Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, November 4, 1913
Through occult study, undertaken in the appropriate way, it is possible in our time to learn, as it were, what might be called the Fifth Gospel. If you turn your souls to some of what has been said over the years in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, you will also have encountered, among some of what has been said to explain the four Gospels, something that is not in the Gospels as a message about the life of Christ Jesus. From the series of facts mentioned in this regard, I will mention only the story of the two Jesus boys. But there are many other things that can be found today in the purely spiritual records and that are important for our time. It is so important for our time that it seems desirable for the prepared souls to get to know it little by little. For the time being, however, what is told from these sources must remain within our circle. But it may nevertheless be understood as if it were destined to pour into the souls of our present time in such a way that one receives a much more vivid picture of the work of Christ Jesus than has been possible until now.
If you take what I said in the introduction to the first lecture, you will have gathered from it the impression that in our time a much more conscious grasp of the figure of Christ Jesus is necessary than was the case for earlier times. If it should be objected that it would be contrary to the Christian development to bring forward something new about the life of Christ Jesus, then it is only necessary to recall the end of the Gospel of John, where it expressly says that in the Gospels the things that have happened are only partially recorded, and that the world could not bear the books that would be necessary if everything that has happened were to be recorded. From such things one can receive the courage and strength to actually do what is necessary in an age to present new facts about the life of Christ Jesus. And one can know from such things that it is only narrow-mindedness when something is said against such a presentation.
Now I would like to recall what I have often stated here in this place: that at the beginning of our era two Jesus children were born. We already know this, and we also know that the one of the two Jesus boys was born in such a way that the I, the spirit-being, of Zarathustra was embodied in him, and that this Jesus boy then lived with this spirit-being of Zarathustra until about the age of twelve, until that the point in time that the Gospel of Luke describes in such a way that the parents led Jesus to Jerusalem, then lost him, and that he was found among the scribes, to whom he interpreted the teachings in a way that amazed them and the parents, and which they themselves were called to interpret. I have drawn attention to the fact that this scene, as described in the Gospel of Luke, in reality indicates that the ego of Zarathustra, which had lived for about twelve years in the one Jesus child, moved over into the other Jesus child, now also twelve years old, who until then had been of a completely different nature; so that we now have that Jesus-child who comes from the Nathanic line of the house of David, and who did not have the Zarathustra-ego within him until the twelfth year, but from now on has it within him.
It is now possible, by means of what I have often spoken of and which can be described as reading in the Akashic Records, to gain further insights into the life of the Jesus child, now endowed with the Zarathustra ego. In doing so, one can distinguish three periods in the life of this Jesus. The first period extends roughly from the age of twelve to eighteen, the second from eighteen to twenty-four, and the third from about the age of twenty-four to the moment marked by the baptism of John in the Jordan, that is, to around the age of thirty.
Let us imagine that this Jesus, who was now twelve years old and had the Zarathustra ego within him, presents himself before the scribes of the Israelite people as an individual who has an elementary knowledge of the essence of Jewish doctrine and the essence of ancient Hebrew law, and that he is able to speak about it in an appropriate way. So this ancient Hebrew world lived in the soul of that Jesus-child. All that had come down in the way of knowledge about the relation of the Hebrew people to their God, which is usually understood as the proclamation of the God of the Hebrew people to Moses, lived in him. If we speak in sketchy terms, we can therefore say: A rich treasure from the holy teaching of what was in the Hebrew people lived in Jesus; and with this treasure, with this knowledge, he lived, doing his father's trade, in Nazareth, devoted to what he knew so well, processing it in his soul.
Now the Akasha Chronicle research shows us how, for him, what he knew in this way became a source of various mental doubts and mental pains, how he felt, especially in the deepest sense, more and more thoroughly and with severe inner struggles of the soul , how once, in quite different times of human evolution a grandiose proclamation, a grandiose revelation, flowed down from the spiritual worlds into the souls of those who, endowed with quite different soul powers, could receive such a teaching. It was especially brought home to the soul of Jesus that there had once been people with quite different soul powers who could look up to the revealing spiritual powers and understand in a completely different way what was revealed there than the later generation to which he himself belonged, the derived one, which had less soul powers to lead up in order to process what had once been led down. Often the moment came when he said to himself: All this was once proclaimed, one can still know it today; but one can no longer grasp it as fully as those who received it at the time grasped it. And the more of this was revealed to him inwardly, the more of it he was able to grasp in his soul, as he now received it when he stood before the Jewish scribes and interpreted their own law to them, the more he felt the inability of the souls of his time to find their way into what was ancient Hebrew revelation. Therefore the people, the souls of his time, the peculiarities of these souls of his time seemed to him like the descendants of people who had once received great revelations, but who could no longer reach up to this revelation. What had once been brightly and warmly drawn into these souls, he could often tell himself, now faded, and in many ways seemed dull, while the souls had felt it in the deepest sense before. This is how he felt about much of what now emerged more and more in his soul through inspiration.
