The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] When we met here some time ago, we were able to discuss the deeper currents of Christianity from the point of view of the Gospel of John. And at that time, those powerful images and ideas that a person can gain by delving into this unique document of humanity, namely the Gospel of John, came to our spiritual mind's eye. On various occasions, we had to emphasize how the deepest depths of Christianity come to light when one reflects on the basis of this document. And today, some of the listeners from that time or from another cycle on the Gospel of John might well wonder: Is it possible to somehow expand or deepen the points of view, which in some respects really must be described as the deepest, and which can be gained from the perspective of the Gospel of John can gain from it, is it possible to somehow expand or deepen these perspectives by considering the other Christian documents, for example the three other Gospels, by considering the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Mark? And those who, one might say, love theoretical comfort will ask themselves: Is it necessary at all, now that we have become aware of how the deepest depths of Christian truths confront us from the Gospel of John , is it at all necessary to discuss the essence of Christianity on the basis of the other Gospels, especially from the point of view of the – as one could easily believe – less profound Gospel of Luke?

[ 2 ] Anyone who would ask such a question and believe that they have said anything essential from such a point of view would be succumbing to a very significant misunderstanding. Not only is Christianity as such immeasurable in its essence and can be illuminated from the most diverse points of view, but the other is also true – and this series of lectures in particular is intended to prove this: although the Gospel of John is such an infinitely profound document, one can still learn things from the study of the Gospel of Luke, for example, that cannot be learned from the Gospel of John. What we became accustomed to in the Gospel of John cycle of lectures, namely to name the deep ideas of Christianity, is by no means Christianity in its full depth; rather, there is a way to penetrate the depths of Christianity from a different starting point. And this other starting point is to be gained by placing the Gospel of Luke at the center of our considerations from an anthroposophical, spiritual-scientific point of view.

[ 3 ] Let us imagine that there is something to be gained from the Gospel of Luke, even after we have exhausted the depths of the Gospel of John. We must start from what we encounter when we look at every line of the Gospel of John: that documents such as the Gospels present themselves, especially to the anthroposophical observer, as documents documents written by people who have looked more deeply into the essence of life and the essence of existence, who, as initiates and clairvoyants, have looked into the depths of the world. When we speak in general terms, we can use the terms “initiate” and “clairvoyant” as synonyms. But if we now want to penetrate to deeper layers of spiritual life in the course of our anthroposophical observations, then we must distinguish between the clairvoyant and the initiate, which we initially rightly did not. We must distinguish them as two categories of people who have found their way into the supersensible realms of existence. In a certain respect there is a difference between an initiate and a clairvoyant, although there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to prevent the initiate from being at the same time a clairvoyant and the clairvoyant from being to some extent an initiate. If you want to distinguish precisely between these two categories of people, the initiate and the clairvoyant, then you must remember the descriptions given in my discussion of “How to Know Higher Worlds”. You must remember that there are essentially three stages leading beyond the ordinary observation of the world.

[ 4 ] The knowledge that is initially accessible to man can be characterized in such a way that man looks at the world through the senses and through the mind and the other soul powers, makes what he has seen his own. Beyond that, there are three other levels of knowing the world. The first is the so-called imaginative knowledge, the second stage is the inspired knowledge, and the third stage is the intuitive knowledge, if we understand the word intuitive in its true, spiritual-scientific sense.

[ 5 ] Who then possesses imaginative knowledge? He, before whose spiritual eye what lies behind the world of sense unfolds in pictures, in a mighty tableau of pictures, which are, however, not at all similar to what are called pictures in ordinary life. Apart from the difference that there is no such thing as what we call the laws of three-dimensional space for these images of imaginative knowledge, there are also other peculiarities of these imaginative images that cannot easily be compared with anything in the ordinary sense world.

[ 6 ] We can arrive at an idea of the imaginative world if we imagine a plant standing before us, and we would be able to extract everything that the sense of sight perceives as color from the plant, so that it floats freely in the air. If we were to do nothing but extract the color from the plant and let it float freely in front of us, we would have a dead color form before us. But for the clairvoyant person, this color form is by no means a dead color image. Rather, when he draws out what is in things, color, from the things, then, through his preparations and exercises, this color image begins to be enlivened by the spiritual, just as as it was animated in the sensual world by the material of the plants; and then the person does not have a dead color shape in front of him, but rather, freely floating, colored light, shimmering and sparkling in the most diverse ways, but inwardly animated. So that each color is the expression of the peculiarity of a spiritual-soul entity that is not perceptible in the sensory world; that is, the color in the sensory plant begins to express itself to the clairvoyant as a soul-spiritual entity.

