The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we placed before our souls the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for human development on our earth. But every event in the world is connected, through almost infinite relationships, with the development of the entire cosmos. And we will only be able to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in its essence if we also clarify the cosmic significance of this event.

[ 2 ] We already know that the being we call the Christ being descended from super-earthly regions to our earth, that it was seen, so to speak, in its approach in ancient Persia through the clairvoyant gift of Zarathustra on the sun, then through Moses in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai, and finally, for those who experienced the Christ event, in the presence of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 3 ] We know that our earthly events, above all the development of humanity, are connected with our solar system. For we have shown that this development of humanity, as it has come about, could not have taken place at all if, out of a world body in which our sun and our present moon were still united with the earth, first the sun and then later the moon had not emerged, thereby placing our earth in a position of equilibrium between the sun and the moon. Because human beings could not keep up with the rapid pace of development of those beings who sought a place on the sun, the Earth had to be separated from the sun. And because, if the Earth had remained together with the moon, humanity would have fallen prey to rapid hardening and ossification, the moon had to be separated with its substances and entities. This made the development of humanity possible in the right way. But yesterday we saw that a certain tendency toward hardening remained, and that this remnant would have been sufficient to lead humanity toward a kind of state of decay at the end of our Earth's development, had the Christ impulse not come. This will enable us to look a little into our entire development.

[ 4 ] Once upon a time, the sun, moon, and earth were one world body. Then came the time when the sun separated; only the earth and moon remained united. Then the present moon separated, and the earth remained behind as the scene of human evolution. That was in the ancient Lemurian period, which preceded the so-called Atlantean period, which we have already discussed from various points of view. Then the earth developed in such a way that the forces of the sun and moon worked from outside, from the Atlantean period up to our time.

[ 5 ] Let us now consider the further course of Earth's development up to the time when the Christ impulse came. And let us focus on a very specific point in time in our Earth's development, the moment when the cross was raised on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus. Let us focus on this moment in our Earth's development.

[ 6 ] Up to this point, what happened to humanity was the consequence of the united forces of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings entering into the inner being of human beings. And we have seen that through this entering, human beings lived themselves into Maya or illusion in relation to the outer world: Ahriman caused the outer world not to appear to human beings in its true form, but as if it were only a material, a physical world, as if there were nothing spiritual behind all that is physical. Thus, for a long time — and for many members of the Earth's evolution, this is still the case today — human beings found themselves in a state brought about by error, because they only see the sensory, material impressions around them and process them through their ideas. Through this influence of Ahriman or Mephistopheles, human beings see the outer world in a false light and form illusory and untrue ideas about the spiritual world. But everything spiritual is connected with physical effects, and we have seen what physical effects accompanied this illusion of outer perception. We have seen that one consequence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences was that human blood became less and less capable of giving people the ability to see what is right in the outer world, so that with the deterioration of the blood, with the dissolution of the blood, as it was in the times of ancient blood kinship, with this scattering, with this killing of the blood through the mixing of blood, there was an ever-increasing illusion. For human beings could no longer ask the old wisdom that they had inherited and that told them: It is not so that the outer world is merely matter; for if you hold fast to your old wisdom, it tells you that behind the physical world there is a spiritual world. — But this wisdom was lost more and more. And so human beings became increasingly dependent on the external physical world with their entire soul life and their knowledge. This transformed all physical impressions into illusion, into deception. If the influence of Christ had not come, man would have finally reached the point where he would have lost all the old treasures of wisdom and would have been completely dependent on the external world of the senses and its impressions. He would have forgotten that there is a spiritual world. That would have had to happen. Man would have become blind to the spiritual world.

[ 7 ] Now we must consider in all its seriousness the truth that human beings would have fallen more and more into deception and error about the outer world. It is not easy to take this truth, which has just been presented to you—the fall of human beings into error about the outer impressions of the sensory world—in all its seriousness and breadth. Try to understand what this means: we are to recognize all external impressions of the senses, as they present themselves to us in the physical-sensory world, as illusion, as deception. We are to learn to say to ourselves: as the facts and impressions in the sensory world are and make an impression on us, so they are false, and we must learn to see their true form behind the external impressions.