This was the life of his soul from the age of twelve to eighteen, that it penetrated deeper and deeper into Jewish teaching, and could be less and less satisfied by it, yes, that it caused him more and more pain and suffering. It fills the soul with the deepest tragic feeling when one considers how Jesus of Nazareth had to suffer because of what had become of an ancient sacred teaching in a later generation. And often, as he sat there quietly dreaming and pondering, he said to himself: “The teaching once descended, the revelation once given to men; but now men are no longer here to comprehend it!" This sketchily characterizes the spiritual mood of Jesus of Nazareth. This was at work in the contemplation of his soul in those moments that remained to him during the time he spent as a craftsman, as a carpenter or joiner in Nazareth.
Then came the time from the age of eighteen to twenty-four, when he traveled around in nearby and somewhat more distant areas. He not only touched places in Palestine, but also outside Palestine, while working in his trade in a wide variety of places. During these years, in which the human soul, so freshly surrendered, absorbs much from its surroundings, he got to know many people and many human attitudes, and learned how human souls lived with what remained for them as an ancient and sacred teaching, that is, with what they could understand of it. And it is understandable from the outset that on a mind that had been through six years of what I just told, all the inner joys, sufferings, and disappointments weighing on the soul, had to make a very different impression than on the minds of other people. Every soul was a mystery for him that he had to solve; but every soul was also something that told him that it was waiting for something that had to come.
Among the various regions he touched, there were also some that belonged to the paganism of that time. One scene in particular made a deep impression on us, gleaming out of the spiritual painting of his wanderings inside and outside Palestine during the period from his eighteenth to his twenty-fourth year. There we see him arriving at a pagan place of worship, a pagan place of worship such as was built to the pagan gods under this or that name in Asia, Africa, and Europe. It was one of those places of worship whose ceremonies were reminiscent of the way in which they were also practiced in the Mysteries, but there they were practiced with understanding, whereas in these pagan places of worship they had often degenerated into a kind of external ceremony. But there was one such place of worship that Jesus of Nazareth came to that was abandoned by its priests, where the cult was no longer practiced. It was in a region where people lived in need and misery, in sickness and toil; their place of worship was abandoned by the priests. But when Jesus of Nazareth came to this place of worship, the people gathered around him, the people who were often plagued by illness, misery, and need, but who were especially plagued by the thought: This is the place where we once gathered, where the priests sacrificed with us and showed us the effect of the gods; now we stand before the abandoned place of worship.
A peculiar trait in the soul of Jesus comes to the spiritual observer. On other walks, it could be seen that Jesus was received everywhere in a very special way. The basic mood of his soul spread something that had a mild and beneficial effect on the people in whose circles he was able to stay. He traveled from place to place, worked here and there in this or that carpenter's workshop, and then sat with the people with whom he talked. Every word he spoke was understood in a special way, because it was spoken in a very special way; it was imbued with the mildness and benevolence of the heart. Not so much the what, but the how, cast something like a magic spell over the souls of men. Everywhere warm relations were formed with the wanderer. They did not take him like any other person; they saw something special shining from his eyes, and they felt something special speaking from his heart.
And so it was as if in the people who stood around their altar in hardship and misery and need and saw a stranger had come, as if in every soul the thought had come to life: a priest has come to us who now wants to perform the sacrifice at the altar again! That was the mood that surrounded him, caused by the impression his arrival made. It was as if he had appeared to the heathens as a priest who would perform their sacrifice again.
And behold, as he stood there before the assembled crowd, he felt, at a certain moment, as if he had been transported, as if he had been brought into a special state of mind – and he saw something terrible! He saw, at the altar and among the crowd that was gathering around him in ever greater numbers, what can be called demons, and he recognized what these demons meant. He recognized how the pagan sacrifices had gradually developed into something that magically attracted such demons. And so, when Jesus came to the altar, not only the people had come, but also the demons that had gathered at the altar during the earlier sacrifices. For this he recognized: that although such pagan sacrifices originated from what could be done in the old pagan times and at good places of worship to the true gods, insofar as they were recognizable for the pagan times, but that these sacrifices had gradually fallen into decline. The secrets had degenerated, and instead of the sacrifices flowing to the gods, these sacrifices and the thoughts of the priests attracted demons, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, which he now saw around him again, after he had been transported to a different state of consciousness. And when those gathered around him had seen how he had been transported into this other state of consciousness and had therefore fallen, they fled. But the demons remained.