[ 7 ] Now imagine a world filled with such multifariously reflecting color forms, endlessly changing and transforming, but not limited to the colorful, as in a painting of shimmering color reflections. Rather, imagine imagine all this as an expression of spiritual and soul-like entities, so that you say to yourself: when a green color image flashes here, it is an expression for me of an understanding being behind it; or when a light reddish color image flashes, it is an expression for me of something that is a passionate being. Now imagine this whole sea of interplaying colors – I could just as easily take another example and say: a sea of interplaying sound sensations or smell or taste, for these are all expressions of underlying spiritual and soul entities – then you have what is called the imaginative world. It is not something for which the word imagination is used in ordinary language, but it is a real world. It is a different kind of perception from the sensory one.

[ 8 ] Within this imaginative world, people encounter everything that lies behind the sensory world and that they do not perceive with their “sensual senses”, if we want to use the expression, for example, the human etheric body, the human astral body. So when a clairvoyant person gets to know the world through this imaginative knowledge, they get to know higher beings from their outside, so to speak, just as you get to know them from their sensual outside when you walk on the street and people walk past you. You get to know them better when you have the opportunity to talk to them. Then, through their words, they express something else to you than what you see when you just meet them on the street and look at them. With some people, when you pass by, to say the least, you cannot see whether there is inner pain or joy in their soul, whether sorrow or delight glows in their soul. But you can learn all this when you talk to a person. One time he announces himself to you through what you can see without his intervention, his exterior, the other time he speaks to you himself. So it is also with the beings of the supersensible world.

[ 9 ] A clairvoyant who gets to know the beings of the supersensible world through imaginative knowledge only gets to know the spiritual-soul exterior, as it were. But he hears them express themselves when he rises from imaginative knowledge to knowledge through inspiration. Then there is really a real communication with these entities. From their own being they tell him what they are and who they are. Therefore inspiration is a higher level of knowledge than mere imagination, and one experiences more about the beings of the spiritual-soul world when one ascends to inspiration than one can gain through imaginative knowledge.

[ 10 ] A still higher level of knowledge is then intuition, provided that one does not use the word intuition as in common parlance, where everything unclear that comes to mind is called intuition, but if one takes the term intuition in the truly spiritual sense. In this case, intuition is a form of realization in which one can not only listen spiritually to what the entities communicate out of themselves, but where one becomes one with these entities, where one immerses oneself in one's own entity. This is a high level of spiritual knowledge. For it requires that the person first carries out that development of love for all entities within himself, where he no longer makes any distinction between himself and the other entities in the spiritual environment, where he has, so to speak, poured out his being into the whole spiritual environment, where he is therefore really no longer outside the entities that communicate with him spiritually, but where he is within these entities, standing in them. And because this can only be in relation to a spiritual-divine world, the expression intuition, which means 'to stand in God', is fully justified. — So these three stages of knowledge of the supersensible world appear to us: imagination, inspiration and intuition.

[ 11 ] Now, of course, there is the possibility of acquiring these three stages of supersensible knowledge. But it is also possible, for example, to advance only as far as the stage of imagination in any incarnation; then the clairvoyant in question is deprived of those regions of the spiritual world that can only be reached through inspiration and intuition. Then the person is a “clairvoyant” person. — In our time it is not usual to lead people to the higher levels of supersensible knowledge without first letting them pass through the level of imagination, so that for our present circumstances it can hardly be the case that someone, so to speak, leaves out the level of imagination and is immediately led to the level of inspiration or intuition. What would be by no means the right thing to do today could nevertheless occur, and has occurred, in certain other periods of human development.

[ 12 ] There were times in human development when the stages of supersensible knowledge were, so to speak, distributed among different individuals: imagination on the one hand, and inspiration and intuition on the other. So that there were, for example, mystery centers where people had such an open spiritual eye that they were clairvoyant in the realm of imagination, that the symbolic world of images was accessible to them. The fact that these people, who were so clairvoyant, said to themselves: “For this incarnation I will refrain from reaching the higher levels, inspiration and intuition,” made them able to see clearly and distinctly within the world of the imaginative. They trained themselves, so to speak, to a very high degree to see in this world of the imaginative.