[ 8 ] I will tell you of an event in which it is usually difficult for people to apply the truth, so that they say to themselves: The form that presents itself to me in the external world through this event is untrue, is an illusion, is Maya. — And do you know what this event is? This event is death. By confronting us in the outer, physical world, by speaking to our consciousness, which has gradually become such that it can only comprehend external physical events under the influences we have described, death carries a certain quality within itself, has become such that human beings can only view it from the perspective of the outer physical world. It was precisely through death that humanity fell into the most erroneous and fateful views. We must therefore conclude that the form in which death presents itself to us is only Maya, illusion, a deception.

[ 9 ] Before our eyes in the external physical world stand the most manifold events. There before our eyes are the stars that fill the universe; there are the mountains, the plants, the animals; there is the whole world of our minerals; there also stands man and everything else with the facts that we can gain through our observation with the senses. And when we ask ourselves: Where do these facts come from? Where does this external physical-sensory world, which presents itself to us as a material world, come from? Then we must answer: It comes from the spiritual. The spiritual lies at the foundation of our physical, sensory world. And if we were to go back to the most original form of the spirit from which everything sensory and physical emerges, we would have to call it the foundation of all being, in Christian esotericism that which is called the Father principle in the Godhead. The divine Father principle lies at the foundation of everything that is created. So what has actually been veiled from human beings, causing everything to be immersed in Maya or illusion? The divine Father principle! Instead of the illusions of the senses, they should see the divine Father principle in everything around them. Human beings should see everywhere the divine-spiritual Father principle to which all things and they themselves belong. The divine-spiritual Father principle, to which all things and he himself belong, does not reveal itself in its true form. Because human beings have suffered the diminutions of their abilities that we have spoken of, this Father principle reveals itself through the great deception, through Maya.

[ 10 ] What is woven into the great deception? Among all the facts we see, one presents itself to us as fundamental, and that is death. Man should therefore say to himself: The external things that present themselves to our senses are in truth the Father principle; they express the divine-spiritual Father element. And if death is woven into the entire sensory world, then death is something that belongs to the divine-spiritual Father principle. Because human beings have developed as they have, the divine Father principle is enveloped in various shells—and ultimately in the shell of death. What must human beings therefore seek behind death, as behind everything sensory? The Father, the cosmic Father! Just as human beings must learn to say of every thing, “It is the Father in truth,” so must they learn to say to themselves, “Death is the Father.” And why does a false image of the Father appear to us in the sensory-physical world? Why does the image of the father appear so distorted to us that it seems disfigured, appearing to us as the deceptive death? Because the Lucifer-Ahriman principle is mixed into all our lives! So if human beings are to be led from a false, deceptive, majestic view of death to a correct view of death, what must happen?

[ 11 ] Human beings would have to be enlightened about death through facts! Something would have to happen through which human beings could learn that what they have known about death, what they have felt about death, what they have been able to do under the impulse of their ideas about death, is untrue. An event had to occur that would reveal the true form of death to them. The false form of death had to be eradicated, and a true form of death had to be established.

[ 12 ] That was the mission of Christ on earth: through his deed, he replaced the false form of death with the true form of death.

[ 13 ] Death became this distorted image of the Father through the intervention of Lucifer-Ahriman in human evolution. Death was the consequence, the effect of the influence of Lucifer-Ahriman. What, then, must the one who wanted to remove this false image of death from the world do?

[ 14 ] The false form of death could never have been removed from human life unless its cause—Lucifer-Ahriman—had been eliminated. But no earthly being could have accomplished this. An earthly being can, within the course of earthly evolution, wipe out the things that have been done by earthly beings themselves, but not the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. Only a being who was not yet on earth when Lucifer-Ahriman was active, who was still in outer space, who came to earth at a time when Lucifer-Ahriman had already entered the human body completely, could bring this about.