In a more urgent way than the decline of the old Hebrew teaching, the decline of the pagan Mysteries had thus come before the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. From the age of twelve to eighteen, he had experienced within himself how that which was once given to humanity so that it warmed and enlightened the soul could no longer work and thus led to a certain desolation of the soul. Now he saw how the old beneficent workings of the gods had been replaced by demonic workings of a Luciferian and Ahrimanian kind. He saw the decay of paganism in what he had spiritually perceived around him. Imagine these experiences of the soul, this way of learning what had become of the influence of the old gods and of people's intercourse with the old gods; imagine the feeling that is produced in this way: humanity must thirst for the new, for it becomes wretched in its soul if nothing new comes!
And Jesus of Nazareth had, after the demons had, so to speak, beheld him and then followed the fleeing man, a kind of vision, a vision of which we shall speak again, in which the process of human development resounded to him from the spiritual heights in a special way. He had the vision of what I will share in a future lecture, which is like a kind of macrocosmic Lord's Prayer. He felt what had once been proclaimed to humanity in the pure Word, as pure Logos.
When Jesus of Nazareth returned home from this journey, it was around the time – as spiritual research suggests – that the father of Jesus of Nazareth had died. In the following years, from the age of twenty-four until the time marked as that of John the Baptist in the Jordan, Jesus of Nazareth became acquainted with what can be called the Essene doctrine and the Essene community. The Essenes were a community that had set up their headquarters in a valley in Palestine. The central headquarters was in a remote location. But the Essenes had branches everywhere; there was also something of a branch in Nazareth. The Essenes had set themselves the task of developing a particular way of life, a particular spiritual life, which was to be in harmony with the external life, whereby the soul could develop to a higher point of view of experience, whereby it could come into a kind of community with the spiritual world. In certain degrees one ascended to that which the Essene community wanted to give its members, its co-confessors, as the highest: a kind of union with the higher world.
The Essenes had thus developed something that was intended to cultivate the human soul in such a way that it could grasp what could no longer be grasped through the natural course of human development: the ancient connection with the divine spiritual world. The Essenes sought to achieve this through strict rules that also applied to their external way of life. They sought to achieve this by strictly withdrawing, as it were, from contact with the external world. Such an Essene had no personal property. The Essenes had come together from all possible parts of the world at that time. But anyone who wanted to become an Essene had to give up what possessions he had to the Essene community; only the Essene community had possessions, property. So if someone in a particular place owned property and wanted to become an Essene, he handed over the house and whatever land it included to the Essene community. This meant that the community had property in a wide variety of places. There was a peculiar principle in the Essene community that would certainly cause offence today, given our views, but which was necessary for the Essenes to achieve what they wanted. They cultivated the life of the soul by devoting themselves to a pure life, a life of devotion to wisdom, but also a charitable life of love. Thus, wherever they went - and they wandered around the world to fulfill their task - they performed good deeds. Part of their teaching was healing the sick. They practiced healing everywhere in the manner of that time. But they also did a lot of material charity. And there that principle was in force which cannot be imitated in our present social order, and probably should not be imitated: an Essene could support anyone he considered in need, but not a family member.
The goal of the Essenes was to perfect the soul in order to reconnect it to the spiritual world. This goal was designed to keep the temptations of Ahriman and Lucifer from approaching the soul of the Essenes. We could also characterize the Essene ideal by saying that the Essene tried to keep away from himself everything that can be called Luciferic and Ahrimanic temptations. He tried to live in such a way that what is Ahrimanic drawing down into sensuality, into the outer world, into materialistic life, could not approach him at all. But he also tried to live a life of bodily purity so that the temptations and temptations arising from the soul could not affect this soul. So he tried to lead such a life that Lucifer and Ahriman could not reach the Essene soul.
The way Jesus of Nazareth developed led to a relationship with the Essenes that would not have been possible with any other person, and would not have been possible at all in the years I am talking about here, if he had not become an Essene himself. Jesus of Nazareth was even allowed to enter the most sacred and lonely rooms at the central place of the Essenes, as far as that was at all possible within the strict rules of the Essene order, and was allowed to hold conversations with the Essenes that they otherwise only held among themselves. In the process, he was able to familiarize himself with the deepest rules of the Essenes. Thus he came to know how the individual Essene felt and strove and lived, and above all, he learned to feel – and this is something of what it comes down to – what existed as the furthest possibility for a soul of his time, to penetrate again through perfection to the ancient sacred revelation. He came to know all of this.