[ 13 ] Now, however, one thing was necessary for them. Those who only want to see in the world of the imaginative and refrain from penetrating into the world of inspiration and intuition live in a certain sense in a world of insecurity. This world of the flooding 'imaginative' is, so to speak, boundless, and if you are left to your own devices, you swim back and forth with your soul in it without really knowing exactly where you are going. Therefore, in those times and among those peoples in whom certain people renounced the higher levels of knowledge, it was necessary for the clairvoyant, imaginative people to devote themselves entirely to their leaders, to those who had an open mind for inspiration and for intuition. For only inspiration and intuition give certainty for the spiritual world, so that one knows exactly: this is the way, that is the goal. On the other hand, if one lacks inspired knowledge, one cannot say to oneself: this is the way, this is where I must go to reach a goal. So if one cannot say this to oneself, then one must entrust oneself to the knowledgeable guidance of a person who can say it. That is why it is always emphasized in so many places, and rightly so, that the one who first ascends to imaginative knowledge must closely join the guru, the guide who gives him direction and goal in relation to what he cannot give himself.

[ 14 ] On the other hand, however, it was also useful at certain times – today this is no longer done – to let other people leapfrog imaginative knowledge in a way and lead them straight up to inspired knowledge or, if possible, to intuitive knowledge. Such people refrained from seeing the imaginative images of the spiritual world around them; they only surrendered to those impressions from the spiritual world that are outpourings from the inner being of the spiritual entities. They listened with spiritual ears to what the beings of the spiritual world were saying. It is as if you had a wall between you and another person and did not see that person yourself; but you heard him speaking behind the wall. It is quite possible that people renounce looking in the spiritual world, so to speak, in order to be led more quickly to the spiritual listening to the statements of spiritual beings. It does not matter whether someone sees the images of the imaginative world or not, if he is able to hear with spiritual ears what the beings in the supersensible world have to say about themselves, then we say of such a person: he is gifted with the “inner word” —, in contrast to the outer word that we have in the physical world from person to person. Thus we can form the idea that there are also people who, without seeing the imaginative world, have the inner word and can hear the sayings of spiritual beings and communicate them.

[ 15 ] There was a time in the evolution of mankind when these two types of supersensible experience interacted in the adepts in the mysteries. And because each of them refrained from the contemplation of the other, they were able to develop more precisely and clearly what they were capable of, and because that was the case, there was a beautiful, wonderful interaction within the mysteries at certain times. Some were, so to speak, imaginative clairvoyants; they had trained themselves particularly to see the world of images. And some had skipped the world of the imaginative; they had trained themselves particularly to take up the inner word, what is experienced through inspiration, into their soul. And so one could communicate to the other what he had experienced through his particular 'training'. This was possible in times when there was a degree of trust from person to person that is impossible today, simply due to the way the world has developed. Today, no one believes the other person so strongly that they would only listen to what the other person describes as images from the imaginative world and then add what they themselves know from inspiration, faithfully believing that the other person's descriptions are correct. Today, everyone wants to see for themselves. This is the legitimate way of our time. Very few people today would be satisfied with a one-sided training of the imagination, as was common in certain periods. Therefore, it is also necessary for the present time that man be led step by step through the three stages of higher knowledge, without omitting one or the other.

[ 16 ] At all levels of supersensible knowledge we encounter the great mysteries that are connected with that event which we call the Christ-event, so that imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge have much, infinitely much to say about this Christ-event.

[ 17 ] If we now turn our gaze back to the four gospels from this point of view, we may say that the Gospel of John is written from the standpoint of one who was initiated, who stood within the secrets of the world, and who had attained intuition. He describes the Christ event for the beholding of the supersensible world, and for the attainment of intuition. But anyone who takes a close look at the peculiarities of the Gospel of John will have to admit, as we shall see in this lecture cycle, that everything that comes to us particularly clearly in the Gospel of John is said from the standpoint of inspiration and intuition, and that everything that arises from images of the imagination, on the other hand, pales and is unclear. Thus we may call the author of the Gospel of John – leaving aside what he has nevertheless taken in from the imagination – we may call him the messenger of everything concerning the Christ event that arises for the one who has the inner word, all the way up to intuition. That is why the writer of the Gospel of John essentially characterizes the secrets of the Christ-realm as being endowed with the inner word or the Logos. The Gospel of John is based on inspired intuitive knowledge.

