The Fifth Gospel: Jesus' three great sorrows

 

Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart, November 22, 1913

We have often spoken of the great and far-reaching significance of the Christ Impulse for the evolution of humanity on earth, and we have tried to characterize the whole essence of this Christ Impulse, which we usually summarize in the words “the Mystery of Golgotha,” from the most diverse angles. Recently, it has been my task to research some very specific and concrete aspects of this Mystery of Golgotha and its related matters. These investigations have presented themselves to me in such a way that I feel it is my duty to share the results of these investigations with our circle of friends, especially now, in this time of ours. I have succeeded in extracting some important information from what is called the Akasha Chronicle, and which we have often spoken about, with regard to the life of Christ Jesus.

We have already spoken at length during our last meetings about the radical changes that are taking place in the development of humanity in our time, and it is precisely in connection with these changes that it is necessary to convey to individual human souls, who have come together in the anthroposophical movement as we understand it, new data about the life of Christ Jesus. I only ask you to treat what I have to say in this regard with particular discretion and to keep it within our branches. Because even the little that has had to be published so far about the Christ Jesus life and what was not known from the gospels or tradition has already caused a certain wildness, a wild passion, and I don't even want to talk about the strange critics who are against our current, but even among those who have at least once shown goodwill towards this current, has caused a certain wildness, a wild passion, such as the story of the two Jesus children. Nothing seems so repulsive to our time, so inwardly repulsive, than drawing attention to the real results of spiritual research, to specific individual results of spiritual research. One still accepts it when the spiritual in general is spoken of, even when individual remarkable abstract theories about spiritual life are put forward. But one no longer wants to accept it when details from the spiritual life are presented in the same way as one presents details from the life of the physical plane. Much that must be said in connection with what I have to present will still be said. Now I would like to begin with the narrative itself, starting from a particular point, and I ask you to accept this narrative as a kind of fifth gospel that falls into our time as the four other gospels fell into their time. This is the only introduction that will be given. We will discuss further motivation tomorrow.

I would like to begin with the point in time that is indicated in the Gospel of Luke as the appearance of the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem among the scribes, where he attracts the attention of these scribes with the great, powerful answers he is able to give them. And so, as related in the Gospel of Luke, his relatives, who had lost track of him, find him. We know that this appearance is based on the fact that a great change in the life of Jesus had taken place, which can only be understood with the help of spiritual science. We know — and this may be briefly repeated — that approximately at the beginning of our era two Jesus-children were born, that one of them descended from the so-called Solomonic line of the House of David, and that in this Jesus-child was incarnated the spirit or the I, we may say, of Zarathustra. We know that this Jesus child grew up with a great gift, which must seem understandable when one knows the fact that this Jesus child carried the ego of Zarathustra within him. We know that the other Jesus child was born at about the same time from the Nathanic line of the House of David, and that this child had entered the physical plane with very different character traits than the Jesus child from the Solomonic line. While the boy Jesus of the Solomon line showed a special talent for everything that came from his environment and showed that it originated from human culture, up to the point where human culture had come at that time, the other Jesus boy was actually untalented in relation to everything that humanity had achieved in its development. He could not really relate to what he was supposed to learn about all that people had conquered in the course of historical development. Instead, this boy Jesus showed a wonderful depth and abundance of heart and mind, such a wealth of feeling that he cannot be compared to any other child when looking at the point in our human development where this child can be found and observed in the Akasha Chronicle.

Then the two boys grew up, and at the very moment when they were both about twelve years old, the ego of Zarathustra passed from one Jesus boy to the other, and it was the Jesus boy from the Nathanic line, with the ego of Zarathustra within him, who gave the great, powerful answers before the scribes in Jerusalem. So it was that the peculiar nature — one cannot say it any other way — of the Jesus child of Nathan and the I of Zarathustra had united. We know then — and this has been presented by me on earlier occasions — that the physical mother of the Jesus child of Nathan soon died, as did the father of the other child, and that now from the mother of the other Jesus child — the Solomonian Jesus child also soon wasted away because he was actually without an ego, withered away —, that now from the mother of the Solomonian Jesus child and the father of the Nathanian Jesus child a family became. The step-siblings, who were descended from the mother and father of the Solomonic line, also came over and now lived in Nazareth, and within this family, that is, with his stepmother or foster mother, the Jesus child with the Zarathustra ego now grew up within him, without his knowing, of course, at this age, that he had the ego of Zarathustra within him. He had within him the capacities that the ego of Zarathustra must have; but he did not know how to say: I have the ego of Zarathustra within me.

