The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] It will be relatively easy for us to understand the details of Luke's Gospel if we have first done the necessary preparatory work so that the beings and individuals in question stand before us, as it were, alive, so that we know who we are actually dealing with. Therefore, do not be discouraged if we have a lot of “background information.” First, we must get to know the great figure who stands at the center of the Gospels in all his complex being, as well as a few other things without which we would never be able to grasp what then appears to us in all its simplicity in the Gospel of Luke.

[ 2 ] We must first recall something we discussed in the last few days: the great significance of that unique being whom we call the Buddha, and of whom we could say that in the fifth to sixth century before our era, he rose from bodhisattva to Buddha. We have characterized what this meant for humanity, and we want to bring this once again clearly before our minds.

[ 3 ] The content of the Buddha's teaching had to be handed over to humanity as its property, so to speak. If we were to go back beyond the age of the Buddha, we would have to say of all previous epochs of humanity: In those times, there could not have been a single human being on earth who could have found this teaching of compassion and love, expressed in the eightfold path, out of themselves. Human development had not yet progressed to the point where any soul could have found these truths through immersion in its own thinking and feeling. Everything first comes into being in the world, everything first arises, and for everything that is to arise, the causes must be given. How, for example, could people in earlier times follow the principles of the eightfold path? They could only do so because they were handed down to them in a certain way, because they were instilled in them from the occult schools of the initiates and seers. Within the mysteries, within the occult schools of seers, the Bodhisattva taught precisely because in such schools it was possible to rise up to the higher worlds and receive that which could not yet be given to the outer human mind, to the outer human soul. But in those ancient times, this had to be instilled in the rest of humanity, so to speak, by those who were able to partake of the grace and come into direct contact with the teachers in the occult schools. Without people being able to arrive at the principles themselves, their lives had to be influenced in such a way that they unfolded in accordance with these principles. Those people who lived outside the mysteries thus followed, in a certain unconscious way, what was given to them, also unconsciously, by those who were able to give it to them from the occult schools. There was no human body on earth that could have been organized in such a way that, even if all that was spiritual had entered into it, the human being could have found the content of the eightfold path out of himself. This had to be a revelation from above, conveyed through the appropriate channels. But it follows from this that a being such as the Bodhisattva was not at all capable of making full use of a human body before the age of Buddha. He could not find a body on earth in which he could embody all the abilities through which he was to work on human beings. There was no such human body. — What was necessary, then? How did such a Bodhisattva incarnate? We must ask ourselves this question.

[ 4 ] He did not fully embody what he was as a spiritual being. If one had looked at such a body, which was animated by a Bodhisattva, with clairvoyant vision, one would have seen that it only partially enclosed the essence of a Bodhisattva, which extended far beyond the human shell as an etheric body and in this way was connected with the spiritual realm, which it never completely left. Thus, the Bodhisattva never completely left the spiritual world. He lived at the same time in a spiritual body and in a physical body. This was now the transition from Bodhisattva to Buddha, that for the first time such a body existed into which the Bodhisattva could, so to speak, enter completely and develop his abilities within this body. In this way, he had established the human form that human beings must strive to attain in order to become like him, so that they too can find the teaching of the eightfold path from within themselves, just as the Bodhisattva found it from within himself under the Bodhi tree. If one were to examine the essence that was embodied in the Buddha in his previous incarnations, one would have to say: It was such that it had to remain partly in the spiritual world and could send only part of its essence into the body. Only now, in the fifth to sixth century before our era, did the first human organization exist into which the Bodhisattva could enter completely and thus set the example that humanity itself could find the eightfold path out of the moral disposition of the soul.

