John Denham Parsons 
The Non-Christian Cross 
An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Adopted as That the Symbol of Christianity

The history of the symbol of the cross has had an attraction for the author ever since, as an enquiring youth, he found himself unable to obtain satisfactory answers to four questions concerning the same which presented themselves to his mind. Pursuing these matters for himself, the author eventually found that even before our era the cross was venerated by many as the symbol of Life; though our works of reference seldom mention this fact, and never do it justice. He moreover discovered that no one has ever written a complete history of the symbol, showing the possibility that the stauros or post to which Jesus was affixed was not cross-shaped, and the certainty that, in any case, what eventually became the symbol of our faith owed some of its prestige as a Christian symbol of Victory and Life to the position it occupied in pre-Christian days. The author has therefore, in the hope of drawing attention to the subject, incorporated the results of his researches in the present book.

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John Denham Parsons (1861 – 1936) was an English writer and Shakespeare authorship theorist. Parsons was a proponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship. He published many works on this topic. Parsons’ book The Non-Christian Cross argued that the Christian cross symbol is not Christian in origin.