[ 15 ] Now this being came to Earth and, as we have seen, eliminated Lucifer-Ahriman at just the right moment, removing the cause of what had brought death into the world. So this had to be a being that had nothing to do with all the other causes of death within humanity. With everything that caused human beings to suffer death, that is, with everything that was brought about by Lucifer, later Ahriman, with everything that individual human beings accomplished on Earth because of the influence of Lucifer-Ahriman, in other words: with everything through which human beings became guilty, fell into evil, this being had to have nothing to do with. For if a being had suffered death under the influence of all these causes, then this death would have been justified. Such a death, which was unjustified, which was taken upon itself by a being without guilt, a completely innocent death, could alone wipe out all guilty death.

[ 16 ] Accordingly, an innocent being had to suffer death, had to marry death, had to endure death. And by enduring death, he brought into this human life those forces which gradually create for human beings the knowledge of the true nature of death, that is, the knowledge that death, as it appears in the sensory world, has no truth, that, on the contrary, this death had to occur for the sake of life in the spiritual world, that with this death the very foundation is laid for life in the spiritual.

[ 17 ] Thus, through the innocent death on Golgotha, the proof was provided that human beings will gradually come to understand: that death is the ever-living Father! And once we have the right view of death, once we have learned through the event of Golgotha that outer death means nothing, that the Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, with whom we can unite, once we have recognized that this Christ has brought about that, although the image of death on the cross presents itself, this is only an outer event, and that the life of Christ in the etheric body before death is the same as after death, that this death therefore cannot harm life—we have understood that we have before us a death that does not extinguish life, that is itself life, then we have, through what hung on the cross, once and for all the sign that death is in truth the giver of life. Just as the plant grows out of the seed, death is not a destroyer, but a seed of life. It has been sown into our physical-sensory world so that this physical-sensory world does not fall out of life, but can be taken up into life. The refutation of death had to be delivered on the cross through the contradictory death, through the death of an innocent one. But what was actually accomplished by this?

[ 18 ] We know from the previous lectures that human beings have an I as the fourth member of their being, and that as this I develops, it has blood as its outer physical instrument. Blood is the expression of the I. That is why the I fell into error, more and more into Maya or illusion, as the blood became worse and worse. That is why human beings also owe the increase in the power of their I to the fact that they have blood. But in turn, they owe this I in a spiritual sense to the fact that they learned to distinguish themselves from the spiritual world, that they became individuals. This could not be given to him under any other circumstances than by first cutting off his view of the spiritual world. And what cut off this view was precisely death. If man had always known that death is the seed of life, he would not have come to an independent ego, for he would have remained connected with the spiritual world. But death came and gave him the illusion that he was separated from the spiritual world, and thus educated man to independent individuality.

[ 19 ] But this individuality became more and more independent, so much so that it exaggerated its independence and went beyond a certain point. On the other hand, this could only be balanced by withdrawing from this egoism the power that had driven it beyond this point. What had led too strongly into egoism in the ego, what had promoted not mere egoity, egoism, but egoism in the ego, had to be driven out. But this was driven out — so that in the course of the future it can be driven out more and more from the individual egos — at that time, when death came on the cross at Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds.

[ 20 ] In the flowing blood from the wounds of Christ, we therefore see the actual symbol of the excess egoism in the human ego. Just as blood is the expression of the ego, so the blood that flowed on Golgotha is the expression of the excess in the human ego. If the blood had not flowed on Golgotha, human beings would have become spiritually hardened in egoism and thus headed toward the fate we described yesterday. With the blood flowing on Golgotha, the impetus was given for that which makes the ego egoistic to gradually disappear from humanity.

[ 21 ] But every physical event has a spiritual counterpart. To the same extent that blood flowed from the wounds on Golgotha, something spiritual happened. At that moment, rays that had not previously gone out from the Earth went out into space for the first time, so that we, created at that moment, can think of rays going out from the Earth into space. The earth had become darker and darker with the passing of time until the event at Golgotha. Now the blood flows on Golgotha, and the earth begins to shine!

