The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (or Christianity Before Christ) is an 1875 book written by Kersey Graves

Kersey Graves

Kersey Graves was a skeptic, atheist, spiritualist, Nontheist Friend, reformist and writer.-Life:Kersey Graves was born in Brownsville, Pennsylvania on 21 November 1813.. His parents were Quakers, and as a young man he followed them in their observance, and then later moved to the Hicksite wing...

. It asserts that Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 was not an actual person

Historical Jesus

The term historical Jesus refers to scholarly reconstructions of the 1st-century figure Jesus of Nazareth. These reconstructions are based upon historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and...

, but was a creation largely based on earlier stories of deities or god-men

Demigod

The term "demigod" , meaning "half-god", is commonly used to describe mythological figures whose one parent was a god and whose other parent was human; as such, demigods are human-god hybrids...

 saviours who had been crucified, and descended to and ascended from the underworld.

It has been noted that Graves derived "many of the most important facts collated in this work" from the comprehensive 1833 work, the Anacalypsis, by Sir Godfrey Higgins

Godfrey Higgins

Godfrey Higgins , was an archaeologist, Freemason and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, humanist, social reformer, and author of various now-esoteric and rare books...

. These works thus present an early variant of what would come to be known as the Jesus myth hypothesis.

The book is often used as a source for many Jesus myth hypothesis writers, including Acharya S, Tom Harpur

Tom Harpur

Thomas William Harpur is a Canadian author, broadcaster, columnist and theologian. An ordained priest, he is a proponent of the Christ myth theory, the idea that Jesus did not exist but is a fictional or mythological figure...

 and John G. Jackson

John G. Jackson (writer)

John Glover Jackson was a Pan-Africanist historian, lecturer, teacher and writer. He promoted ideas of Afrocentrism, Black atheists, and Jesus Christ in comparative mythology....

.

Atheist activist Madelyn Murray O'Hair was a fan of the book.

The book's accuracy has been questioned by both Christian and atheist scholars, with the consensus being that the book is unscholarly and unreliable.

External links

• The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, complete text at sacred-texts.com.
• The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, online edition at infidels.org.
• Kersey Graves and The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Richard Carrier
  Richard Carrier
  Richard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
  
  (2003).