Note 4 — Chapter VII · DR. JENSEN

Evangelists borrowed their saga from Gilgamesch epos alone Let us pause a moment and take stock of the above. In the epic two heroes meet each other in a desert. John and Jesus also meet in a desert; therefore, so argues Jensen, John and Jesus are reproductions of the heroes in question, and neither of them ever lived. It matters nothing that neither John nor Jesus was a Nimrod. This encounter of Gilgamesch and Eabani was, as Jensen reminds us, the model of every Old Testament story in which two males happen to meet in a desert; therefore it must have been the model of the evangelists also when they concocted their story of John and Jesus meeting in the wilderness. But how about the prostitute; and how about the entry into Erech? How are these lacunæ of the Gospel story to be filled in? Jensen’s solution is remarkable; he finds the encounter with the prostitute to have been the model on which the fourth evangelist contrived his story of Jesus’s visit to Martha and Mary. For that evangelist, like the synoptical ones, had the Gilgamesch Saga stored all ready in his escritoire, and finding that his predecessors had omitted the prostitute he hastened to fill up the lacuna, and doubled her into Martha and Mary. In this and many other respects, so we are assured by Jensen, the fourth evangelist reproduces the Gilgamesch epic more fully and systematically than the other evangelists, and on that account we must assign to John’s setting of the life of Christ a certain preference and priority. He is truer to the only source there was for any of it. The other lacuna of the Synoptic Gospels is the feasting in Erech and Eabani’s entry amid general feasting into that city. The corresponding episode in the Gospels, we are assured, is the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, which the Fourth Gospel, again hitting the right nail on the head, sets at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, and not at its end. But what, we still ask, is the Gospel counterpart to the honours heaped by Gilgamesch on Eabani? How dull we are! “The baptism of Jesus by John must, apart from other considerations, have arisen out of the fact that Eabani, after his arrival at Gilgamesch’s palace, is by him allotted kingly honours.”4