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 [203]heinrich zimmern (art. “deluge,” in encyclop?dia 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.”
yet a jew may have possessed some imagination of his own this undoubted occurrence of babylonian myths in the book of genesis has provided some less critical and cautious cuneiform scholars with a clue, as they imagine, to the entire contents of the bible from beginning to end. it is as if the jews, all through their literary history of a thousand years, could not possibly have invented any myths of their own, still less have picked a few up elsewhere than in babylon. accordingly, in a volume of 1,030 enormous pages, p. jensen has undertaken to show1 that the new testament, no less than the old, was derived from this single well-spring. moses and aaron, joshua, jeroboam, rehoboam, hadad, jacob and esau, saul, david and jonathan, joseph and his brethren, potiphar, rachel and leah, laban, zipporah, miriam sister of moses, dinah, simeon and levi, jethro and the gibeonites and sichemites, sarah and hagar, gilgamesch, eabani, and the holy harlot, protagonists of the entire old testamentabraham and isaac, samson, uriah and nathan, naboth, elijah and elisha, naaman, benhadad and hazael, gideon, jerubbaal, abimelech, jephthah, tobit, jehu, and pretty well any other personage in the old testament, are duplicates, according to him, of gilgamesch or his companion the shepherd eabani (son of ea), or of the hierodule or sacred prostitute, [204]and of a few more leading figures in the babylonian epic. there is hardly a story in the whole of jewish literature which is not, according to jensen, an echo of the gilgamesch legend; and every personage, every incident, is freely manipulated to make them fit this procrustean bed. no combinations of elements separated in the biblical texts, no separations of elements united therein, no recasting of the fabric of a narrative, no modifications of any kind, are so violent as to deter dr. jensen. at the top of every page is an abstract of its argument, usually of this type: “der hirte eabani, die hierodule und gilgamesch. der hirte moses, sein weib und aaron.” in other words, as moses was one shepherd and eabani another, moses is no other than eabani. as there is a sacred prostitute in the gilgamesch story, and a wife in the legend of moses, therefore wife and prostitute are one and the same. as gilgamesch was companion of eabani, and aaron of moses, therefore aaron was an alias of gilgamesch. dr. jensen is quite content with points of contact between the stories so few and slight as the above, and pursues this sort of loose argument over a thousand pages. here is another such rubric: “simson-gilgamesch’s leiche und saul-gilgamesch’s gebeine wieder ausgegraben, elisa-gilgamesch’s grab ge?ffnet.” in other words, simson, or samson, left a corpse behind him (who does not?); saul’s bones were piously looked after by the jabeshites; elisha’s bones raised a dead moabite by mere contact to fresh life. these three figures are, therefore, ultimately one, and that one is gilgamesch; and their three stories, which have no discernible features in common, are so many disguises of the gilgamesch epos.
as also of the entire new testamentbut dr. jensen transcends himself in the new [205]testament. “the jesus-saga,” he informs us (p. 933), “as it meets us in the synoptic gospels, and equally as it meets us in john’s gospel, stands out among all the other gilgamesch sagas which we have so far (i.e., in the old testament) expounded, in that it not merely follows up the main body of the saga with sundry fragments of it, like so many stragglers, but sets before us a long series of bits of it arranged in the original order almost undisturbed.”2
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 [206]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 [207]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 n?tig ist ein solche annahme nicht”).
