AMERICAN JESUS
How the Son of God Became a National Icon.
By Stephen Prothero.

On Jan. 20, 1804, Thomas Jefferson ordered from a Philadelphia bookseller two copies of the King James Version of the New Testament. An unflinching rationalist, Jefferson deeply admired Jesus the man but disdained the cloak of doctrine and mysticism in which he'd been draped. And so, despite all his duties as president, Jefferson found the time to sit down in the White House with his Bibles and, over several evenings, excise with a razor all those passages that related to the virgin birth, the resurrection, the incarnation and anything else that smacked of the supernatural. Only about 1 in 10 verses survived. Jefferson cut them out and pasted them into two columns of 46 octavo sheets, the size ministers then favored. Published as ''The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,'' this truncated Gospel portrayed Jesus as a wise man who spent his time wandering around Galilee, delivering parables and aphorisms.

By this act, Stephen Prothero writes, Jefferson became America's first real Bible scholar, and his cut-and-paste Gospel marked the birth of an ''American Jesus,'' a ''malleable and multiform'' figure whose story over the next two centuries would be constantly remolded and reimagined to fit the needs of succeeding generations. In ''American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon,'' Prothero,+a professor of religion at Boston University, mines not only sermons and theological tracts but also novels, biographies, songs, films, the press and the visual arts to ''see how Americans of all stripes have cast the man from Nazareth in their own image''+and so ''to examine, through the looking glass, the kaleidoscopic character of American culture.''