One day, when he left the Essene assembly, he had a momentous experience. As he went out of the gate of the secluded Essene dwelling, he saw two figures fleeing from either side of the gate, and he sensed that they were Lucifer and Ahriman. And more often this was repeated to him like a similar vision. The Essenes were, after all, a very numerous order of people. They had their settlements everywhere in the way I have described. Therefore, they were also respected as such in a certain way, although they led their social life in a very different way than the other people of that time. The cities they visited made special gates for them because the Essene was not allowed to go through a gate where there was a picture on it. If he wanted to enter a city and came to a gate where there was an image, he had to turn back and enter the city at a different place where there was no image. This played a certain role in the entire system of the Essene doctrine of perfection, because it was the case that nothing of a legendary, mythical or religious nature was allowed to be depicted in the image. The Essene wanted to flee from the Luciferian aspect of pictorial impulses. So it was that on his wanderings, Jesus of Nazareth came to know the imageless Essene communities. And again and again at these imageless Essene communities he saw how Lucifer and Ahriman had placed themselves there as invisible images where visible images were frowned upon. These were significant experiences in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
What did these significant experiences lead to for him in connection with the numerous conversations he was able to have with the Essenes who had attained a high level of perfection? It led to something that was again extremely depressing, deeply, deeply depressing for his soul, which caused him endless torment and pain. It occurred to him that he had to say to himself: Yes, there is a strictly closed community; there are people who strive to get in touch with the spiritual powers, with the divine spiritual world, in the present. So there is still something among people in the present that seeks to regain this connection. But at what cost? The fact that this community of the Essenes led a life that other people could not lead. For if all men had led the life of the Essenes, the life of the Essenes would not have been possible. And now a connection occurred to him that had an extremely depressing effect on his soul: Where do Lucifer and Ahriman flee to, he said to himself, when they flee from the gates of the Essenes? They flee to where the souls of other people are! So that is what humanity had come to: a community that had to separate itself if it wanted to find a connection to the divine spiritual world. And because they set themselves apart, because they set themselves apart in such a way that they can only develop in their entire social cohesion by excluding other people from themselves, they condemn other people to sink all the deeper into what they, this Essene community, fled. The fact that the Essene community rose meant that the others had to fall all the more! Because the Essene led a life in which Lucifer and Ahriman could not come into contact with him, Ahriman and Lucifer were able to come to the other people precisely by tempting and enticing them.
That was Jesus of Nazareth's experience with an esoteric order. What could be experienced in his time with Jewish law had already been experienced in his soul in earlier years. What the pagan cults of his time had come to, he had also experienced in his soul in earlier years, when the world of demons had come before his soul at a significant moment. Now he had to experience at what cost human beings of his time had to seek its approach to the divine-spiritual secrets of the world. Thus we live in a time – that came bitterly before his soul – in which those who seek the connection with the Divine-Spiritual must do so in close community and at the expense of other people. Thus we live in a time in which the cry of longing for such a connection with the Divine-Spiritual World can become all people's. That had weighed heavily on his soul.
And as this lay so heavily on his soul, he once had a spiritual conversation with the soul of the Buddha within the Essene community. The whole way of life of the Essene community was very similar to the way of life that Buddha had brought into the world. And Jesus saw himself face to face with Buddha and heard Buddha saying: 'The path that I have given to mankind cannot bring the connection with the divine spiritual world to all people; for I have founded a teaching that, if it is to be understood and experienced in its higher aspects, makes necessary such a separation as is contained in this teaching." With the utmost clarity and force, Jesus of Nazareth realized that Buddha had founded a teaching that presupposes that, in addition to those who profess the innermost part of this teaching, there must be other people who cannot profess this innermost part. For how could Buddha and his disciples have gone with an offering bowl in hand and collected alms if there had not been people who could have given them alms? He now heard from Buddha that his teaching was not one that every person in every situation in life could develop.
The possibilities for development that existed in his time were experienced by Jesus of Nazareth in the three periods of his life before his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist. He did not experience them in the way that one learns something, but in the way that one experiences something when one comes into direct, very close contact with these things. He had come into very close contact with the ancient Jewish law when it had flashed up in him in an inspirational way, and he had been able to experience within himself something like an echo of the revelations that had been made to Moses and the prophets. But he had also been able to experience how it was no longer possible for a soul of his time, with the physical organization of that time, to fully grasp these things. Different times had come than those in which one could fully absorb the ancient Jewish law. And how the decline of the pagan Mysteries had brought about the demonic world he had also experienced through the closest contact, through an experience in the supersensible world, in which he had summoned not only the people who had been plunged into need and misery by the ruined place of worship, but also the demons who had gathered around the sacrificial site instead of the good old pagan powers. And how it was impossible for man, in spite of the demands of the coming time, to learn anything of the deepest secret knowledge of the Essene order he had experienced during the six years before the baptism of St. John.