[ 22 ] If, in pre-Christian times, any being had been able to look down on the earth from a distant world, initially with clairvoyant powers, it would have seen how the earth's aura gradually dimmed and became darkest in the time preceding the event of Golgotha. But then it would have seen how the earth's aura lit up in new colors. The deed on Golgotha permeated the earth with an astral light that will gradually become etheric and then physical light. For every being in the world continues to evolve. What is the sun today was first a planet. And just as ancient Saturn evolved into the sun, so our earth, which is now a planet, is evolving into the sun. The first impetus for our Earth to become a sun was given when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha. Then the Earth began to shine, at first astral, visible only to clairvoyants. But in the future, the astral light will become physical light, and the Earth will become a shining body, a sun body.

[ 23 ] I have often told you: it is not through the agglomeration of physical matter that a world body comes into being, but through the creation of a new spiritual center, a new theater of action, by a spiritual being. The formation of a world body begins with the spiritual. Every physical world body was first spirit. What our Earth will one day become is first the auric-astral, which began to radiate from the Earth here. This is the first seed of the future Sun-Earth. But what a human being would have seen at that time with their deceptive senses is an illusion. It is not the truth at all; it dissolves, it ceases to be. The more the earth becomes sun, the more this Maya burns in the sun's fire and disappears within it.

[ 24 ] But because the earth was then permeated by a new force, because the foundation was laid for the earth to become sun, it became possible for this force to permeate human beings as well. The first impetus was given to what I described yesterday: the radiation of the Christ force into the etheric human body. And through what was able to radiate into it astralically, this etheric human body was able to begin to take in new life force, as it needs it for the future.

[ 25 ] So if you imagine a certain time after the event of Golgotha and compare it with the time when the event of Golgotha took place, if you compare a future state of humanity with the time when the event of Golgotha took place, then you can say to yourself: At that time, when the Christ impulse came, the earth was still such that it could no longer radiate anything into the etheric bodies of human beings. For a time after that, however, the etheric bodies of those human beings who had found a connection with the Christ impulse were permeated by this light. When they understood Christ, they took into themselves the radiant power that has been in the earth ever since, the new luminosity of the earth. They took the Christ light into their etheric bodies! The Christ light flows into the etheric bodies of human beings.

[ 26 ] And now, since that time, there is always a part of the Christ light in the etheric bodies of human beings. What happens now? What happens to that part of the etheric body of human beings that has taken in the Christ light? What happens to it after death? What is it that gradually takes up residence in the etheric body of human beings as a result of the Christ impulse?

[ 27 ] This is something that the Christ impulse has brought, something that the Christ impulse has sunk into the etheric body of human beings, something that has been there ever since and was not there before. Since that time, the possibility has existed in the etheric bodies of human beings that something new may arise in them, as it were, as an effect of the Christ light, something that breathes life, that is immortal, that can never fall prey to death. But if it does not succumb to death, then as long as human beings on earth still succumb to the illusion of death, it will be saved from death; it will not participate in death. Since that time, therefore, there has been something in the etheric body of human beings that does not participate in death, that does not succumb to the forces of death on earth. And this something that does not participate in death, which human beings gradually conquer through the influence of the Christ impulse, now flows back, flows out into the world space, and, depending on whether it is stronger or weaker in human beings, forms a force that flows out into the world space. And this force will form a sphere around the Earth that is in the process of becoming the Sun. A kind of spiritual sphere is forming around the Earth from the etheric bodies that have become alive. Just as the Christ Light radiates from the Earth, we also have a kind of reflection of the Christ Light in the orbit of the Earth. What is reflected here as Christ Light, and what has come about as a result of the Christ event, is what Christ calls the Holy Spirit. Just as it is true that the Earth began to become a sun through the event of Golgotha, it is equally true that from this event onwards, the Earth also began to become creative and to form a spiritual ring around itself, which later became a kind of planet around the Earth.

