The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves [1875]

This is one of the most controversial books about the Christian narrative of Jesus ever published. Graves tried to gather together all of what was known at the time about other similar stories of gods who walked the earth, preached ethical and mystical doctrines, and ended up as deicides. Today, folklorists have discovered a set of world-wide themes relating a story of a culture-hero who has a miraculous birth and tragic death. This is one of the archetypal stories which Jung and Campbell discussed. It is now considered less shocking that incidents in religious narrative could be drawn from the global bank of folklore motifs. This does not lessen the impact, however, on traditional believers in these narratives as the absolute truth.

So is the need for a deathless hero who saves humanity part of the deep structure of our brain? Is religion simply filling a psychological need which is part of being human? This book may be picked apart in its details; however, it was one of the first to explore this 'big' question, an answer to which is as pressing today as it was then. The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors raised a host of questions, few of which have yet been adequately answered, over a century later.

There are serious flaws in this book. Graves was apparently not working from original sources, with the exception of the Bible; he seems to have relied on books such as Higgins' Anacalypsis, without necessarily citing them. He muddles Vaishnava Hinduism and Buddhism, two belief systems with fundamental differences. That said, the traditional narratives of Krishna and Buddha do contain motifs in common with the NT stories of Jesus.

Production notes. This text first appeared on the Internet at another site, in a slightly defective and added-emphasis version with a disclaimer on each page. I have corrected the text to reflect the original book as closely as possible, as per this sites' standards. Some have criticized Graves for excessive typos (as if this was an intellectual failing on his part), and there are certainly a few in this book. However, I can state definitively after a modern spell-check of the text that they are not particularly excessive compared to any given book from this period.

--J.B. Hare, 8/5/2007.