[ 5 ] All religions and worldviews were aware of this phenomenon, that there were human beings who were partly in the spiritual world. They knew that there were beings for whom human existence was too narrow to accommodate the full individuality of beings who had to work on earth. Within the Near Eastern worldview, this kind of connection between the higher individualities of such beings and a physical body was called being filled with the Holy Spirit. This is a very specific technical term. And in the usage of the languages of the Near East, one would have said of such a being as a Bodhisattva incarnated on earth that it was “filled with the Holy Spirit,” meaning that the forces that constitute such a being are not entirely within that being; something spiritual must be working on it from outside. One could therefore also say that the Buddha was filled with the Holy Spirit in his previous incarnations.

[ 6 ] Once we have understood this, we will also be able to understand what we read at the beginning of Luke's Gospel and what we touched upon yesterday. We know that in the etheric body of the one Jesus child, the physically descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David, there lived the part of the etheric body that had remained untouched, which had been taken from humanity at the event known as the Fall, so that, as it were, the etheric substance that had been taken out of Adam before the Fall was preserved and poured into this child. It had to be so, in order that there might be such a young being, untouched by all the experiences of earth's evolution, who could absorb everything he was to absorb. Could an ordinary human being, who had undergone incarnations since the Lemurian epoch, have absorbed the overshadowing by the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha? Never! And even less would he have been able to absorb what was later to enter into him. A human body of such a refined nature had to come into being, and this could only happen through the etheric substance of Adam, untouched by all earthly experiences, being poured into the etheric body of this particular child Jesus. But this also meant that this etheric substance was connected with all the forces that had worked on earthly development before the Fall, and which therefore now had a tremendous power in this child. This made possible what we touched upon yesterday: the remarkable influence that the mother of the Nathanic Jesus exerted on the mother of John the Baptist and also on John himself before he was born.

[ 7 ] To understand this, we must realize what kind of being we are dealing with in John the Baptist. We can only understand this beinghood of John if we bring to mind the difference between the peculiar proclamation that flowed down through India through the Buddha — which we have characterized sufficiently for our purpose — and the proclamation that came to the ancient Hebrew people through Moses and his successors, the ancient Hebrew prophets.

[ 8 ] Through Buddha, humanity has received what the soul can find as its own law, what it can establish in order to purify itself and organize itself into a high moral state as can be attained on earth. The law of the soul, Dharma, was proclaimed by Buddha, proclaimed as it can be found by human beings at the highest stage of human nature's development, out of the human soul itself. And Buddha was the one who first brought it out. But human development is not linear. The most diverse cultural currents must fertilize each other.

[ 9 ] What was to take place in the Near East as the Christ event made it necessary for this Near Eastern development to lag behind the Indian development in a certain way, in order to take up later in a fresher way what had been given to the Indian development in a different form. A people had to be created, so to speak, within the Near East, which developed in a completely different way and lagged further behind than the peoples further to the east. Once the peoples of the East had been brought to the point, in the sense of world wisdom, where they could see the Bodhisattva as Buddha, the peoples of the Near East — especially the ancient Hebrew people — had to be left at a childlike, lower stage. This was necessary. For in the great development of humanity, the same thing had to be done that we might observe on a small scale if we had a human being who developed to a certain maturity by the age of twenty; in the process, he has acquired certain abilities, but acquired abilities are, in a certain sense, also a kind of fetter, an obstacle.

[ 10 ] When one has acquired abilities at a certain age, these have the peculiarity of wanting to remain at their level, of wanting to keep the person at that level. They hold him back, and later, at the age of thirty, he cannot easily move beyond the level he acquired at the age of twenty. If, on the other hand, we have a second person who has acquired little by himself in his twenties and now learns these abilities from the other, then the one who has remained childlike longer can more easily advance to this level and then, at the age of thirty, be at a higher level than the former. Anyone who can observe life will find that this is the case. Skills that have been acquired and made one's own, so to speak, also form a shackle for later life, while those that are not so closely linked to one's soul, those that have been acquired more externally, are less of a shackle.