[ 28 ] Thus, something essential is happening in the cosmos from this event at Golgotha onwards. At that time, when the cross was raised on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus, a new cosmic center was created. We were there when this new cosmic center was created! We were there as human beings, whether in a physical body or outside physical life between birth and death.

[ 29 ] This is how new worlds are formed! But we must understand that we are standing at the starting point of a newly forming sun when we contemplate the dying Christ.

[ 30 ] Christ marries death, which has become the characteristic expression of the Father Spirit on earth. Christ goes to the Father and marries his expression, death — and the image of death becomes untrue, for death becomes the seed of a new sun in the universe. If we feel this event, if we feel this untruthfulness of death, if we feel that death on the cross becomes the seed from which a new sun springs forth, then we also feel quite rightly what humanity on earth must have felt and sensed as the most important transition within human evolution.

[ 31 ] There was once a time when people still had a dim, vague clairvoyance. They lived in the spiritual realm and looked back on their lives. When they reached the age of thirty, for example, they looked back on their twentieth year, their tenth year, and so on, back to their birth, but they knew: I have come into this birth from divine-spiritual heights. At that time, birth was not a beginning: as spiritual beings, they saw birth and they also saw death, and they knew that there was something spiritual within them that could not be touched by this death. Birth and death in the present sense did not yet exist. Birth and death only came later — and took on their false, deceptive form in the outer image of the father. In the outer image of the father, the characteristic feature became death! And then people looked at death and saw how it apparently destroyed life. And death became more and more an image that represented the opposite of life. If life brought much suffering, then death was something that represented the greatest suffering.

[ 32 ] How must those who looked at earthly events from outside, that is, who saw how these earthly events were reflected in humanity before the coming of Christ, how must they have thought about death? When he descended from divine-spiritual heights as a higher being with different views from those of humans, when he looked down upon humanity, he had to say what Buddha said.

[ 33 ] This Buddha had come from a royal palace where he had been educated. There he had seen nothing but things that elevated life. But now, when he stepped out, he saw a suffering human being, he saw a sick human being, but above all he saw a dead human being. When he experienced this, the sentence came before his eyes: “Sickness is suffering! Old age is suffering! Death is suffering!” This was indeed how humanity felt. And what all of humanity felt was wrung from Buddha's great soul.

[ 34 ] Then came Christ. And after Christ, after another six hundred years had passed, as six hundred years had passed from Buddha to Christ, there were people who could say, when they saw the cross and the dead man on it: What hangs on the cross is the symbol of that seed from which life springs forth life after life! They had learned to feel truly about death!

[ 35 ] Christ Jesus married death, went to this death, which became the characteristic expression of the Father, and united himself with this death. And from the marriage of Christ Jesus with death, the beginning of a sun of life is offered. It is a mirage, a Maya or illusion, that death is synonymous with suffering. Death, if people in the future learn to let it approach them as it approached Christ, is in truth the seed of life. And people will contribute to a new sun and a new planetary system in proportion to the extent that, receiving the Christ impulse, they give of themselves and thus make the sun of life greater and greater.

[ 36 ] Someone might object: That is what spiritual science says! But what do you want with such a cosmology in relation to the Gospel?

[ 37 ] Christ taught those who were his disciples. And in order to make them ready for the greatest thing, he followed the method necessary for learning to understand the greatest thing in the appropriate way: he spoke to his disciples in parables or, as it is translated in the German Bible, in “proverbs” — in allegories and similes. Then the time came when the disciples had become more and more mature, and when they felt ready to hear the truth without proverbs. And Christ Jesus allowed the time to come when he wanted to speak to his apostles without proverbs, without parables. For the apostles wanted to hear the name for which he had come into the world; they wanted to hear the important name:

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be complete.

I have spoken these things to you in proverbs. But the time is coming when I will no longer speak to you in proverbs, but will tell you plainly about my Father.”

[ 38 ] Do we feel the moment approaching when he wants to speak to his disciples about the Father?

“On that day you will ask in my name. And I do not say to you that I will ask the Father for you.

