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 show[1] 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, 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 geöffnet.” 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 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 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.
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]
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]