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The Fundamentals historical. The Jesus legend is an Israelitish Gilgamesh legend. —A s a Gilgamesh legend the Jesus legend is a sister legend to numerous, particularly to most of the Old Testament, le- gends.” In his concluding chapter Professor Jensen writes: “Jesus of Nazareth, in whom, as in the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, Christianity has believed for nearly two thousands years, and who is regarded, even by the most ad- vanced scholarship of our own day, as a good and great man who lived and died the sublime pattern of the ideal ethical life—th is Jesus has never lived upon earth; neither has He died, because He is nothing but an Israelitish Gilgamesh. We, the children of a much lauded time of progress and achievements, we who look down upon the superstitions of the past with a forbearing smile, we worship in our cathe- drals and churches, in our meetinghouses and schools, in palaces and shanties, a Babylonian deity.” There was a time when critical analysis of the Biblical texts ran wild. Pro- fessor Jensen’s book is comparison run mad. I should not have taken the time to quote from Jensen, but should have dismissed his book wth a forbearing smile, if he were not taken seriously by a number of scholars. To my amazement I noticed that as careful and sane a scholar as Professor Zimmern wrote an extended review of the book, approving it almost without qualification, and saying: “Jen- sen will hardly succeed at once in seeing his ideas accepted. But truth is not depending upon immediate success, and will in this case, even as in others, be victorious, though not with- out great trouble, and only slowly. The .weight of facts which this book adduces is too immense.” The other reason why I referred to this book is to show that the logical and unavoidable result of explaining every- thing distinctively Christian in the Bible by applying the princi- ple of comparison, or, in other words, that the strict and un- hampered following of the “religionsgeschichtliche” method, as it is in vogue at present, must lead to absurdities.
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