For he himself, the Father, loves you, because you love me and believe that I came from God.

I came from the Father.”

[ 39 ] He naturally came forth from the Father in His true form, and not in the deceptive form of the Father.

“I came from the Father and entered the world; now I have left the world and am going to the Father.”

[ 40 ] Now it dawns on the disciples, because they have matured, that the world around them is the outer expression of the Father, and that what is most significant in the outer world—where the outer world is most Maya or illusion—is the expression of the Father: that death is the name for the Father. This dawns on the disciples. But one must read it correctly.

His disciples said to him, “See, now you speak plainly and do not speak in parables.

Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you; therefore we believe that you came from God.”

Jesus answered them, ”Now you believe.

Behold, the hour is coming, and now is come, that ye shall be scattered, every one to his own, and shall leave me alone. But I am not alone, because I have the Father with me.

These things have I spoken unto you, that ye might have peace. In the world ye will have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” (16:24-33)

[ 41 ] Did the disciples know where he was going? Yes, they knew from now on that he was going to his death, that he was marrying death. And now read what he said to them after they had come to understand the words: “I have come from death,” that is, from death in its true form, from the Father of life, “and I have come into the world; again I leave the world and go to the Father.” Then his disciples said:

“Now we know that you know all things, and have no need for anyone to question you; therefore we believe that you came from God.”

[ 42 ] Now the disciples knew that the true form of death is found in the divine Father-Spirit, that death, as it is viewed by humans and felt by them, is a deceptive appearance, an error. Thus Christ reveals to his disciples the name of death, behind which lies the source of the highest life. The new sun of life would never have come into being if death had not come into the world and allowed itself to be overcome by Christ. Thus, when viewed in its true form, death is the Father. And Christ came into the world because a false reflection arose from this Father in death. And Christ came into the world to create the true form, a true image of the living Father God. The Son is the descendant of the Father, who reveals the true form of the Father. Truly, the Father sent his Son into the world so that the true nature of the Father might be revealed, that is, the eternal life hidden behind temporal death.

[ 43 ] This is not merely the cosmology of spiritual science. It is what is needed to exhaust the whole, full depth of the Gospel of John. And the one who wrote the Gospel of John has thereby laid down the highest truths, as it were, and has been able to say: Herein are truths from which humanity will be able to draw sustenance for all eternity. And as humanity learns to understand and practice these truths more and more, it will have a new wisdom and grow into the spiritual world in a new way. But this will only happen gradually. Therefore, the overall leadership of Christian development had to provide the possibility of creating, so to speak, supplementary books to accompany the Gospel of John, books that were not intended only for the most willing understanders, like the Gospel of John, which was meant to be Christ's legacy for eternity, but supplementary books had to be created for the times to come.

[ 44 ] First, a book was created from which the first centuries of Christian development could learn, in a manner appropriate to their understanding, the best they needed for understanding the Christ event. Of course, in relation to the whole of humanity, there were only a few who understood from this supplementary book what it was about for them. This first supplementary book, which was given not for the most select, but for the elect, was the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel of Mark has precisely that structure—and we will come back to this—which made it particularly accessible to a certain understanding of the time.

[ 45 ] Then came a time when people gradually began to understand the Gospel of Mark less and less, when human understanding was directed in such a way that it was best understood to see the whole power of Christ in the inner value for the human soul and in a certain contempt for the outer physical world. A time came when people were inclined to say: External temporal goods are worthless; true wealth lies only in the developed, more human inner life. That was the time when, for example, Johannes Tauler wrote his book “On the Poor Life of Christ,” in which the Gospel of Luke was particularly well understood. Luke, a disciple of Paul, is one of those who reshaped Paul's Gospel in a way that was appropriate for that period, so that it placed above all else the “poor life” of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born in a stable among poor shepherds. Here we see the “poor life of Christ” of John Tauler depicted in the Gospel of Luke—a second companion book for the further development of humanity.