[ 11 ] If humanity wants to advance, then arrangements must always be made to ensure that there is a cultural current that absorbs and processes a certain amount of abilities internally, and another current must run alongside it, so to speak, which is held back somewhat in its development. Then we have a cultural current that develops certain abilities to a corresponding level; these abilities are now intertwined with the innermost essence of this current and human nature. It goes further: something new emerges. But this current would not be able to rise to a higher level on its own. Therefore, arrangements had to be made for another current to run alongside the first. This second current remains undeveloped in a certain sense, and has therefore by no means reached the level of the first. It now progresses further and takes from the other what it has achieved, and because it has remained young in the meantime, it can then rise higher later on. In this way, one has fertilized the other. Thus, spiritual currents must run side by side in human development. And provision must be made through spiritual world guidance to ensure that this is so.

[ 12 ] How could provision be made in spiritual world guidance to ensure that, alongside the current that found expression in the great Buddha, another current runs that only later takes up what Buddhism has brought to humanity? This could only be ensured by withholding from that current, which for us is the ancient Hebrew current, the possibility of producing people who, out of their own moral convictions, would develop Dharma, that is, who would arrive at the eightfold path. This current was not allowed to have a Buddha. What the Buddha brought as the inner essence of his spiritual current had to be given to this other spiritual current from outside. Therefore, in order that the matter should proceed in a particularly wise manner, long before the appearance of the Buddha, the law was not given to the peoples of the Near East internally, but externally through revelation in the Decalogue, in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17). What was to become the inner possession of another human stream was given to the ancient Hebrew people in the Ten Commandments as a sum of external laws, as something received from outside, something not yet integrated into the soul. Therefore, members of the ancient Hebrew people perceive the commandments as something that has been given to them from heaven because of the childlike nature of their stage of development.

[ 13 ] The Indian people had been educated to recognize that human beings generate Dharma, the law of the soul, from within themselves, and the ancient Hebrew people had been educated to obey the law that had been given to them from outside. Thus, the Hebrew people form a wonderful complement to what Zarathustra accomplished for his culture and for all cultures that emerged from it.

[ 14 ] We must emphasize that Zarathustra directed his gaze toward the outside world. While Buddha gave us profound teachings on the refinement of the human inner life, Zarathustra gave us the great and powerful teaching about the cosmos, which is supposed to give us insight into the world from whose womb we have emerged. While Buddha's gaze was directed inward, the gaze of the followers of Zarathustra was directed toward the outside world in order to penetrate it spiritually.

[ 15 ] Let us try to delve into what Zarathustra gave from his first appearance, when he brought the proclamation of Ahura Mazdao, until the next period, when he appeared as Nazarathos. He gave increasingly urgent teachings about the great spiritual laws and the beings of the cosmos. At first, these were only hints that Zarathustra gave to Persian culture about the spirit of the sun; but then he developed them further, and they appear to us as the wonderful Chaldean teaching about the cosmos and the spiritual causes from which we were born, which is so little understood today. If we examine these teachings about the cosmos, they reveal an important peculiarity.

[ 16 ] When Zarathustra still spoke to the ancient Persian people about the external spiritual causes of the sensory world, he presented them with the two powers of Ormuzd and Ahriman or Angramainyu, which work against each other throughout the universe. But what they did not find in this teaching is what we might call the moral warmth that permeates the soul. According to the ancient Persian view, man is, so to speak, woven into the entire cosmic process. It is a matter of Ormuzd and Ahriman working against each other that is discernible in the human soul. Because these two are fighting each other, passions rage in the human soul. What the inner human soul is has not yet been recognized. What has been brought forth is cosmic teaching. When people spoke of good and evil, they meant the excellent, useful, and harmful effects that oppose each other in the cosmos and are also expressed in human beings. The “moral worldview” had not yet been incorporated into this teaching of looking outward. In this teaching, one learned about all the beings that rule the sensory world, everything that rules the world as excellent and light, and everything that rules the world as dark and harmful. One felt entangled in this. But the actual morality in which human beings participate with their souls was not yet felt in the soul as it was later. For example, when one had a person before one who was considered “evil,” one felt that forces were flowing through this person from the evil beings of the world; one felt that he was “possessed” by these evil beings of the world. Nor could one say that he was to blame for this. One felt that human beings were entangled in a world system that was not yet permeated by moral qualities. That was the peculiarity of a teaching that initially directed the gaze outward, even if it was a spiritual gaze.