What now emerged, what had already been announced in the great answers he had given to the scribes, but what emerged more and more, that was - so I have to describe the life of this Jesus boy, the life from about the twelfth to the eighteenth year of life - that something like an inner inspiration asserted itself in his inner being , a direct knowledge that arose in him, a knowledge of a very peculiar kind, a knowledge that was so natural to him that he perceived something in his own soul, as the ancient prophets in the primeval times of Judaism had received their divine-spiritual revelations from divine-spiritual heights, from spiritual worlds. They had been accustomed to describe in their memory the message that once came to the ancient prophets from the spiritual world as the great Bath-Kol, as the voice from the spiritual world, the great Bath-Kol. As if the great Bath-Kol had risen again in him, but now in him alone, it seemed to the twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, eighteen-year-old Jesus, a rare, wonderful maturity of inner inspiration, a revival of those inner experiences that only the ancient prophets had.

What is particularly striking when one focuses on this point in human development in an Akashic chronicling manner is that within the whole family and within the whole environment in Nazareth, this boy was alone and lonely in relative youth with his inner revelation, which went beyond everything that others could know at that time. Even his stepmother or foster mother at the time understood him very poorly, and the others even less so. And it is less important when judging this boy Jesus to form all kinds of theories, but rather to have a sense of what it means to be a mature boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen, to feel something completely alien within oneself, feelings of revelation that were impossible for anyone else at the time, and to stand alone with these revelations, unable to speak to anyone, and what was even more, to have to feel that no one would understand if you spoke to them. It is difficult for a man to endure such things; to experience such things between the ages of twelve and eighteen is something monstrous. And to this monstrosity was added another.

He had an open mind, this boy Jesus, for what a person in his time was capable of receiving. Even then, with the eyes of his soul open, he saw what people, by virtue of their nature, were able to absorb and process spiritually and soulfully, and what they had received over the centuries from the ancient prophets revealed to the Jews. Deeply pained, with the most profound sorrow, he felt: Yes, it was so in primeval times, so the great Bath-Kol spoke to the prophets; that was an original teaching, of which scant remnants have remained among the Pharisees and other scribes. If the great Bath Kol were to speak to any human being now, there would be no one to understand the voice from the spiritual world. Humanity has changed from the time of the old prophets. Even if those great, those glorious revelations of primeval times were to resound today, the ears to understand them would be missing. This came to the soul of this Jesus child again and again, and with this suffering he was alone.

It is impossible to convey the depth of feeling that turned to what suffering, so characterized as I have just done, befell this Jesus child. And it may be said without fear of contradiction: No matter how much we may have said in theory about the Mystery of Golgotha, the magnitude of the cosmic or historical aspects is not at all overshadowed when we consider the individual concrete facts more and more as they present themselves in their factuality. For it is only by observing these facts that one can fully appreciate the course of human development, how an ancient wisdom was also present in the Jewish people and how impossible it was to understand this ancient wisdom at the time when it only, one might say, tentatively in a single soul between the ages of twelve and eighteen, but only caused this soul agony because no one could have understood how this Bath-Kol had expressed herself, how this revelation was only there for this soul to suffer endlessly. The boy was completely alone with these experiences, which, so to speak, represented the suffering of the historical development of mankind in such a concentration.

Now something developed in the boy that, I would like to say, can be observed in its rudiments here and there in life, which one must think of only infinitely magnified in relation to the life of Jesus. Pain and suffering experienced from similar sources to those described here are transformed in the soul, so that the person who experiences such pain and suffering within himself naturally transforms into goodwill, into love, but not just into feelings of goodwill and feelings of love, but into the power, into an enormous power of love, into the possibility of living this love spiritually and emotionally. And so, as Jesus grew up, something very peculiar developed in him.

