Rudolf Steiner, Stockholm
January 4, 1910
My honored listeners!
The Gospel of John differs from the other three gospels in that it is attributed to a direct disciple of Christ Jesus, while the other three are attributed by name to disciples who were not direct disciples of Christ. One consequence of this is that we have to seek the deepest wisdom of Christianity in the Gospel of John.
Now the question arises for us: How should Theosophy relate to the Gospels and their authenticity? Theosophy cannot recognize as true anything that is not confirmed by occult research. We would not be able to extract any truth from a document. Theosophy can only be built on its own foundations, it can only build on the experiences gained by looking into the spiritual sources of the present and the past. The only truly historical document for Theosophy is what we call the Akasha Chronicle, that is, the spiritual record that the seer is able to see. So when we have gathered information from this spiritual record, we can compare it with what the historical records, that is, the Gospels, can provide. And no tenet is accepted by the occult researcher because it has been written in some written record, but because it has been found to be correct from our own research.
Yesterday it was mentioned in the introduction that the spiritual currents of the pre-Christian era converged in the event of Palestine - and, as we now want to see, in a higher form through the personality of Christ Jesus. This personality is incredibly complicated. How is such a personality possible, one that is able to absorb everything that came before into its personality and merge it into a higher unity?
In the Gospel of John, Christ is presented as the embodied, the incarnate Word of the World, as the incarnate Logos. To understand this to some extent, we have to go back a long way to the time of the emergence of the first cultural trends on our Earth. 600 years before the Palestine event, the mighty spiritual current that we call the Indian current had reached its high point and conclusion in the person of Gautama Buddha. But the same Buddha who worked in India was present in a certain form in Palestine at the time of Christ Jesus. What spiritual science means by the word 'Buddha' is not a specific person, but a dignity. Just as the individual human being develops more and more during his earthly life and is given ever higher offices, so an individuality can, through various incarnations, ascend to the Buddha office, to the Buddha dignity.
Before that, through many incarnations, the same individuality was not a Buddha, but a Bodhisattva. What is that? The Bodhisattvas have very specific tasks. They are the teachers and guides of humanity. All of humanity has passed through various stages.
The consciousness of today has been acquired by man in the course of time. Before that, our soul possessed different qualities. Reason, etc. have been acquired by man in the course of time; formerly man was endowed with different qualities. If we look back to the Lemurian period, we find a certain dull, clairvoyant realization in people. The whole of human life was not a spiritual self-awareness. Vague images arose in the soul in ancient times. Therefore, people could not be influenced in the same way as they are today, but only in a way that can be compared to inspiration or suggestion. And what they were told was not grasped by the intellect. The guides and teachers of humanity worked through suggestion, through inspiration, through their immediate presence, through the student's looking up to the great teacher.
The Bodhisattva taught in this way as long as he was not Buddha. Before his Buddha existence, he had repeatedly incarnated on earth in humanity, but he did not work in a physical body, only in his etheric body, and he could only have taught by not fully entering the human personality with his being, with his actual self. The disciple had clairvoyant consciousness and saw behind the personality of the teacher something like a mighty aura, which had no place in the human personality. The Bodhisattva allowed mighty images to flow into the soul of the disciple, as it were.
But not always should people unconsciously absorb this as an image, but should recognize from their own judgment what a person's goal was. What human beings had to conquer through their own efforts, namely love and compassion, was present in the human soul as forces, but was not consciously absorbed. Now the time had come for people to let love and compassion emerge from within themselves as something that arises from the human soul. In the past, these qualities were an emanation of the bodhisattva, but now they were to arise from the human soul itself.
Nowadays, there are many people who say: It is human to show love and compassion; but that was not the case before the appearance of the bodhisattva. Although love was present even then, it was more like an urge in the blood and was limited to the family and the tribe. The liberating, spiritual love, which is independent of all blood ties, was to become a reality only with Christ Jesus. In order to bring people to consciously develop love and compassion from within themselves, it had to be experienced first in a human body that love and compassion arise from the human soul. Then this can be passed on to other people. For this purpose, the Bodhisattva had to descend into the physical world, take on a physical body and, in the person of Gautama Buddha, work among people. This Gautama was not a Buddha at the time of his birth, but in the twenty-ninth year of his life he became a Buddha after leaving his royal palace and encountering grief and suffering outside the palace.