“so much,” he writes (p. 818),
of john’s person alone. let us now pursue the jesus saga further.
in the gilgamesch epic it is related how the hunter marched out to eabani with the holy prostitute, how eabani enjoyed her, and afterwards proceeded with her to erech, where, directly or in his honour, a festival was held; how he there attached himself to gilgamesch, and how kingly honours were by the latter awarded to him. we must by now in a general way assume on the part of our readers a knowledge of how these events meet us over again in the sagas of the old testament. in the numerous gilgamesch sagas, then [of the old testament], we found again this rencounter with the holy prostitute. and yet we seek it in vain in the three first gospels in the exact context where we should find it on the supposition that they must embody a gilgamesch saga—that is to say, immediately subsequent to john’s emergence in the desert. equally little do we find in this context any reflex of eabani’s entry into the city of erech, all agog at the moment with a festival. on the other hand, we definitely find in its original position an echo of gilgamesch’s meeting with eabani.3
[208]
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 lacun? 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 [209]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
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. [210]
over scores of pages he has argued that john the baptist is no other than eabani, because he so faithfully fulfils over again the r?le of the eabanis we meet with in the old testament. for example, according to luke (i, 15, and vii, 33) john drinks no wine, and is, therefore, a nazirean, who eschews wine and forbears to cut his hair. therein he resembles joseph-eabani, and simson-eabani, and samuel-eabani, and also absolom, who, as an eabani, had at least an upper growth of hair. and as the eabani of the epic, with the long head-hair of a woman, drinks water along with the wild beasts in the desert, and as eabani, in company with these beasts, feeds on grass and herbs alone, so, at any rate according to luke, john ate no bread.5
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 [211]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.
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 [212]‘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, ?neas 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.
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 [213]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 jud?a? 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. [214]
1 das gilgamesch epos in der weltliteratur, 1906. ↑
2 p. 933: “die jesus-sage nach den synoptikern—wie auch die nach johannes—unterscheidet sich nun aber von allen anderen bisher er?rterten gilgamesch-sagen dadurch, dass sie hinter dem gros der sage nicht nur einzelne bruchstücke von ihr als nachzügler bringt, sondern eine lange reihe von stücken der sage in fast ungest?rter ursprünglicher reihenfolge,” etc. ↑
3 p. 818. so weit von johannis person allein. verfolgen wir nun die jesus-sage weiter.
im gilgamesch epos wird erz?hlt, wie zu eabani in der wüste der j?ger mit der hierodule hinauszieht, wie eabani ihrer habe geniesst, und dann mit ihr nach erech kommt, wo grade oder ihm zu ehre ein [208]fest gefeiert wird, wie er sich dort an gilgamesch anschliesst und ihn durch diesen k?nigliche ehren zuteil werden. welche metamorphosen diese geschehnisse in den sagen des alten testaments erlebt haben, darf jetzt in der hauptsache als bekannt vorausgesetzt werden. in zahlreichen gilgamesch-sagen fanden wir nun die begegnung mit der hierodule wieder. aber vergeblich suchen wir sie dort in den drei ersten evangelien, wo ihr platz w?re, falls diese etwa eine gilgamesch-sage enthalten sollten, n?mlich unmittelbar hinter johannis auftreten in der wüste. ebenso wenig finden wir an dieser stelle etwa einen reflex von eabani’s einzug in das festlich erregte erech. wohl dagegen treffen wir an ursprünglicher stelle ein wiederhall von gilgamesch’s begegnung mit eabani. ↑
4 p. 820. jesu taufe durch johannes w?re sonst auch daraus geworden, dass eabani, nach dem er an gilgamesch’s hof gelangt ist, durch diesen k?niglicher ehren teilhaft wird. ↑
5 nach lukas (i, 15 and vii, 33) trinkt johannes keinen wein, ist also ein nasir?er, der keinen wein trinkt und dessen haar nicht kekürzt wird, ebenso wie joseph-eabani, wie simson als ein eabani, wie samuel-eabani, wie absolom als eabani wenigstens einen üppigen haarwuchs besitzt, und wie der eabani des epos, mit dem langen haupthaar eines weibes, in der wüste mit den tieren zusammen wasser trinkt, und wie eabani mit diesen tieren zusammen nur gras und krauter frisst, so isst johannes, nach lukas wenigstens, kein brot. ↑
6 p. 838: wie für xisuthros, liegt für jesus ein schiff bereit, und, wie xisuthros und jonas, “flieht” jesus in ein schiff. ↑