Despite the hostility of his brothers and sisters and his immediate surroundings because they could not understand him and regarded him as someone who was not quite himself, it could not be denied that, as it showed up at the time for the physical eye, it now shows up for the Akashic Records that wherever this young lad went, if he spoke to anyone, even if they could not understand him, they at least responded to what he said, there was something like an actual overflow of a certain something from Jesus' soul into the other soul. It was like the passing over of a fluid of goodwill, of love: that was what radiated. It was the transformed suffering, the transformed pain. It came to those who came into contact with Jesus like a soothing breath of love, so that one felt one had something special in front of one, by being in some way in his presence. It was as if he were a kind of carpenter or joiner, and Jesus worked diligently in the Father's house. But in the hours when he came to himself, what I have just characterized took place. These were the inner experiences of Jesus of Nazareth, let us say between the twelfth and sixteenth or eighteenth years of his life.

Then, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, he began a kind of wandering. He wandered around a lot, working here and there in the trade he practised at home, coming into contact with Jewish and pagan areas. Even then, something very strange was already showing in a peculiar way in his dealings with the people he met, as a result of his experiences in his earlier years. And it is important to bear this in mind, because it is only by taking this into account that we can penetrate more deeply into what actually happened back then in the development of humanity.

He came, I would say, working from place to place and there to the families. After work, as we would say today, he sat with the families, and there one sensed everywhere that train of goodwill, of love, of which I spoke. You felt it everywhere, but you felt it, so to speak, through action; because everywhere he went, in the years when he traveled around between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, you had the feeling: There really is a special being sitting here. They didn't always express it, but they had the feeling: There is a special being among us. And that expressed itself in the fact that when he had moved away from the place, it wasn't just that they talked about what had happened between him and the others for weeks, but often it turned out like this: When the people sat together in the evenings while he was away, they had the feeling that he was entering the room. It was a shared vision. They had the feeling: He is among us again. And that happened in many, many places: that he had gone away and yet was still there, appearing spiritually to people, living spiritually among people, so that they knew: we are sitting with him.

As I said, in terms of the subjective it was a vision; in terms of the objective it was the tremendous effect of the love that he had expressed in the way described, and which expressed itself in such a way that the place of his appearance was in a certain sense no longer bound to the outer physical space, to the outer physical space conditions of the human physical body. It is tremendously helpful for understanding the Jesus figure to see again and again how indelibly he is imprinted in the minds of those to whom he once came, how he, so to speak, remained with them spiritually and returned to them again. Those who once knew him did not lose him from their hearts.

Now, during this wandering, he also came to pagan areas, I said, and in a pagan area he now had a very special experience. This experience makes a particularly deep impression when considering the Akasha Chronicle of this point in human development. He came to a pagan area. At this point, I would like to make it very clear: if you ask me where this was, where he came, I still have to tell you today: I don't know. Perhaps later research will reveal where it was, but I have not yet been able to find the geographical location. But the fact is absolutely clear. There may be reasons why one cannot find the geographical location, but the fact itself can be absolutely clear. In fact, precisely by telling you these things, I do not want to withhold from you at any moment the admission of what has not yet been investigated in this matter, so that you can see that I am really concerned in this matter with communicating only what I am fully able to vouch for.

So he came to a pagan place. There was a dilapidated place of worship. The priests of this place had long since left the place; but the people all around were in deep misery, afflicted by diseases. Precisely because an evil disease was raging there, the pagan priests had left the place of worship for this and other reasons. The people felt not only sick, miserable, burdened and laden, but also abandoned by the priests who had performed the pagan sacrifices, and suffered terrible torments. Now he came here to this area. It was around the time of his twenty-fourth year. Even then, he was already to a great extent characterized by the fact that he made a very special, a tremendous impression by his mere appearance, even if he did not even speak, but only when he was seen approaching. There is really something very special about this appearance of Jesus for the people of that time among whom he appeared. One felt something quite incredible when he approached. One must bear in mind that one is dealing with people from a completely different age and a different region. When he approached, one could see people feel: There is something very special here, something radiates from this being that does not radiate from any other person. Almost everyone felt this, some sympathetically, others without sympathy. It is not surprising that it became known and spread like wildfire: a special being is coming! And those around the altar believed that another old pagan priest had come or had sent someone to perform the sacrifice again. And the crowd that gathered became more and more numerous; for like wildfire it spread that a very special being had arrived. Jesus, when he saw the crowd, had infinite compassion for them, but he did not have the will, although they stormily demanded it, to perform the sacrifice again, not the will to perform this pagan sacrifice. But when he saw this crowd, his soul was filled with the same pain over the decayed paganism as it had been filled with the pain over the decayed Judaism in the years from the twelfth to the sixteenth, eighteenth year of his life. And when he looked at the crowd, he saw demonic elemental entities everywhere among the crowd, and finally also at the sacrificial altar where he was standing. He fell as if dead; but this falling occurred only because he lapsed into a state of being removed from the world due to the dreadful sight he had witnessed.