That is when love and compassion were awakened in him. It is said that a clarity arose in him and he understood that the human body could become an instrument of love and compassion. No individual had had this experience before. Through this experience, he attained a higher dignity of being, and thus the bodhisattva became a Buddha. He felt the inner impulse of compassion and love. This opened up the possibility for more and more people to experience the same thing and to feel it as their own impulse from their own soul. Everything must first be present in an outstanding personality.
When a Bodhisattva ascends to Buddha-hood, he receives a successor. Legend says: When he descended, he gave his successor the heavenly crown – 3000 years will pass before that Bodhisattva, who is such a one today, will ascend to Buddha-hood. The Eastern teaching calls the new Buddha Maitreya-Buddha. When can this happen? When a sufficiently large number of people have come to understand as their inner truth what Gautama Buddha experienced of love and compassion when he sat under the bodhi tree. Then a new mission will come to Earth through a new Buddha – the Maitreya Buddha.
This is how the wonderful Eastern legend about the mission of Gautama Buddha ends.
What became of Buddha after he left his earthly body? [Answering this question is important for Christianity.] When a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, he no longer needs to descend into a physical body. Legend also has it that Buddha took seven steps immediately after his birth and said that this would be his last incarnation. He can work in the etheric or life body. So he embodied himself in an etheric body. I ask my listeners to note how different such an embodiment is from the embodiment in a physical body.
To understand this, we need to take a look at the initiated person. What is initiation based on? On the fact that in ordinary human life one can make observations not only through the organs belonging to the physical body – eyes, ears, brain, heart and so on – but that one can already become independent of the physical tools in physical life. The initiate does not need his physical body to make observations in the world. He develops higher organs of perception in his etheric body when he trains himself to perceive supersensible things. While in the physical life man thinks, wills and feels, and holds these faculties together through the physical body, in the initiated man thinking, feeling and willing appear as three independent beings, and he has to do not with three powers but with three souls. When Buddha died and his physical body no longer held together the etheric body through its elasticity, it disintegrated into three independent beings and later, through their division, into four more, together seven souls, seven independently developed soul beings, over which he had to rule.
During life on earth, the physical body, through its elasticity, holds together the etheric body and with it the soul forces of the human being. After death, the ego is the only cohesive element. But if this ego is poorly developed, the person often runs a great risk of losing himself after death.
When such an individuality incarnates as a Buddha, it does not incarnate into a single spiritual being, but into a group of spiritual beings - the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha. This means that it does not incarnate into the physical world, but into a body that cannot be defined by anything in the physical world.
When there is talk of seven or twelve “disciples of Buddha,” this is often symbolic of the soul powers that emanate from Buddha's etheric body.
In this way Buddha lived when the event in Palestine occurred. That means: If a person who had become clairvoyant had been there, he would have found the Buddha leading a group of seven soul beings; but this Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, which was in Palestine at the time of Jesus and worked there was no longer the Gautama who had worked in India, but this individuality, as it had developed during the 600 years that had passed since his death, and had acquired even higher qualities. The Buddhism that we find in Christianity is also not the one preached in India 600 years before Christ Jesus, but the one that the Buddha, who had been taken to a higher level of development at the time of Jesus Christ, allowed to flow into Christianity from his etheric body. What Buddha had to give to Christianity will be described later.
[If standing still means death even for the ordinary person, then we must find even more plausible reasons why a being like the Buddha does not remain static in his development.
The second trend is Zoroastrianism.
What Zoroaster had to give at the time when Christ Jesus walked the earth was not what was imparted to the ancient Persian people under this name, not what is referred to in the history of the teachings of Zoroaster, and is not what we mean by it. Just as the name Buddha was borne by many teachers who proclaimed his teaching, so the name Zarathustra has passed over to his proclaimers. Five thousand years before Christ, he was the great teacher of the ancient Persian people. He was an outstanding personality of the highest degree, highly developed and a deeply initiated individuality. He not only had the teaching that we discussed yesterday, but also produced great disciples who could continue to plant what he had taught.
Zarathustra had two great disciples. He taught them the great secret. He taught one of them everything that can be known about that which is simultaneously spread out in space, that is, all the secrets of the cosmos as already present in space. He taught the other everything that can be known about the secrets of world evolution over the course of time. He went back to the primeval times of development and showed how the earth was formed. These two great disciples were re-embodied. The one to whom Zarathustra had taught all spiritual knowledge about space was re-embodied in that personality who had the mission to found the great Egyptian culture. He was thus reborn as the Egyptian Hermes.