[ 18 ] The situation is different with the other three gospels. And none of the other gospel writers has expressed what he actually has to say as clearly as the writer of the Gospel of Luke.

[ 19 ] A short, strange preface precedes the Gospel of Luke, a preface that roughly says that many people before the writer of the Gospel of Luke had already set about collecting and presenting all kinds of stories that were in circulation about the events of Palestine Palestine, and that, in order to do this more accurately and orderly, the writer of the Gospel of Luke now undertakes to present what – and now come the significant words – those who from the beginning – the usual translation is now – were “eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:1-2) know how to communicate. So the author of the Gospel of Luke wants to communicate what those who were eyewitnesses – or, better, “self-seers” – and servants of the word had to say. In the sense of the Gospel of Luke, “self-seers” are those people who have imaginative knowledge, who can penetrate into the world of images and perceive the Christ event there, who are specially trained to see through such imaginations, self-seers who see exactly and clearly – the writer of the Gospel of Luke bases his messages on them – and who were also “servants of the word”. A meaningful word! He does not say “owner” of the word, because that would be people who have full inspired knowledge, but “servants” of the word, that is, servants of those who do not have the imaginations available to them to the same extent as they do through their self-vision, but who have the revelations of the inspired world available to them. They, the servants, are told what the inspired perceives; they can proclaim it because their inspired teachers have told them. They are servants, not owners of the word.

[ 20 ] Thus the Gospel of Luke goes back to the messages of those who are self-seeing, self-experiencing in the imaginative worlds, who have learned to express what they see in the imaginative world by the means that the inspired person has, who have thus made themselves servants of the word.

[ 21 ] Again, we have an example here of how precisely the Gospels are spoken and how we must understand the words exactly literally. Everything is exact and precise in such documents written on the basis of spiritual science, and modern man often has no idea of the exactness with which the words in these documents are chosen.

[ 22 ] But now we must remind you – as we always do when we are considering these matters from an anthroposophical point of view – that the Gospels are not in the proper sense the sources of knowledge for spiritual science. The fact that something is written in the Gospels does not make it a truth for someone who stands strictly on the ground of spiritual science. The spiritual scientist does not draw from written documents, but from what spiritual scientific research itself yields in his time. What the beings of the spiritual world have to say to the initiate and the clairvoyant in our time are the sources for actual spiritual science, for the initiates and for the clairvoyants. And these sources are in some respects the same in our time as they were in the times I have just described to you. Therefore, even today, those who have insight into the imaginative world can be called clairvoyant, and only those who can rise to the level of inspiration and intuition can be called initiates. Thus, in these times, the expression 'clairvoyant' does not need to coincide with that of 'initiate'.

[ 23 ] What we find in the Gospel of John could only be based on the research of the initiate who was able to ascend to inspired and intuitive knowledge. What we encounter in the other gospels could be based on communications from imaginative, clairvoyant people who were not yet able to ascend into the inspired and intuitive world themselves. Thus, if we strictly adhere to the present-day difference, the Gospel of John is based on initiation; the three other Gospels, preferably the Gospel of Luke, even according to the writer himself, on clairvoyance. And because it is based particularly on clairvoyance, because everything that the most trained clairvoyant is able to see is called upon to help, we are offered a precise picture of what can only be presented to us in faded images in the Gospel of John. To emphasize the difference even more precisely, I would like to say the following.

[ 24 ] Assume – although this is hardly the case today – that a person is initiated, so that the world of inspiration and intuition is open to him, but that he is not clairvoyant, that he cannot recognize the imaginative world. Such a man would meet another man who is perhaps not at all initiated, but to whom the imaginative world is open through some circumstances, so that he can see the whole field of imaginations. A man of the latter kind could communicate to the former a great deal that the former does not see, which the former can perhaps only explain out of inspiration, but which he cannot see himself because he lacks clairvoyance. People who are clairvoyant without being initiated are very numerous today; the opposite is hardly the case today. Nevertheless, it could be that some initiated person has the gift of clairvoyance but, for some reason or other, cannot see the imaginations in a particular case. Then a clairvoyant person could tell him much that is still unknown to him.