[ 46 ] In our time, there will again be some people who will learn what they can understand, in accordance with our time, best from the Gospel of Matthew. It will come about that our time, even if it perhaps chooses the name “Matthew” less, will nevertheless choose more and more that which corresponds most to the Gospel of Matthew. A time will come when it will be pointed out more and more that nothing can be understood of the supersensible events that took place at the baptism of John, as we have recounted them. This is something that still lies in the future for many people. We are living in a time when those who accepted Christ in the thirtieth year of their lives will increasingly be made into the “simple man from Nazareth,” even by religious scholars. People who want this, for whom the simple man from Nazareth is the most important thing, who value the lesser Christ than the highly initiated Jesus of Nazareth, will find the Gospel of Matthew particularly important, at least in its meaning. A materialistic age may say: When we open the Gospel of Matthew, we find a genealogical register, a family tree showing us the ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth, going back from Abraham through three times fourteen generations to Joseph. And as it says: Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and so on, down to Joseph and Jesus of Nazareth. And this is stated for the purpose of making it clear that the physical lineage, the physical line of inheritance of the body into which Jesus of Nazareth was born according to his individuality, can be traced back to Abraham. If you leave Joseph out, this family tree has no meaning whatsoever. If you talk about a supernatural birth in relation to this family tree, then it ceases to have any meaning whatsoever. For why would the writer of the Gospel of Matthew bother to draw a family tree with three times fourteen members if he wanted to say afterwards: Jesus of Nazareth is not descended from Joseph in the physical, in the flesh! The Gospel of Matthew can only be understood by emphasizing that individuality was born into a body that was truly descended from Joseph of Abraham. That was the intention behind this genealogical table: No, Joseph cannot be omitted in the sense of the Gospel of Matthew! — Therefore, Joseph cannot be omitted by those who cannot understand the supersensible birth in the sense of John's baptism.

[ 47 ] But the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in a community where the main value was not placed on Christ, but on the individuality that stood before the world in the person of the initiated Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Matthew is based on what the Ebionite Gnostics knew as the initiation document, and the Gospel of Matthew goes back to such a writing as its model. There, the value was placed on the initiated Jesus of Nazareth, and everything else becomes even clearer from the fact that it is found in the Ebionite Gospel. But this gives the Gospel of Matthew a mood that you don't have to read into it—because it's not really there—but you can read it into it, you can read the Gospel of Matthew in such a way that you say: We're not dealing with a supernatural birth here. And yet, again, it will be possible to find in what is presented in the Gospel of Matthew a symbol for a God who is called that, who as a God is actually only a human being, even if Matthew does not mean it that way. But those who refer to Matthew today and will refer to him more and more will interpret it that way.

[ 48 ] So that no one who wants to approach Christ loses the opportunity to do so, provision has also been made for those who cannot rise from Jesus to Christ, so that they have in the Gospel of Matthew one of the rungs through which they can develop upward to Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 49 ] Spiritual research, however, is called upon to lead people up to an understanding of the Gospel of the Gospels, to the Gospel of John. Every other Gospel is to be regarded as a supplement to the Gospel of John. And the reasons for all the other Gospels lie in the Gospel of John. We therefore understand the other Gospels all the better when we consider them against the background of the Gospel of John.

[ 50 ] Contemplating the Gospel of John will lead people to understand in the broadest sense what happened at Golgotha; to understand through what mystery death has been refuted within human evolution in its false form. And people will learn to understand how the deed at Golgotha not only showed that death is in truth the source of life, but also how it was brought about that human beings could attain a position in relation to death that leads them to shape their own being more and more alive, until it finally becomes completely alive, that is, can rise from all death—until it has overcome death. This was what was revealed to Paul when he saw the living Christ before Damascus, when he knew: Christ lives! — when he looked through his clairvoyant eye into what was the spiritual environment of the earth, and now, as an initiate of the Old Testament, knew: Before, the earth was without a certain light. Now I see the light within it. So Christ was there, so the one who died on the cross was Christ in Jesus of Nazareth!

[ 51 ] Thus Paul before Damascus was able to comprehend the event that had taken place on Golgotha.