Note 6 — Chapter VII · DR. JENSEN

One more example of Dr. Jensen’s system. In the Gospel, Jesus, finding himself on one occasion surrounded by a larger throng of people than was desirable, took a boat in order to get away from them, and passed across the lake on the shore of which he had been preaching and ministering to the sick. The incident is a commonplace one enough, but nothing is too slight and unimportant for Dr. Jensen to detect in it a Gilgamesch parallel, and accordingly he writes thus of it: “As for Xisuthros, so for Jesus, a boat is lying ready, and like Xisuthros and Jonas, Jesus ‘flees’ in a boat.”6 Xisuthros, I may remind the reader, is the name of the flood-hero in Berosus. Hardly a single one of the parallels which crowd the thousand pages of Dr. Jensen is less flimsy than the above. Without doing more violence to texts and to probabilities, one could prove that Achilles and Patroclus and Helen, Æneas and Achates and Dido, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Dulcinea, were all of them so many understudies of Gilgamesch, Eabani and his temple slave; and we almost expect to find such a demonstration in his promised second volume.