[ 25 ] It must always be strictly emphasized that anthroposophy or spiritual science is not based on anything other than the sources of the initiates, that neither the Gospel of John nor the other Gospels are sources of their knowledge. What can be investigated today without an historical document is the source for anthroposophical knowledge. But then we approach the documents and compare what spiritual research can find today with the documents. What spiritual research can find today without a document about the Christ event — can find every hour — we find again in the most magnificent way in the Gospel of John. And that is why it is such a valuable writing, because it shows us that at the time it was written, there was someone who wrote as someone today who is initiated into the spiritual world can write. The same voice, so to speak, that can be perceived today comes to us from the depths of the centuries.

[ 26 ] A similar situation applies to the other Gospels and also to the Gospel of Luke. Not the pictures that the writer of the Gospel of Luke describes to us are the sources of knowledge of the higher worlds for us, but the source for us is what the elevation into the supersensible world itself gives us. And when we speak of the Christ event, then for us the source is also that great tableau of images and imaginations that arise for us when we fix our gaze on what stands at the beginning of our era. And what presents itself to us, we compare with the images and imaginations that are described to us in the Gospel of Luke. And this cycle of lectures should show us how the imaginative pictures that today's man gains differ from the descriptions that confront us in the Gospel of Luke.

[ 27 ] It is true that for spiritual research, when it extends to the events of the past, there is only one source. This source does not lie in external documents. Not stones that we dig out of the earth, not documents kept in archives, not what historians have written, whether inspired or not, are the source of spiritual science. What we are able to read in the imperishable chronicle, in the Akasha Chronicle, that is the source for spiritual research. It gives us the opportunity to recognize what has happened without external records.

[ 28 ] Thus, today's man can choose two ways to obtain knowledge from the past. He can take the external documents if he wants to learn about the external events, the historical records, or, if he wants to learn about spiritual conditions, the religious records. Or he can ask: What do those people have to say who have opened that imperishable chronicle for themselves, which we call the Akasha Chronicle, that great tableau in which everything that has ever happened in the development of the world, the earth and mankind is recorded in imperishable writing?

[ 29 ] The human being who rises into the supersensible worlds gradually learns to read this chronicle. This is no ordinary writing. Imagine the course of events as they have unfolded, standing before your spiritual eye. Imagine Emperor Augustus with all his deeds standing before your eyes as if in a fog image. Everything that happened at that time is there in your mind's eye. This is how it appears to the spiritual researcher, and he can experience it anew every hour. He needs no external evidence. He need only fix his gaze on a particular point in world or human history, and the events that have occurred will present themselves to him in a spiritual image. In this way, the spiritual gaze can roam through the times of the past. What it beholds there is recorded as the result of spiritual research.

[ 30 ] What happened in the times at the beginning of our era? What happened there can be seen through the spiritual gaze and compared with what, for example, the Gospel of Luke tells us. Then the spiritual researcher realizes that there were indeed spiritual seers at that time who also saw what was in the past; and we can compare how what they can communicate to us as their present relates to what can be seen by looking back into the Akasha Chronicle of that time.

[ 31 ] We must always bear in mind that we are not drawing from the records, but that we are drawing from spiritual research itself, and that we are seeking out in the records that which is drawn from spiritual research. This gives the documents added value, and we can decide for ourselves on the truth of what is written in them based on our own research. This means that they grow in our estimation as an expression of truth, because we can recognize truth for ourselves. One should not speak of such a thing as it has just been described without also pointing out that reading the Akashic Records is not as easy as observing events in the physical world. I would like to give you a specific example to illustrate where, for example, certain difficulties lie when reading the Akasha Chronicle. I would like to illustrate it to you in the human being himself.

[ 32 ] We know from elementary anthroposophy that the human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. The moment you stop observing the human being only on the physical plane and start ascending into the spiritual world is when the difficulties begin. When you have a person in front of you physically, you have a unity in front of you; you have their physical body, their etheric body, their astral body and their I. If you observe the person during the waking hours, you have all of this in one unity in front of you. The moment you do not observe the human being during the waking hours of the day, but instead you have to ascend into the higher worlds in order to observe him, the moment this ascent becomes a necessity, that is when the difficulties begin. If, for example, we ascend into the world of imagination at night in order to see the astral body – because it is outside the physical body – then we have divided the human being into two separate parts.