While he lay there, as if dead, the crowd was seized with fear. The people began to flee. But he, while lying there in a different state, had a vision of the spiritual world that illustrated to him what ancient paganism was like when the original wisdom of paganism was still present in the sacrificial rites of the pagans in the ancient mysteries in their original sacred form. It revealed to him what paganism was in primeval times, how it had revealed itself to him earlier in a different way, what Judaism was like. But just as this happened in a spiritual-soul, invisible way, just as what arose in inspiration, just as it had come to the old prophets, wanted to speak to him, so he had to experience the greatness of paganism in a different way, had to see what can only be described by saying that he saw, as he lay there, the pagan places of sacrifice, which were so arranged in their cultic furnishings that they were a result of the original Mystery revelations, and were actually like the external representation of the Mystery ritual. At these sacrificial sites, when the sacrifices were performed, the prayers of the people were accompanied, during the ancient times when this still existed in its original form, by the infusion of the powers of those spiritual entities from the ranks of the higher hierarchies to which the heathens could rise. As if he saw a vision before his mind's eye: Yes, when sacrifices were once made at such an altar, in the times when paganism was in its old glory, then the forces of the good pagan gods flowed into the sacrificial acts. But now - now, not through an inspiration, but through an immediate imagination - he had to experience the decline of paganism in great vividness. He now had to experience this, the decline of paganism too! And instead of the good powers flowing into the sacrificial acts as they had done in the past, demonic elemental entities now came to life, all kinds of elemental emissaries of Lucifer and Ahriman. He saw them now, and that was how the descent of paganism appeared to his mind's eye.

That was the second kind of great pain that he could feel: once the heathens had cultic rites that connected humanity with the good beings of certain hierarchies. This has become so decadent, so corrupt, that there are places like this where all good forces have been transformed into demonic forces, that it has come to such a pass that the people around them have been abandoned by the old pagan gods. So in a different way, the decline of paganism came before his soul than with Judaism, in a more inward, much more vivid way.

Indeed, one must know a little about the difference in feeling and sensing between when this feeling and sensing is the outflow of such direct imaginative experience or of theoretical knowledge. By fixing one's gaze on this point in the Akasha Chronicle, one indeed gets the impression of an infinitely meaningful but infinitely painful experience of the developmental history of humanity, which in turn is compressed into this imaginative moment.

He knew now: Divine spiritual powers once lived among the heathens; but if they lived now, there would be no people and no possibility for people to truly restore that ancient relationship. He now experienced this misery of humanity, concentrated and compressed into a brief experience. And as he rose to perceive what had once been revealed in the good, in the best old days of paganism, he heard words – so one can say – which felt to him like the secret of all human life on earth and its connection with the divine spiritual beings. I could not but express in words of our German language what had been spoken to the soul of the fallen, as if dead, Jesus, who at that very moment began to come to himself again. And for certain reasons I had to communicate these words first to our friends who were gathered at the time, when we laid the foundation stone for our building at Dornach. What was heard at that time, as primeval wisdom, is expressed in German words as follows:

Amen
The evils prevail
Witnesses of dissolving unity
Of selfhood guilt incurred by others
Experienced in daily bread
In which heaven's will does not prevail
Since man has separated himself from your kingdom and forgotten your names, you fathers in the heavens.

 

You see, my dear friends, it is something similar to an inverted Lord's Prayer, but that is how it should be.

Amen
The evils
Witnesses of selfhood that is released
From the guilt of selfhood owed to others
Experienced in the daily bread
In which the Will of Heaven does not rule
Because man has separated himself from your kingdom
And forgot your names
You fathers in the heavens.

