Chapter VII · DR. JENSEN

Babylonian influence on Greek religion slight; The three writers whose views I have so far considered agree in denying that Jesus was a real historical personage; but their agreement extends no further, for the Jesus legend is the precipitate, according to Professor W. B. Smith, of a monotheistic propaganda; according to Mr. Robertson, of a movement mainly idolatrous, polytheistic, and pagan. There exists in Germany, however, a third school of denial, which sees in the Jesus story a duplicate of the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesch legend. The more extreme writers of this school have endeavoured to show that not only the Hebrews, but the Greeks as well, derived their religious myths and rites from ancient Babylon; and their general hypothesis has on that account been nicknamed Pan-Babylonismus. This is not the place to criticize the use made of old Babylonian mythology in explanation of old Greek religion, though I do well to point out that the best students of the latter—for example, Dr. Farnell—confine the indebtedness of the Greeks to very narrow limits.

on Hebrew religion more important; The case of the Hebrew scriptures and religion stands on different ground; for the Jews were Semites, and their myths of creation and of the origin and early history of man are, by the admission even of orthodox divines of to-day, largely borrowed from the more ancient civilization of Babylon. Thus Heinrich Zimmern (art. “Deluge,” in Encyclopædia Biblica) writes: “Of all the parallel traditions of a deluge, the Babylonian is undeniably the most important, because the points of contact between it and the Hebrew story are so striking that the view of the dependence of one of the two on the other is directly suggested even to the most cautious of students.”

And he waxes eloquent about the delusions and ignorance of Christians, who for 2,000 years have been erecting churches and cathedrals in honour of a Jesus of Nazareth, who all the time was a mere alias of Gilgamesch.

John—Eabani Let us, then, test some of the arguments by which this remarkable conclusion is reached. Let us begin with John the Baptist (p. 811). John was a prophet, who appeared east of the Jordan. So was Elias or Elijah. Elijah was a hairy man, and John wore a raiment of camel’s-hair; both of them wore leather girdles.

Now, in the Gilgamesch story, Eabani is covered with hair all over his body (p. 579—“am ganzen Leibe mit Haaren bedeckt ist”). Eabani (p. 818) is a hairy man, and presumably was clad in skins (“ist ein haariger Mann und vermutlich mit Fellen bekleidet”). Dr. Jensen concludes from this that John and Elijah are both of them, equally and independently, duplicates or understudies of Eabani. It never occurs to him that in the desert camel’s-hair was a handy material out of which to make a coat, as also leather to make girdles of, and that desert prophets in any story whatever would inevitably be represented as clad in such a manner. He has, indeed, heard of Jo. Weiss’s suggestion that Luke had read the LXX, and modelled his picture of John the Baptist on Elijah; but he rejects the suggestion, for he feels—and rightly—that to make any such admissions must compromise his main theory, which is that the old Babylonian epic was the only source of the evangelists. No (he writes), John’s girdle, like Elijah’s, came straight out of the Saga (“wohl durch die Sage bedingt ist”). Nor (he adds) can Luke’s story of Sarah and Zechariah be modelled on Old Testament examples, as critics have argued. On the contrary, it is a fresh reflex of Gilgamesch (“ein neuer Reflex”), an independent sidelight cast by the central Babylonian orb (“ein neues Seitenstück”), and is copied direct. We must not give in to the suggestion thrown out by modern critics that it is a later addition to the original evangelical tradition. Far from that being so, it must be regarded as an integral and original constituent in the Jesus-saga (“So wird man zugestehen müssen, dass sie keine Zugabe, sondern ein integrierender Urbestandteil der Jesus-sage ist”).

Jesus—Gilgamesch From this and many similar passages we realize that the view that Jesus never lived, but was a mere reflex of Gilgamesch, is not, in Jensen’s mind, a conclusion to be proved, but a dogma assumed as the basis of all argument, a dogma to which we must adjust all our methods of inquiry. To admit any other sources of the Gospel story, let alone historical facts, would be to infringe the exclusive apriority, as a source, of the Babylonian epic; and that is why we are not allowed to argue up to the latter, but only down from it. If for a moment he is ready to admit that Old Testament narrative coloured Luke’s birth-story, and that (for example) the angel’s visit in the first chapter of Luke was suggested by the thirteenth chapter of Judges, he speedily takes back the admission. Such an assumption is not necessary (“allein nötig ist ein solche Annahme nicht”).