[ 33 ] What I am about to describe will rarely occur, because observing the human being is still relatively easy; but it will give you an idea of the difficulties. Imagine someone entering a room where a number of people are sleeping. If he has the ability of clairvoyance, he will see the physical bodies and the etheric bodies lying in the beds. But this world of the astral is a world of continuity. Up there in the astral world, the astral bodies are running through each other. And even if it is not easy for the trained clairvoyant, it could still happen that when he looks at a whole group of people sleeping, he can easily mix up which astral body belongs to a physical body down there. I said it does not easily happen that this occurs because this seeing belongs relatively to the lowest degrees and because the person who comes to it is well prepared as one has to differentiate in such a case. But when one does not observe people in the higher worlds, but other spiritual entities, then the difficulties begin to be quite great. Yes, they are quite great for man when he is not regarded as a present man, but in his whole being, as he passes through the incarnations.

[ 34 ] If you look at a person who is living now and ask yourself: Where was this person's self in the previous incarnation? then you have to go through the devachanic world to his previous incarnation. You have to be able to determine which self always belonged to the previous incarnations of this particular person. To do that, you have to be able to hold together in a complicated way the continuous ego and the various stages here on earth. It is very easy to make a mistake and to commit an error when searching for the whereabouts of an ego in previous bodies. When one ascends into the higher worlds, it is not so easy to hold together everything that belongs to a person, to a personality, with what is recorded in the Akasha Chronicle as his previous incarnations.

[ 35 ] Now suppose someone set themselves the following task. They have a person in front of them, let's say John Doe. They, as a clairvoyant or initiated person, asks: what are the physical ancestors of this John Doe? Let us assume that all physical records have been lost, so one could only rely on the Akashic Records. He would have to find the physical ancestors, and then he would have to determine the father, mother, grandfather and so on from the Akashic Records to see how the physical body has developed in the physical line of descent. But then the question could arise: what were the earlier incarnations of this human being? Here he must take a completely different path to that which he takes to arrive at the physical ancestors of the human being. He will perhaps have to go back many, many times if he wants to arrive at the earlier incarnations of the I. So you have two currents already. The physical body, as it stands before us, is neither a completely new creature, because it descends from the ancestors in the physical line of inheritance, nor is the I a completely new creature, because it connects to the previous incarnations.

[ 36 ] But what applies to the physical body and to the ego also applies to the intermediate links, the etheric body and the astral body. Most of you will know that the etheric body is not a completely new creature either, but that it too may have gone through some kind of path through the most diverse forms. I have told you how the etheric body of Zarathustra reappeared in the etheric body of Moses — it is the same etheric body. If one were now to examine the physical ancestors of Moses, one would get one line. If one were to examine the ancestors of the etheric body of Moses, one would get another line: this would lead to the etheric body of Zarathustra and to other etheric bodies.

[ 37 ] Just as we have to follow completely different currents for the physical body than for the etheric body, so it is also for the astral body. We can come from every link of human nature into the most diverse currents. Thus we can say: the etheric body is the etheric re-embodiment of an etheric body that was in a completely different individuality, and certainly not in the same one in which the I was previously embodied. And we can say the same for the astral body.

[ 38 ] When we ascend into the higher worlds to examine a person for his former members, the individual currents all go in different directions. One leads us in one direction, the other in another, and we encounter very complicated processes in the spiritual world. If someone now wants to understand a person completely from the point of view of spiritual research, he must not merely describe him as a descendant of his ancestors, not merely as deriving his etheric body from this or that being, or his astral body from this or that being, but he must describe completely how all these four members have made their way until they have now united in this entity. This cannot be done all at once. For example, one can follow the path the etheric body has taken and can come to important conclusions. Another person can then follow the path of the astral body. One person may place more emphasis on the etheric body and the other on the astral body and formulate his descriptions accordingly. For the person who does not observe everything that clairvoyant people say about an entity, it will make no difference whether one person says this or the other that; it will seem to him as if only the same thing is being described. To him, the person who describes only the physical personality will say the same as the one who describes the etheric body; he will always believe that he is describing the essence of Hans Müller.

[ 39 ] All this can now give you a picture of the complexity of the circumstances that confront us when we want to describe the nature of any phenomenon in the world – be it a human or any other entity – from the point of view of clairvoyant, initiated research. What I have said now I had to say; for you see from it that only the most extensive research in the Akasha Chronicle, spreading out in all directions, can clearly bring any entity before our spiritual eyes.

