T. W. Doane

Thomas William Doane (1852–1885) was an American writer on comparative religion. Little is recorded of his life beyond his single book, Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, published in 1882, which set the stories of the Old and New Testaments beside the myths of Babylon, Egypt, India, Persia, Greece and other ancient nations in order to argue that Christianity had borrowed its legends and doctrines from older faiths. Drawing heavily on the comparative mythologists of the preceding decades, the book went through many editions and was long a standard text among American freethinkers and rationalists. Doane died in his early thirties, three years after its publication.