A personality as lofty as that of Zarathustra acquires the ability to transfer the limbs that a human being has to others. This is symbolized in the Old Testament story of Shem. In this way, Zarathustra transferred his astral and etheric bodies, which were so highly developed, to others. These bodies were preserved in secret ways. He gave his astral body to the Egyptian Hermes, the founder of the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, so that it took on the perfect form of Zarathustra. This is how Zarathustra's first partial sacrifice occurred.
Zarathustra gave his etheric body to the disciple Moses, to whom he had revealed the successive stages of the development of the earth. How could this happen?
[The religious documents always tell in powerful images. For the spiritual researcher, these become clear when light from spiritual research falls on these images.
When a child develops, it is dull to its surroundings; only later do instincts, desires and passions emerge. The child, who was to take in Zarathustra's etheric body, therefore had to be protected from external impressions until his astral life woke up, until his life of desire woke up. Therefore, the child Moses was placed in a box and set in the water. Here everything that the etheric body of Zarathustra contained shone in him.
[Thus, through the sacrifice of his bodies, Zarathustra has helped to found Egyptian and Hebrew culture, these two significant spiritual currents.
Thus Zarathustra - the messenger of the spiritual sun-deity, of Ahura-Mazdao - worked through Hermes and Moses into Egyptian and ancient Hebrew culture.
And what has become of Zarathustra or Zoroaster's self? This self has reappeared as a human being. Through his brilliant initiation, he was able to create his new astral and etheric bodies. He was reborn several times as a leader of Persian culture and finally appeared, as Zaratas-Nazaratos, as a teacher in the ancient Chaldean secret schools. At that time he was simultaneously with Buddha and the teacher of Pythagoras; and when the Jews were led into Babylonian captivity, many of them became his disciples in Babylonia.
Thus, thanks to spiritual scientific research, we have traced the paths by which the teachings of Zarathustra - or Zoroaster - entered into Egyptian and ancient Hebrew cultures. The spiritual current emanating from him can be found in Palestine at the time of Jesus, side by side with the current emanating from Buddha.
All this had to happen for the event in Palestine. The gospels tell again what spiritual science has taught us. In Palestine, 600 years after the death of Buddha, two boys were born at the same time from different parents, both belonging to the House of David. These two children became important for the further development of humanity.
The House of David of the Hebrews had two lines: one through Solomon, the royal line; the other through Nathan, the Levitical line of the House of David. From the Solomonic line was one parental couple, and from the Nathanic line was the other parental couple. One child, the son of Joseph and Mary, was born of the Solomon line of the House of David. He was born in Bethlehem and was given the name Jesus. All three names were very common in Palestine at that time. Another child, Jesus, traces his origin to the Nathanic line of the House of David and was born in Nazareth. His parents were also named Joseph and Mary. Today we will focus primarily on the “Bethlehem Jesus”.
The individuality that was the founder of the ancient Persian culture was embodied in this boy, and which 600 years before had been the teacher of Pythagoras and many of the Jews who were taken into Babylonian captivity in the Chaldean secret schools. This I-ness appeared embodied in the boy Jesus, who had his origin in the Solomonic line of the house of David. This Jesus was thus the adolescent Zarathustra.
Alongside him, the other Jesus-child also grew. The two boys developed differently. The Solomon-Jesus developed all the qualities through which one attains clear and distinct concepts and insights into the surrounding world. How could it be otherwise? He grew to the highest abilities of human culture in a body from a royal lineage. He was a precocious child, capable of learning everything that had been accumulated over centuries and millennia.
The other boy, the Nathanian Jesus, showed very strange characteristics. He cared little about what surrounded us in the outer world. He had the highest inner development of mind and heart. Never has there been such a lovely child. His gaze went beyond this world into a completely different world, which had nothing to do with what the outer world had gone through for centuries. He was the delight of those around him.
These two children grew up side by side in the small town of Nazareth, where the parents of the Solomon Child had moved some time after the child's birth.
The two children were together until the age of twelve. To understand the nature of the Nathanian Jesus Child, we must try to understand the nature of his etheric body and, with the help of spiritual scientific research, find the hidden sources of his origin. We will come back to this tomorrow.
Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive
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