[ 17 ] That is why the Hebrew teaching is such a wonderful complement to this cosmological teaching, because it transfers into what has been revealed from outside the moral element that made it possible to connect meaning with the concept of guilt, of human culpability. Before the Hebrew element, one could only say of an evil person that he was possessed by evil forces. The proclamation of the Ten Commandments made it necessary to distinguish between people who observed this law and those who did not. The concept of guilt, of human indebtedness, emerges. And how it enters into human development can be felt when one brings something before one's soul where it is clearly shown how people are still unclear about what the concept of guilt actually means, where it becomes tragic that there is a lack of clarity about the concept of guilt. Let the Book of Job sink in, and you will notice the lack of clarity about the concept of guilt, the lack of knowledge about how one should actually behave when misfortune strikes, and you will already find the new concept of guilt dawning in it.

[ 18 ] Thus, as a revelation from outside — like the other revelations about the other realms of nature — morality was given to this ancient Hebrew people. This could only happen because Zarathustra ensured the continuation of his work, as I have told you, by transferring his etheric body to Moses and his astral body to Hermes. This enabled Moses to perceive in the same way as Zarathustra what was at work in the outer world, but now he perceived not only indifferent, neutral forces, but also that which governs the world morally, that which can become a commandment. That is why this ancient Hebrew people lived in such a way that their culture contained what we can call obedience, submission to the law, while the spiritual current of Buddha contained the ideal of finding the direction for human life in the eightfold path.

[ 19 ] But this ancient Hebrew people was also to remain until the right moment, which we are now in the process of characterizing: until the appearance of the Christ principle. It was to be saved, so to speak, through the revelation of the Buddha and preserved in a more immature state of culture, if we may call it that. Therefore, personalities had to be found within the ancient Hebrew people who, as human beings, were not able to take on the full essence of an individuality that had to represent the “law.” No personality could arise within the ancient Hebrew people who would have been like the Buddha. It was only possible to arrive at the law through enlightenment from outside, through Moses having the etheric body of Zarathustra and being able to receive what is not born from one's own soul. It was not possible for the Hebrew people to bring the law into being from their own hearts. But the work of Moses had to be continued, just as every other work must be continued, so that it might bear the right fruit at the right time. Therefore, individuals had to appear among the ancient Hebrew people who appear to us as prophets and seers. And one of the most important of these seers is the one we know as Elijah.

[ 20 ] How should we imagine such a personality? Elijah was to be one of the representatives of what Moses had initiated within the Hebrew people. But no human beings could be born from the substance of this people who could be completely interwoven with what was contained in the law of Moses, which could only be received as a revelation from above. What we have characterized as necessary for the Indian epoch, and also as the peculiar nature of the Bodhisattva, had therefore to occur again and again in the Hebrew people. There had to be individualities that were not completely absorbed in the human personality, that were with one part of their being in the earthly personality and with the other part in the spiritual world. Elijah was such a being. What we find on the physical plane as the personality of Elijah contains only part of Elijah's being. Elijah's ego cannot completely penetrate Elijah's physical body. He must be called a personality who is “filled with the spirit.” And it would be impossible to bring about such an appearance as Elijah through the mere normal forces in the world, through which a human being is otherwise placed in the world.

[ 21 ] When, in the normal case, a human being is to enter the world, the human being develops from the physical processes in the mother's body in such a way that at a certain time the individuality that was previously incarnated simply connects itself with the physical being. In ordinary human beings, everything follows a straight path, so to speak, without the intervention of special forces that lie outside the normal path. This could not be the case with an individuality such as Elijah. Other forces had to intervene, forces that deal with that part of the individuality that extends into the spiritual world. An influence must be exerted from outside on the developing human being. Therefore, when such individualities are incarnated in the world, they appear to be inspired, driven by the spirit. They appear as ecstatic personalities who go far beyond what their ordinary intelligence can tell them. This is how all the Old Testament prophets appear. The spirit drives them; the ego cannot always account for what it does. The spirit lives in the personality and is sustained from outside.

