Last night I read a portion of an Awake! article from April 2006 (on pages 12 - 13) called "The Bible's Viewpoint. Did Jesus Really Die on a Cross?"
What caught my intention is that it quoted a scholar's book called The Non-Christian Cross, by J. D. Parson. I thus investigated that book and its author and I discovered that the book was published in the year 1929! [The book's full title is THE NON-CHRISTIAN CROSS: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE SYMBOL EVENTUALLY ADOPTED AS THAT OF OUR RELIGION.] That is the only scholarly source referred to in the Awake! article yet the source was about 77 years old when the Awake! was published. Furthermore I learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denham_Parsons that the author, John Denham Parsons, was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, yet the WT (which condemns the occult and spiritism) quoted him as an authority about the implement of Christ's death! Not only that, but Parsons wrote a book called OUR SUN-GOD OR CHRISTIANITY BEFORE CHRIST: A DEMONSTRATION THAT, AS THE FATHERS ADMITTED, OUR RELIGION EXISTED BEFORE OUR ERA, AND EVEN IN PRE-HISTORIC TIMES.
I decided to read those books to see what they say. I discovered that thay actually make a good case for a number of their claims! They can both be read for free online at https://archive.org .
The Cross book Parsons says the following.
'Another fact worthy of special note is that, whether the Fathers wrote in Greek and used the word stauros^ or wrote in Latin and trans- lated that word as cnix, they often seem to have had in their mind's eye a tree ; a tree which moreover was closely connected in meaning with the forbidden tree of the Garden of Eden, an allegorical figure of undoubtedly phallic signification which had its counterpart in the Tree of the Hesperides, from which the Sun-God Hercules after killing the Serpent was fabled to have picked the Golden Apples of Love, one of which became the symbol of Venus, the Goddess of Love. Nor was this the only such counterpart, for almost every race seems in days of old to have had an allegorical Tree of Knowledge or Life whose fruit was Love ; the ancients perceiving that it was love which produced life, and that but for the sexual passion and its indulgence mankind would cease to be.
Starting upon an examination of the early Christian writings in question, we read in the Gospel of Nicodemits that when the Chief Priests interviewed certain men whom Jesus had raised from the dead, those men made upon their faces " the sign of the stauros." ^ The sign of the cross is presumably meant ; and
^ Nicodemus i.
all that need be said is that if the men whom Jesus raised from the dead were acquainted with the sign of the cross, it would appear that it must have been as a pre-Christian sign.
Further on in the same Gospel, Satan is represented as being told that " All that thou hast gained through the Tree of Knowledge, all hast thou lost through the Tree of the Stauros." ^ Elsewhere we read that " The King of Glory stretched out his right hand, and took hold of our forefather Adam., and raised him : then, turning also to the rest, he said, Come with me as many as have died through the Tree which he touched, for behold I again raise you all up through the Tree of the Stauros." ^ Some see in this peculiar pronouncement a reference to the doctrine of re-incarnation.
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^ Nicodenms vii. - Nicodemtis viii. '
In the Sun-God book (published in 1895) a number of things which Parsons says are things which a small number of atheists today say about Christianity having started before the time of Moses, and that some sayings in the Gospels relate to the signs of the Zodiac. Like a number of atheists who proclaim the Christ Myth theory, he says the Gospel of Mark is an allegory and he explains some things about early Christianity from a Gnostic point of view. He also says that some passages in the OT Bible are myths instead of being factual. He also believes in human evolution and says that our Genus, Homo, existed many thousands of years longer than 6,000 years. I might post quotes from that book in a different topic thread.