What one gains in this area from the contemplation of the Akasha Chronicle is the realization that here, through inner spiritual experience, something has been suffered that could never have been suffered by any other soul on earth. Perhaps there is not full understanding in our time for this very word that I have just spoken. Therefore, I would like to interject something here. In the further course of the messages from the Fifth Gospel I will have to explain how these sufferings increased tremendously in the time between John the Baptist's baptism in the Jordan and the Mystery of Golgotha. Our time could easily object: But why should such a high soul suffer at all? Because our time has strange ideas about these things. And when I come to discuss the full depth of Jesus' suffering and, later, of Christ's, I must draw your attention to many misunderstandings that arise.
I have already mentioned several times, including here, that a book by Maurice Maeterlinck has recently been published, “On Death”, which should be read for the sake of seeing how absurdities such a person, who has otherwise also written good things in the field of spiritual life, can write. Among many absurdities, Maeterlinck's book also asserts that a spirit that has no body cannot suffer because only a physical body can suffer. From this Maeterlinck draws the conclusion that a person who has left his body cannot suffer in the spiritual world. Anyone who thinks like this could easily come to the conclusion that the Christ-being, after it had entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth, could not suffer. Nevertheless, I will have to describe next time the deepest suffering of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is certainly strange how a person with sound reason can believe that a physical body can suffer. After all, only the soul in the physical body can suffer, because the physical body cannot have pain and suffering. What pain and suffering is, is located in the soul-spiritual part of a body, and physical pain is precisely that which is caused by irregularities of the physical organism. Insofar as the physical organism is an organism, they are irregularities. You can have a strained muscle in it and so on; but the physical body, the physical organization, does not suffer, even if matter is dragged from one place to another. Just as a straw bag cannot suffer when the straw is thrown around, so a physical body cannot suffer. But because a spiritual-soul being is in the body, the spiritual-soul part suffers from the fact that something is not as it should be. So it is the spiritual-soul part that suffers; and it is always the spiritual-soul part. And the higher the spiritual-soul stands, the more it can suffer, and the higher it stands, the more it can suffer from spiritual-soul impressions.
I say this so that you can try to form an impression, a feeling, of how the Zarathustra essence suffered during these years from the experience that the old revelations have become impossible for what the human soul needs in modern times. First of all, there was the infinite suffering that confronts us, which cannot be compared to any suffering on earth, when we look at the part of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that we are considering today in the manner of the Akasha Chronicle.
At the end of the period that I last characterized, Jesus of Nazareth had a conversation with his mother. This conversation with the mother was decisive for what he now undertook: the path to the one with whom he had already entered into a kind of relationship through his relationship with the Essene order, which he undertook as a walk to John the Baptist. I will talk about this conversation with the mother, which is then decisive for what follows in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, next time.
Let me say in conclusion today: consider the messages of this Fifth Gospel as something that is given as well as it can be given, because the spiritual forces of our time require that a number of souls know about these things from now on. But also consider what is given with a certain reverence. For I have already mentioned here how wild the external spiritual life in Germany became, even among the most honest thinkers, at the moment when a publication was first made only about the two Jesus children. Such things, which are taken from the spiritual world, which come directly from spiritual research, the public outside our movement cannot yet tolerate them at all. And the things come to meet one in the most varied ways, which are perceptible like a wild passion, and which want to ward off something that comes out of the spiritual world like a new proclamation. It is not necessary that through careless chatter these things be also belittled and ridiculed, as has happened to the story of the two Jesus children, for these things should be sacred to us.
It is actually not at all easy to talk about these things in the present, precisely in view of the fact that these things are most strongly resisted. And basically it is, after all, what I have often characterized: the infinite laziness of the human soul in our time, which does not want to go into the details of spiritual research and therefore does not want to gain any insight into the possibility of coming to such things. It is already the case in the present that, on the one hand, the longing for revelations from the spiritual world lies hidden in the depths of the human soul, and that, on the other hand, the conscious part of the human soul in our time becomes most passionately negative when such revelations from the spiritual world are spoken of.
Consider the words I have said at the end of today's reflection and take them as a guide to how we want the things we speak about in the Fifth Gospel to be taken.
Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive
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