[ 22 ] Such personalities sometimes withdraw into solitude; but this is then a retreat of that part of the ego which the personality needs, and an intervention of the spirit from outside. In certain ecstatic, unconscious states, such a being listens to the promptings from above. This was especially the case with Elijah. What lived during his life as Elijah, what his mouth spoke, what his hand signified, did not come only from the part that lived in him, but were revelations of divine-spiritual beings that stood behind him.

[ 23 ] When this being was reborn, it was to connect with the body of the child born to Zacharias and Elizabeth. We know from the Gospel itself that we are to regard John the Baptist as the reborn Elijah (Matthew 17:10-13). But we are dealing here with an individuality that was not accustomed from its previous incarnations to developing everything that was to come out through the forces inherent in the normal course of life. In the normal course of life, while the human physical body develops in the mother's womb, the inner power of the I stirs. What is connected with this inwardly, the individuality of Elijah had not yet gone through in earlier times; it had not yet descended so far. The I had not been set in motion by its own powers, as in normal circumstances, but from outside. This had to happen again now. The ego of this being is more out of the spiritual world, closer to the earth, and is now much more connected to the earth than the beings who previously guided Elijah. The transition to the connection between the Buddha and Zarathustra currents had to be made now. Everything had to be rejuvenated. Now it was precisely the entity that had become so closely connected with the earth and its affairs, like the Buddha, who was now connected in his Nirmanakaya with the Nathanic Jesus, that had to act from outside. This being, which was connected to the earth on the one hand, but on the other hand was removed again because it only worked in the Nirmanakaya, lived “beyond” the earth because it had ascended again, and now hovered above the head of the Nathanic Jesus, had to work from outside and unfold the ego force of John the Baptist.

[ 24 ] Thus it was the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha who worked on the unfolding of John's ego force in the same way as the spiritual forces had previously worked on Elijah. At that time, the Elijah being was at certain times transported into ecstatic states; then God spoke, filled his ego with a real power which it could then communicate to the outside world. Now there was again a spiritual being who, as the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, hovered above the Nathanic Jesus; this being now worked upon Elizabeth when John was to be born, stimulated the germ of John in Elizabeth's body in the sixth month of pregnancy, and awakened the ego there. However, because it was now closer to the earth, this power did not merely cause inspiration, but actually brought about the formation of John's I. Under the influence of the visit of the one called Mary, the I of John the Baptist was stirred. Thus the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha has an awakening and redeeming effect, even into the physical substance, on the I of the former Elijah, on the present I of John the Baptist. What can we hope for now?

[ 25 ] Just as Elijah had once spoken his powerful words in the ninth century BC, which were actually the words of God, and just as what his hand pointed to was God's gesture, so it had to be similar now with John the Baptist, in that what was present in Elijah was revived. What was in the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha worked as inspiration into the ego of John the Baptist. What was proclaimed to the shepherds, what hovered over the Nathanic Jesus, extended its power into John the Baptist. And the preaching of John the Baptist is first and foremost the reawakened preaching of Buddha. Something highly peculiar appears here, something that must have a profound effect on our soul when we remember the sermon at Benares, when Buddha spoke of the suffering of life and of liberation from the suffering of life through the eightfold path that the soul must seek. At that time, Buddha proclaimed what he had recognized as the eightfold path; at that time, he also continued his sermon several times, saying: Until now, you have had the teachings of the Brahmins; they trace their origin back to Brahma himself. They say that they are superior to other people because they descend from this noble origin. These Brahmins say that man is valuable because of his ancestry. But I say: Man is valuable because of what he makes of himself, and not because of what is inherent in him through his ancestry. He is worthy of the great wisdom of the world because of what he makes of himself as an individual human being. By pointing to individual qualities and saying, “Truly, I say to you, it does not matter how much one calls oneself a Brahmin, what matters is that you make yourself a purified human being through your own personal efforts,” Buddha aroused the wrath of the Brahmin world. — That was, if not literally, the meaning of many of Buddha's speeches. And then he usually continued this teaching by showing how, when a person understands the world of suffering, he can feel compassion, become a comforter and helper, how he will participate in the fate of others because he knows that he feels the same suffering and pain as they do.

