The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors

The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (or Christianity Before Christ) is an 1875 book written by Kersey Graves. It asserts that Jesus was not an actual person, but was a creation largely based on earlier stories of deities or god-men 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. 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 and John G. Jackson.