 

After this had appeared to him as the secret of man's existence on earth and his connection with the divine-spiritual being, he came back to himself and still saw the fleeing demons and the fleeing people. He now had a great moment of life behind him. He now also knew how it stood with the development of mankind in relation to paganism. He could say to himself: Even in the wide fields of paganism there is a descending development. He had not gained this knowledge through external observation, but through observation of the soul, this knowledge which showed him: paganism, like Judaism, needs something quite new, a quite new impulse!

We must firmly grasp that he had these experiences. He had the Zarathustra-ego in him, but he did not know that he had it in him, not even then. So he had experiences as experiences, because there was no teacher who could have explained it to him theoretically; he had these experiences as experiences.

Soon after he had had this experience in relation to paganism, he began his journey home. It was around the age of twenty-four when he came home. It was around the time when his father died, and now he was living with the family and with the stepmother or foster mother in Nazareth again. The strange thing was that everyone around him seemed to understand him less and less. Only his stepmother or foster mother had gradually developed a certain understanding of the tremendous — albeit incomplete — emotional and loving process taking place in this soul. And so it happened that sometimes, even though the mother was still far from understanding him intimately, they would exchange a few words, even if they were still superficial in relation to what Jesus felt, so that the mother grew more and more to what lived in the soul of Jesus.

During this time, however, he had another special experience, which brought him the third great sorrow. Between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, he became more and more involved with a community that had formed some time before, the Essene community. This Essene community consisted of people who recognized that there was a certain crisis in human history, that Judaism and paganism had arrived at a point in their descending development where people had to seek a new way to find union with the divine spiritual world again. And in relation to the old Mystery methods, it was basically something new, which lay in the way of life that the Essenes sought in order to come up again to the union with the divine-spiritual world. These Essenes had particularly strict rules of life, in order to seek union with the Divine-Spiritual again, after a life of renunciation and devotion, after a life that went far beyond mere mental and intellectual perfection.

These Essenes were actually quite numerous in those days. They had their headquarters at the Dead Sea. But they had individual settlements in various regions of the Near East, and their numbers increased to such an extent that here and there someone was seized by the Essene idea, by the Essene ideal, through circumstances that always arise in such areas, felt impelled to join the Essenes. Such a person then had to give up everything that was his to the order, and the order had strict rules for its members. A person who was in the order could not keep any individual property. Now one person or another had this or that small property here or there. When he became an Essene, this property, which might be far away, fell to the Essenes, so that the Essenes had such properties everywhere. They usually sent younger brothers there, not the one from whom the property originated. From the common property, everyone could support anyone who was deemed worthy, a measure that best shows that at different times, different things benefit humanity, because such a measure would be extremely harsh in our time. But there was such a thing for the Essenes. This consisted in the fact that everyone was authorized to support from the common fund people whom he considered worthy, but never those who were related to him. That was strictly excluded, not close or distant relatives. There were different degrees in the order itself. The highest degree was a very secret one. It was very difficult to be admitted to it.

It is really the case that at that time, with regard to Jesus' life, Jesus was already so that to an enormous degree what I have described as a fluid emanated from him, which had an effect on people like embodied love itself, one might say. This also had an effect on the Essenes, and so it came about that he, without actually being a formal Essene, was drawn to the Essene community. Between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, he became so familiar with the Essenes that we can say that he had learned many of the things he experienced and discussed with them, which were their deepest secrets.

What once was the glory of Judaism, he learned between the ages of twelve and eighteen; what the secret of the Gentiles was, he learned between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. So now, by dealing directly with the Essenes and letting him partake of their secrets, he came to know the secret of the Essenes as it developed up to a certain union with the divine spiritual world. He could say to himself: Yes, there is something like a path to find the way back to the connection with the divine spiritual. And one really sees, after he had been tormented twice, in relation to Judaism and paganism, how it sometimes dawned on him while he was among the Essenes, something like a cheerful confidence that one could indeed find a way up again. But experience was soon to disabuse him of this cheerful confidence.

