"Zeitgeist" Online Movie: Part One
Refuted©
Posted: August 23, 2007
“16 Other Crucified Saviors”?
The narrator continues by alluding to 16 other saviors, who share the same characteristics associated with Jesus (i.e. virgin birth, on December 25, etc.). He is most likely basing his claims on a book titled The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, written by Kersey Graves. This book, however, is not a reliable source. Atheist Richard Carrier presents multiple reasons for drawing this conclusion. Carrier writes:
“The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Or Christianity Before Christ is unreliable, but no comprehensive critique exists. Most scholars immediately recognize many of his findings as unsupported and dismiss Graves as useless. After all, a scholar who rarely cites a source isn't useful to have as a reference even if he is right…In general, even when the evidence is real, it often only appears many years after Christianity began, and thus might be evidence of diffusion in the other direction. Another typical problem is that Graves draws far too much from what often amounts to rather vague evidence. In general, there are ten kinds of problems that crop up in Graves' work here and there:
• Graves often does not distinguish his opinions and theories from what his sources and evidence actually state.
• Graves often omits important sources and evidence.
• Graves often mistreats in a biased or anachronistic way the sources he does use.
• Graves occasionally relies on suspect sources.
• Graves does little or no source analysis or formal textual criticism.
• Graves' work is totally uninformed by modern social history (a field that did not begin to be formally pursued until after World War II, i.e., after Graves died).
• Graves' conclusions and theories often far exceed what the evidence justifies, and he treats both speculations and sound theories as of equal value.
• Graves often ignores important questions of chronology and the actual order of plausible historical influence, and completely disregards the methodological problems this creates.
• Graves' work lacks all humility, which is unconscionable given the great uncertainties that surround the sketchy material he had to work with.
• Graves' scholarship is obsolete, having been vastly improved upon by new methods, materials, discoveries, and textual criticism in the century since he worked. In fact, almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today.
All this is not to say Graves didn't have some things right. But you will never be able to tell what he has right from what he has wrong without totally redoing all his research and beyond, which makes him utterly useless to historians as a source. For example, almost all his sources on Krishna long postdate Christian-Nestorian influence on India. No pre-Christian texts on Krishna contain the details crucial to his case, apart from those few that were common among many gods everywhere. Can you tell from Graves which details are attested by early evidence, and which by late? That's a problem.”
Continue to: Jesus Christ—the Most Recent Solar Messiah?