[ 26 ] Now the Buddha was in his Nirmanakaya, outshining the Nathanic baby Jesus, and then continued his sermon by letting the words sound from the mouth of John the Baptist. What John's mouth spoke was done under the inspiration of the Buddha. And it sounds to us like a continuation of the speech that the Buddha once gave when, for example, John says: You who place so much trust in those who call themselves descendants of those who, in the service of spiritual powers, are called the “children of the serpent,” and who invoke the “wisdom of the serpent,” who has brought you to this? Only thus do you believe that you will bear worthy fruits of repentance, saying, 'We have Abraham as our father.' But now John continued the sermon of the Buddha: 'Do not say that you have Abraham as your father, but become true human beings where you stand in the world. A true human being can be awakened in the place where your foot stands on the stone. Truly, God can raise children to Abraham from stones (Luke 3:7-8). And then, continuing the sermon of the Buddha, he said, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none” (Luke 3:11). They came to him and asked, “Master, what shall we do?” (Luke 3:12), just as the monks once came to Buddha and asked, “What shall we do?” All these are words that sound like the words of Buddha or like a continuation of them.

[ 27 ] Thus these beings appear on the physical plane through the turning of the ages, and thus we learn to understand the unity of religions and spiritual proclamations of humanity. We do not learn what Buddha was by clinging to tradition, but by listening to what Buddha really says. Buddha spoke five to six centuries before our era, as we hear in the sermon at Benares. But Buddha's mouth has not fallen silent. He also speaks where he is no longer incarnated, where he is inspired by the Nirmanakaya. From the mouth of John the Baptist, we hear what the Buddha had to say six centuries later, after he had lived in a physical body. This is the “unity of religions.” We must seek out each religion at the right point in the course of human development and look for what is alive in it, not what is dead; for everything continues to develop. We must learn to understand and comprehend this. But those who do not want to hear the Buddha's saying from the mouth of John the Baptist are like a person who has seen the seed of a rose bush and, some time later, after the rose bush has sprouted and is bearing flowers, does not want to believe that this rose bush arose from this rose seed, and who would now say: This is something else. What was alive in the seed is now blooming in the rose bush. And what was alive in the sermon at Benares bloomed in the sermon of John the Baptist at the Jordan.

[ 28 ] In this way we have come to know another individuality in its essence, which confronts us in that time and about which the Gospel of Luke speaks so emphatically. We can only come to know these Gospels by gradually rising to the task of truly understanding every word as it is meant. And Luke tells us in the introduction that he wants to retell the message of those who acted as “self-seers.” But these self-seers saw the true conditions as they gradually revealed themselves through the ages; they did not merely see what was happening on the physical plane. Those who see only that might say: Five or six centuries before our era, there once lived in India a man who was the son of King Suddhodana and who was called Buddha, and then there once lived a man named John the Baptist. But they do not find what connects the one to the other. For that can only be seen in the spiritual world. Luke, however, says that he is recounting what those who “saw,” who were seers, told him. It is not enough for us to simply accept the words of religious documents; we must also learn to read these words in their proper sense. To do this, however, the individualities that appear in them must be clearly visible to our soul. But they can only be clearly visible to our soul if we know everything that has flowed into them.

