Indeed, I heard something approaching this point made just yesterday in a simple and familiar statement, read aloud from the Bible. "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

The question, related in Luke 24:5, is posed by two angels standing at Jesus's tomb to his female followers, who have come to anoint his body.The emphasis in that verse has always been on the word "living"--and I take it in the broadest sense possible.

One of the basic truths of Christianity is that many of its adherents experience Jesus as a presence, often individually, sometimes corporately, somehow in their lives. There's enormous latitude of experience there. Religion, as it is lived, simply can't be reduced to a set of facts, to be proven or not.

What's this got to do with our third president, perhaps as representative of the Enlightenment as anyone to occupy the White House? Jefferson was a long way from being a conventional Christian. But neither was he an atheist (as his detractors in the election of 1800 so vociferously claimed).

Briefly while president, he began a project he would complete much later in life, a painstaking examination of the Gospels (in Greek, Latin, French and English), which he carefully edited to preserve Jesus's teachings, while dispensing with the stories of his miracles.

John Adams, an erstwhile rival turned friend with whom Jefferson corresponded, knew of this private project and encouraged it. Jefferson would title the finished product, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

A few years ago, the historian Edwin S. Gaustad described the book as an act of reverence: "The retired president did not produce his small book to shock or offend a somnolent world; he composed it for himself, for his devotion, for his assurance, for a more restful sleep at nights and a more confident greeting of the mornings."

The book, published not long ago by Beacon Press as "The Jefferson Bible," contains an introduction by the Rev. Forrest Church, who quotes Jefferson, from a letter he wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush: "I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished anyone to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other."

To such a view, the discovery of a set of bones would mean next to nothing. Nor would they, I suspect, for hundreds of millions of others who have found in Jesus a guide, a friend, a saving presence.