Kersey Graves

Kersey Graves (1813–1883) was an American freethinker and writer on religion. Born into a Quaker family in Pennsylvania, he settled in Richmond, Indiana, worked as a teacher and took part in the antislavery, temperance and spiritualist movements, eventually breaking with orthodox Christianity. His best-known book, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1875), argued that the Christian story was borrowed from older religions; it found a wide audience among skeptics, but historians have rejected its claims and its unreliable sources. He also wrote The Bible of Bibles and The Biography of Satan, in the same polemical vein.