[ 29 ] One more thing has been said: whatever individuality descends to earth, it must develop in accordance with the abilities that can emerge from the body into which it incarnates. This being must reckon with that. Let us assume that a high being wanted to descend today; it could then only reckon with the laws that a human body can have today. Only the seer who sees how the more intimate threads are woven into the inner being can recognize what this individuality actually is. However, such a being on a high level of wisdom must mature through childhood in the body so that at a certain point in time, what this being once was in previous incarnations can emerge. If such a being is to arouse very special feelings in human beings, then the earthly incarnation must also be appropriate so that the body can endure what is to be the object of the mission. In the spiritual worlds, things are truly not as they appear in the physical world. If a being wants to proclaim healing from pain and deliverance from suffering, it must experience the full depth of suffering so that it can find the right words that are applicable in the human sense.

[ 30 ] What that being, who hid himself in the body of the Nathanic Jesus, had to say later was something that was a message to all of humanity. It was something that was to carry humanity beyond all former narrow blood ties. It was not to take away blood ties, not to abolish what stands between father and son, between brother and sister, but to add to the love bound to blood ties what is called universal human love, which goes from soul to soul and is exalted above all blood ties. This was to be brought by the being who later revealed himself in the Nathanic Jesus. It was to bring something of love, of a deepening of love that has nothing to do with what is linked to blood relationship. But in order to do this, this being, who lived in the body of the Nathanic Jesus, first had to experience on earth what it means to feel no connections, to be unrelated to others by blood. Then it could feel purely what only plays between human beings. It first had to feel free from all blood ties, indeed from the possibility of blood ties. The individuality of the Nathanic Jesus had to stand before the world not only as a “homeless” person like the Buddha, who left his homeland for a foreign land, but as someone who had stepped out of all family ties, out of everything that had anything to do with blood ties. He had to feel all the deep pain that one can feel when one has to say goodbye to what is otherwise close to one's heart, when one has to stand alone; out of the great loneliness, the abandonment of his family, the individuality that lived in the Nathanic Jesus had to speak. Who was this being?

[ 31 ] We know that it is that being who lived in the Solomonic Jesus until about the age of twelve; it is the individuality, the spirit of Zarathustra, who lived in the Solomonic Jesus, who had the Solomonic father and the Solomonic mother as parents. But the father died early, and the boy was orphaned on his father's side. Apart from him, there were brothers and sisters in this family. He remained in this family as long as he, Zarathustra, was in the body of the Solomon Jesus. He then leaves this family at the age of twelve, abandons his mother, abandons his brothers and sisters, in order to pass into the body of the Nathanic Jesus. Then his [Nathanic] mother also dies, and later his [Nathanic] father dies. And when he had to go out into the world to do his work, he took leave of everything that had anything to do with blood ties. Not only was he completely orphaned, having had to leave his brothers and sisters, but as a Zarathustra being he also had to renounce ever having descendants or ever founding a family. For the Zarathustra being had not only left his father and mother, brothers and sisters, but also his own body, and had entered into another body, the body of the Nathanic Jesus. This being was able to prepare the way for an even higher being, who could then prepare himself in the body of the Nathanic Jesus for the great task of proclaiming universal love for mankind. And when the mother and brothers of this being came and were told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and want to see you,” this being was able to speak from the depths of his soul, so that no one could misunderstand him, before all the people, without violating any piety: “They are not! For even the body that was connected to this family had been left by Zarathustra. And pointing to those who were in free spiritual communion with him, he could say: These are my mother and my brothers, who hear the word of God and do it! (Luke 8:20-21). This is how the religious documents are to be taken literally.

[ 32 ] In order for someone to proclaim universal love for humanity, he had to be incarnated in a form in which he could experience being abandoned by everything that blood ties can establish. Our feelings are drawn to this form, so that they come close to it as if it were human, to a form that descends from high spiritual heights and expresses human experience and suffering. That is why our hearts beat for it. And the more spiritually we understand it, the better we will understand it, and the more our hearts will beat for it and our souls will rejoice in it.