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the father’s light. He will he disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.”
Jesus said, “When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will bear!”
There is an empirical way of knowing, and there is an intuitive way of understanding. The “father’s light” exists within everyone and “will be disclosed,” but we cannot know it intellectually—we cannot give it an image. Likewise, we comprise two selves—the one we see in the mirror, and the face we had before we were horn. This last paradoxical image exists in nearly all mystical literature—Zen koans, the Kabbalah, the Upanishads—and here, in the Gospel of Thomas. To “see” this imageless image, to know this original self, is to arrive at a nexus where the light within illuminates the world without, and finally shows it for what it truly is—the kingdom of God. For that reason, the kingdom must exist simultaneously within and without. When Jesus’ followers ask him to show them “where you are, for we must seek it,” Jesus replies, "There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world.
I’m surprised there isn’t a Baptist branch devoted to it. 
