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.
Over scores of pages he has argued that John the Baptist is no other than Eabani, because he so faithfully fulfils over again the rôle 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 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 ‘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.
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.
[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 erörterten 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 ungestörter ursprünglicher Reihenfolge,” etc. [↑]
[3] P. 818. So weit von Johannis Person allein. Verfolgen wir nun die Jesus-Sage weiter.