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The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Or Christianity Before Christ

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A very interesting book from a historical and a religions perspective. But let me warn you, this book is not for everyone. The book looks at the 16 religious saviors that were crucified in their persepctive religions, all before the advent of Christianity. There are many chapters covering the similarities of the different religions and their saviors.

One of the most intriguing chapters is the one comparing the Hindoo savior Krishna's similarities with Jesus. The chapter lists 346 similarities from the teachings of the perspective religions as written in the Bible and the Baghavat Gita (Hindoo Bible). It is quite startling, considering Krishna lived thousands of years before Jesus.

The book is more or less a basher of Christianity, not the faith itself but the belief that Jesus was the only savior ever to come to earth based on the writings in the Bible. It shows that other religious writing previous to the Bible in other religions listed their own crucified saviors. Kind of a religious mans "Age of Reason" if you will.

The book is interesting but seems to lack some proof in a few areas when listing older saviors. But he also lists sources and historical documents for many of them. I feel he would have been better off listing 10 or 12 instead of 16. But overall it is worth the read for anyone with an open mind or who is curious about ancient religions. I have read both better and worse but this book is not a waste of time.

After reading this book, my belief system was thrown into complete chaos. Never had I read such a treatise that tears into fundamenalist's oft-repeated arguments about their one true savior and renders them impotent- and this book was written over 100 years ago! Most striking is when the author points out errors in the Bible that call to question the accuracy of it and in the process, puts a challenge to the entire Bible (for example: How did the wise men come from the east if they were following a star in the east?). I can only think of two things wrong with this book. One, since it is over 100 years old, some of the spellings are incorrect (such as Mohammad-Mahomet and Quetzalcoatl-Quetxacote). Also, the author believed that with his book, fundamentalist Christianity would cease to exist. Unfortunately, this did not come true. This book is well written and calmly written, unlike other books that attack Christianity, which engage in wild theories and are usually written by people who have a prior agenda against Christian fundamentalists (such as homosexuals and atheists) Highly recommended for anyone who wants to be challenged or challenge ignorance.

How many Christians know that other historical personages claimed to be God other than Jesus? Even more mind blowing how many realize that they too claimed to be of virgin births? Even more mind blowing is that there are oriental historical stories that parellel Jesus' life very closely only predating the Christ event! This book will challenge anyones faith! And it was written over 100 years ago!
My biggest critizism of it is that the author claims that God would never become human and would certainly never become a baby! Well this is the strength of Christianity... And Faith will never make logical sense (nor will life!) like the author claims...

The main problem with this book is its obvious anti-Christian bias. Sometimes it's almost a rant rather than an essay. Too bad, because the underlying facts are mostly true. Had this book been written in a more scholarly manner by a more dispassionate scholar, it would be more trustworthy and therefore more valuable. Of course, it may be that it was written in the style of the time (quite some time ago). Certainly interesting.

If you have no interest in facts, this might be the book for you! Published in 1875 this book is a curiosity but little more. Even in the Victorian era when this was written, this book was considered silly by scholars.

There was a period in biblical scholarship when many scholars investigated whether or not Christianity had borrowed doctrines from paganism, especially the mystery religions. If you are curious, look up the 'History of Religions' theory, in any book about biblical scholarship. It lasted from the middle of the Victorian era to about 1920.

But all this was long, long ago. There is now not a single credible scholar anywhere in the world that will argue in favor of this theory. Not one. Massive numbers of books were published on the theory, and whole libraries still groan from their weight.

The result of all this investigation? That Christianity not only did not borrow doctrines from pagan sources, but paganism borrowed from Christianity. The earliest Gnostic writing was a hundred years after the death of Christ, for example, yet the Gnostics stole names of apostles to give their works added credibility.

As for the subject of so-called 'dying and rising gods' here is a quote from Dr Jonathan Z Smith: "the category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to be largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly imaginative texts".

Want to investigate further? To read a summary of the entire "History of Religions" theory, as it was called, please buy "The Jesus Legend" by Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd. You can order this from Amazon today. Or for a book written on the popular level, try "The Gospel and the Greeks" by Nash. For a top flight scholar on the subject: Martin Hengel and "The Son of God". Other scholars who have written books on this subject: Edwin Yamauchi, Gunter Wagner, and C H Dodd.

This book has some good stories about other people in history that were supposed God-sons, but they are not well organized thoughts.

-- this is for the fifth edtion.

Exquisite research with some details of how the church suppressed this information