[ 40 ] The entity that stands before us, also in the sense in which the Gospel of John describes it to us, that entity that stands before us with the I – regardless of whether before or after John's baptism, whether we address Jesus of Nazareth before baptism or as the Christ after John's baptism – he stands before us with an ego, with an astral body, with an etheric body and with a physical body. We can only describe her fully from the point of view of the Akasha Chronicle if we follow the paths that these four members of the then Christ Jesus being took through the development of humanity. Only then can we understand her correctly. This is about fully understanding the messages about the Christ event from the point of view of today's spiritual research, where light must be shed on what appears to contradict the four Gospels.

[ 41 ] I have often pointed out why today's purely materialistic research cannot see the high value, the truth value of the Gospel of John: Because it cannot understand that a higher initiate sees differently and more deeply than the others. Between the other three gospels, the synoptic ones, those who do not agree with the Gospel of John try to create a kind of harmony. But if you only take the external material events as a basis, it is difficult to create harmony. For what will be of particular importance for us in tomorrow's lecture, the life of Jesus of Nazareth before John the Baptist, is described to us by two evangelists, by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew and by the writer of the Gospel of Luke; and for an external materialistic point of view, there are differences here that are in no way inferior to the differences that have to be accepted between the three other gospels and the gospel of John. Let us take the facts. The author of the Gospel of Matthew describes how the birth of the creator of Christianity is foretold, how this birth takes place, how magi come from the East who have seen the star, and how the star has led them to the place where the Redeemer is born. He further describes how Herod's attention is drawn to this and that, in order to escape Herod's measure, which consists in the Betlehemite infanticide, the parents of the Redeemer flee to Egypt with the child. When Herod is dead, Joseph, the father of Jesus, is informed that he can return, and he does not return to Bethlehem for fear of Herod's successor, but goes to Nazareth. —Today I will refrain from the Baptist's announcement. But I would like to point out that if we compare the Gospel of Luke with the Gospel of Matthew, the preannouncement of Jesus of Nazareth takes place quite differently in the two gospels: one time it happens to Joseph, the other time to Mary. We then see from the Gospel of Luke how the parents of Jesus of Nazareth originally live in Nazareth and then go to Bethlehem on one occasion, namely for the census. While they are there, Jesus is born. Then, after eight days, the circumcision takes place – nothing of a flight to Egypt –; and after some time, which is not long afterwards, the child is presented at the temple. We see that the sacrifice is offered, which is customary, and that after that the parents return to Nazareth with the child and live there. And then we are told a remarkable story, the story of how Jesus, who is twelve years old, stays behind in the temple during a visit by his parents to Jerusalem, how they search for him, how they then find him again in the temple among those who are interpreting the scriptures, how he approaches them as one who is knowledgeable in the interpretation of scriptures, how he appears to be understanding and wise among the scribes. Then it is told how they take the child home again, how he grows up; and we hear nothing more special about him until John the Baptist is baptized.

[ 42 ] Then we have two stories of Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ is taken up. Anyone who wants to combine them must, above all, ask themselves how they can reconcile the story that immediately after Jesus' birth, his parents, Joseph and Mary, are caused to flee with the child to Egypt, and then return, with the story told in Luke of Jesus' presentation at the temple, according to the ordinary materialistic view.

[ 43 ] There we shall see that what appears to us to be a complete contradiction for the physical view will, in the light of spiritual research, present itself to us as truth. Both are true, despite being presented as an apparent contradiction in the physical world. The three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, should force people to a spiritual understanding of the facts of human events. For people should realize that one achieves nothing if one does not reflect on such documents in the face of apparent contradictions or if one speaks of “poems” where one cannot get through to realities.

[ 44 ] So this time in particular, we will have the opportunity to talk about what the Gospel of John has not given us any reason to talk about in detail, namely the events that took place before John's baptism, before the Christ-being entered the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. And many important riddles about the essence of Christianity will be solved for us precisely by hearing – researched from the Akasha Chronicle – what the nature of Jesus of Nazareth was like before the Christ took his three bodies.

[ 45 ] Tomorrow we will begin to examine the nature and life of Jesus of Nazareth from the Akasha Chronicle, and then ask ourselves: How does what we can know from this source about the true essence of Jesus of Nazareth, compared to what is described in the Gospel of Luke as coming from those who at that time were “self-seers” or “servants of the word,” of the Logos?