“So much,” he writes (p. 818),

of John’s person alone. Let us now pursue the Jesus Saga further.

So then Eabani, who as a hairy man was John the Baptist, is now, by a turn of Jensen’s kaleidoscope, metamorphosed into Jesus, for it is John who did Jesus the honour of baptizing him. Conversely, Gilgamesch, who began as Jesus, is now suddenly turned into John. In fact, Jesus-Gilgamesch and John-Eabani have suddenly changed places with one another, in accordance, I suppose, with the rule of interpretation, somewhere laid down by Hugo Winckler, that in astral myths one hero is apt to swop with another, not only his stage properties, but his personality. But fresh surprises are in store for Jensen’s readers.

Imagine the reader’s consternation when, after these convincing demonstrations of John’s identity with Eabani, and of his consequent non-historicity, he finds him a hundred pages later on altogether eliminated, as from the Gilgamesch Epic, so from the Gospel. For the difficulty suddenly arises before Dr. Jensen’s mind that John the Baptist, being mentioned by Josephus, must after all have really lived; but if he lived, then he cannot have been a mere reflex of Eabani. Had he only consulted Dr. Drews’s work on the Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (English translation, p. 190), he would have known that “the John of the Gospels” is no other than “the Babylonian Oannes, Joannes, or Hanni, the curiously-shaped creature, half fish and half man, who, according to Berosus, was the first law-giver and inventor of letters and founder of civilization, and who rose every morning from the waves of the Red Sea in order to instruct men as to his real spiritual nature.”

Why could not Dr. Jensen consult Dr. Drews “as to the real spiritual nature” of John the Baptist? Why not consult Mr. Robertson, who overwhelms Josephus’s inconvenient testimony to the reality of John the Baptist (in 18 Antiq., v, § 2) with the customary “suspicion of interpolation.” Poor Dr. Jensen lacks their resourcefulness, and is able to discover no other way out of his impasse than to suppose that it was originally Lazarus and not John that had a place in his Gilgamesch Epic, and that some ill-natured editor of the Gospels, for reasons he alone can divine, everywhere struck out the name of Lazarus, and inserted in place of it that of John the Baptist, which he found in the works of Josephus. Such are the possibilities of Gospel redaction as Jensen understands them.

I cannot but think that my readers will resent any further specimens of Dr. Jensen’s system. He has not troubled himself to acquire the merest a b c of modern textual criticism. He has no sense of the differences of idea and style which divide the Fourth from the earlier Gospels, and he lacks all insight into the development of the Gospel tradition. He takes Christian documents out of their historical context, and ignores their dependence on the Judaism of the period B.C. 100 to A.D. 100. He has no understanding of the prophetic, Messianic and Apocalyptic aspects of early Christianity, no sense of its intimate relations with the beliefs and opinions which lie before us in apocryphs like the Book of Enoch, the Fourth Esdras, the Ascent of Isaiah, the Testaments of the Patriarchs. He has never learned that in the four Gospels he has before him successive stages or layers of stratification of Christian tradition, and he accordingly treats them as a single literary block, of which every part is of the same age and evidential value. Like his Gilgamesch Epic the Gospels, for all he knows about them, might have been dug up only yesterday among the sands of Mesopotamia, instead of being the work of a sect with which, as early as the end of the first century, we are fairly well acquainted. Never once does he ask himself how the authors of the New Testament came to have the Gilgamesch Epic at the tips of their tongues, exactly in the form in which he translates it from Babylonian tablets incised 2,000 years before Christ? By what channels did it reach them? Why were they at such pains to transform it into the story of a Galilean Messiah crucified by the Roman Governor of Judæa? And as Paul and Peter, like everyone else named in the book, are duplicates of Gilgamesch and Eabani, where are we to draw the line of intersection between heaven and earth; where fix the year in which the early Christians ceased to be myths and became mere men and women? This is a point it equally behoves Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson and Professor W. B. Smith to clear up our doubts about.