Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 07-21-2005, 05:59 PM

I discovered this well-sourced biographical note on Kersey Graves accidentally while searching for something else. Since Graves seems to be a constant topic here, I thought that I would make a note of it.

Who was Kersey Graves? by John Benedict Buescher

Quote:

The Richmond Democrat described him as “a close student and an independent thinker.�? [40] Nevertheless, while he may have been earnest or sincere in his beliefs, he was also overconfident about his powers of discerning hidden designs and patterns in extremely meager and dubious collections of data. At the same time, he does not seem to have appreciated how tenuous his sources were and how precarious almost all of his intuitions and speculations were. It is not unreasonable to imagine him in his rural Indiana barn, tacking onto the walls all around him fluttered pieces of paper with random notes on them, looking for a flash of intuition that would make sense of them all. It would have resembled something like the fevered garage ruminations of John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

It appears from this, however, that Graves was not a mythicist - he believed that there was a human Jesus who was a spiritual medium, and was later deified by his followers.

This article was the major source of the Wikipedia article on Graves.

lpetrich · 07-27-2005, 02:32 PM

Richard Carrier has discussed Kersey Graves's magnum opus, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors. He indicts KG's work for being careless with his sources, for claiming too much from them, for shoddy methodology, for lacking humility, and for not involving modern social theory. He even claims that "almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today", which seems excessively strong.

But the flaws in "Sixteen Saviors" ought not to negate the whole case for Xian-pagan similarity, as RC himself notes; he quotes Justin Martyr's acknowledgment of such similarities.

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07-27-2005, 02:32 PM	#2
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Richard Carrier has discussed Kersey Graves's magnum opus, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors. He indicts KG's work for being careless with his sources, for claiming too much from them, for shoddy methodology, for lacking humility, and for not involving modern social theory. He even claims that "almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today", which seems excessively strong. But the flaws in "Sixteen Saviors" ought not to negate the whole case for Xian-pagan similarity, as RC himself notes; he quotes Justin Martyr's acknowledgment of such similarities.

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