Peter Jensen (ancient orientalist)

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Peter Christian Albrecht Jensen (born August 16, 1861 in Bordeaux , † August 16, 1936 in Marburg ) was a German ancient orientalist and professor at the Philipps University of Marburg .

Life

Jensen was born the son of Conrad Jensen, the pastor of the German-Danish Evangelical Church in Bordeaux . He grew up in Holstein, later in Nustrup Sogn (North Schleswig), where the family moved in 1871, and attended the Schleswig city ​​high school until 1879 . In 1880 he began studying theology at the University of Leipzig . There he soon switched to oriental studies with a focus on Assyriology with Friedrich Delitzsch . In 1883 Jensen went to Eberhard Schrader in Berlin. After completing his doctorate with Schrader and Eduard Sachau in 1884, Jensen first went to Kiel and Strasbourg as a librarian, where he completed his habilitation in 1888. In 1892 Jensen was called to the University of Marburg as the successor to Julius Wellhausen , where he taught as a full professor from 1895 to 1928. Jensen continued to teach until his stroke in January 1932.

He began to decipher the Hittite hieroglyphs in Hittiter und Armenier (1898), but without making a breakthrough. In contrast, he succeeded in developing the Aramaic inscriptions by Assur and Hatra in 1919/1920 and by Warka in 1926. He dealt with the Babylonian-Assyrian religious literature in his dissertation and in 1890 in The Cosmology of the Babylonians . The work on the volume Assyrian-Babylonian Myths and Epics took place in the prestigious Cuneiform Library series (1900). A second volume remained unfinished. For the Gilgamesh epic this edition remained fundamental for a long time.

His hypotheses on the comparison of myths and legends pointed to parallels between the Gilgamesh epic and Greek (especially Homer ) and Israelite "legends" including the story of the person of Jesus in the New Testament. He then worked out this theory for the monumental work The Gilgamesh Epic in World Literature 1906 in such a way that he interpreted the Old Testament figures from Abraham to the Judean kings as well as Jesus, Paul and John the Baptist in his idiosyncratic interpretation as local Israelite modifications of the Gilgamesh- Legends depicted. He completely denied the historicity of Old and New Testament traditions. After that, perhaps a “somehow historical Jesus”, but by no means that of the Gospels, would have really lived. In 1928 he tried to prove the "sinkers" of the Israelite Gilgamesh sagas in Islamic, Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Roman and Germanic-Nordic sagas and religious traditions, including Mohammed and Buddha in this argument. His hypotheses met with almost unanimous and often sharp criticism, including from Walter Anderson , who in 1930 in a detailed, forty-eight-page review of both volumes of The Epic of Gilgamesh in World Literature, only agreed to one statement by Jensen and concluded by saying, “But if you can asks whether the valuable note of 2½ + 3½ lines reproduced above justifies the costly printing of the two huge volumes of Jensen's work with their 1959 pages, I answer categorically: No ”( Walter Anderson : About P. Jensen's Method of Comparative Legends Research. Acta et commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis (Dorpatensis). B, Humaniora. XXI. 3 , Dorpat , 1930-1931, p. 48).

Jensen is not one of the real Panbabylonists , from whose spokesmen Hugo Winckler and Alfred Jeremias he kept his distance. The scientific and social isolation ultimately drove him to "flee to the public" with newspaper articles and brochures in which he showed himself sharply anti-Christian. In science he only won his student Albert Schott (1901–1945) and, to a limited extent, his Leipzig colleague Heinrich Zimmer . The fact that the Gilgamesh poetry is considered an important work of world literature goes back to Jensen. One of Jensen's most important Hittite students was Hans Ehelolf .

Peter Jensen signed the confession of professors at German universities and colleges about Adolf Hitler . He died in Marburg at the age of 75 after a long illness. His son was the National Socialist English graduate Harro de Wet Jensen .

He was a member of the Association of German Students in Marburg .

From 1971 the British professor of German studies George Albert Wells took up the Jesus myth theses from works by Kalthoff, Jensen and Drews that were never translated into English.

Works (selection)

  • The Cosmology of the Babylonians - Studies and Materials Robarts - University of Toronto 1890.
  • The Gilgamesh Epic in World Literature. Volume 1, Trübner, Strasbourg 1906 ( digitized version ).
  • Moses, Jesus, Paul: three variants of the Babylonian god-man Gilgamesh. An indictment against the theologians, an appeal also to the laity. New Frankfurter Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1909.
  • Did the Jesus of the Gospels Really Live? An answer to Prof. Dr. Jülicher. New Frankfurter Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1910.
  • The Gilgamesh Epic in World Literature. Volume 2: The Israelite Gilgamesh sagas in the sagas of world literature. Ebel, Marburg 1928 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

  1. see Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAMR), Best. 915 No. 5748, p. 513 ( digitized version ).
  2. a b c d e f g h i j k l m Ernst Doblhofer : The decipherment of ancient scripts and languages . 2nd Edition. No. 20415 . Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-15-020415-3 , pp. 199 f .
  3. Andrae, Walter; Jensen, Peter: Aramaic inscriptions from Assur and Hatra from the Parthian period, in: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 60 (1920), pp. 1–51 ( digitized version ).
  4. The Aramaic incantation text in late Babylonian cuneiform. Marburg: A. Ebel, 1926.
  5. Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 102.

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