Then he learned something that was not learned theoretically, again not learned as a doctrine, but in direct life. Once, after he had just joined the Essenes, he went through the Essenes' gate and had a powerful vision that deeply affected his soul. He saw in the immediate vicinity how two figures fled from the Essenes' gate, and he already knew in some way that they were Lucifer and Ahriman; they fled from the Essenes' gate, as it were. He then had this vision more often when he walked through Essene gates. Essenes were already quite numerous at that time, and one had to take them into consideration. Now the Essenes were not allowed to go through the usual gates that were painted. This was connected with the way they had to shape their soul. The Essenes were not allowed to go through any gate that was painted in the manner of the time. He was only allowed to go through unpainted gates. There was one such gate in Jerusalem, and in other cities as well. The Essene was not allowed to go through a painted gate. This is proof that the Essenes were quite numerous at that time. Jesus came to some of these gates, and very often the same apparition repeated itself to him. “There are no pictures there,” he said to himself; ‘but instead of pictures, I see Lucifer and Ahriman standing at the gate.’ And so it formed in his soul – which one must take only from the point of view of spiritual-soul experience in order to fully appreciate it; by saying it that way, describing it theoretically, it is of course easy to accept, but one must consider how the experience of the soul takes shape when one experiences these things in direct spiritual reality. It was through this experience that he developed, let me repeat the word I have already used: the conviction of experience, which can only be expressed in such a way that he could say to himself: It seems as if the Essene way is the one, as has been shown to me in various ways, by which one can, through the perfection of the individual soul, find the way back into the divine spiritual worlds; but this is achieved at the expense of the Essenes setting up their way of life in such a way that they keep away from everything that would in any way allow Lucifer and Ahriman to approach them. They set everything up so that Lucifer and Ahriman could not reach them. So Lucifer and Ahriman had to stand outside the gate. And now he also knew, by following the whole thing spiritually, where Lucifer and Ahriman always went. They went to the other people outside who could not make the Essene way! That struck terribly at his mind, giving a stronger sorrow than the other experiences. It weighed so heavily on him that he had to say to himself: Yes, the Essenes could lead individuals upwards, but only if these individuals devoted themselves to a life that could not be granted to all mankind, that was only possible if individuals separated themselves and fled from Lucifer and Ahriman, who then went to the great multitude.

So it lay on his soul, how a few could experience again what the old prophets had experienced from the great BathKol, what appeared to the heathens at the ancient sacrifice. If what the descendants of the heathens and Jews can no longer experience, if the individual would attain on the Essene way, then the necessary consequence would be that the great remaining mass would be all the more afflicted by Lucifer and Ahriman and their demons. For the Essenes achieve their perfection by sending Lucifer and Ahriman, who flee, to other people. They attain their perfection at the expense of others, for their path is such that only a small group can follow it. This was what Jesus now learned. This was the third great pain, which became even more pronounced for him because, as if emerging from his Essene experiences and entering into the community of the Essenes themselves, he had something like a visionary conversation with the Buddha, whose community, a closed community, had much in common with the Essene movement, only centuries older. The Buddha revealed to him from the spiritual world: Such a community can only exist if only a small group of people participate in it, and not all people. It seems almost primitive when one says that the Buddha revealed to Jesus that the Buddha monks could only go around with the offering bowl when there were only a few such monks and the others were, so to speak, paying for it with another life. It sounds primitive when you put it that way. But it is different when the responsible spiritual power, as here the Buddha, reveals this in a situation in which Jesus of Nazareth now finds himself.

And so, in the life between the twelfth and thirtieth year of life, Jesus of Nazareth had experienced the development of humanity in threefold suffering, right down to the last detail. What now lived in his soul, what had been crowded together in this soul, he was able to develop in a conversation with this mother after the age of twenty-nine, after his stepmother or foster mother had gradually come to understand his nature and had become close to him. And important, infinitely important, was a conversation between Jesus of Nazareth and his stepmother or foster mother around the time of his thirtieth year, a conversation that was conducted in which everything that Jesus of Nazareth experienced during those years was truly poured out, as it were, into a few hours, and which became significant because of it. There are few spiritual experiences that are as significant, at least for a certain level of spiritual experience, as the one that one has when one focuses one's gaze on what Jesus of Nazareth had to say to his stepmother or foster mother.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive