The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] The Gospel of John differs from the other three Gospels in that it is attributed to a direct disciple of Jesus Christ, whereas the other three are attributed to individuals who were not direct disciples of Christ. It follows, therefore, that we must look to the Gospel of John for the deepest wisdom of Christianity.

[ 2 ] This raises the question for us: How should Theosophy relate to the Gospels and their authenticity? For Theosophy can recognize as true only that which is confirmed by esoteric research. We would not be able to extract any truth from a document. Theosophy can only be built on its own foundation; it can only rely on the experiences gained by looking into the spiritual sources of both the present and the past. The only truly historical document for theosophy is what we call the Akashic Records, that is, the spiritual record that the seer is able to perceive. Thus, once we have gathered information from this spiritual record, we can compare it with what the historical records—that is, the Gospels—can provide. And no doctrine is accepted by the occult researcher because it appeared in some written document, but because it has been found to be true through our own research.

[ 3 ] Yesterday it was noted in the introduction that the spiritual currents of the pre-Christian era converged in the events of Palestine—and, as we shall now see, in a higher form through the personality of Christ Jesus. This personality is incredibly complex. How is such a personality possible—one capable of absorbing everything that came before into his own being and fusing it there into a higher unity?

[ 4 ] In the Gospel of John, Christ is portrayed as the embodied, incarnated Word of the World, as the incarnated Logos. To understand this to some extent, we must go far back in time to the emergence of the first cultural currents on our Earth. Six hundred years before the events in Palestine, the powerful spiritual current we call the Indian had reached its peak and culmination in the person of Gautama Buddha. But the same Buddha who was active in India was present in a certain form in Palestine at the time of Christ Jesus. What spiritual science means by the word “Buddha” is not a specific person, but a dignity. Just as the individual human being develops more and more during his earthly life and attains ever higher offices, so can an individuality, through various incarnations, ascend to the office of the Buddha, to the dignity of the Buddha.

[ 5 ] Before this, through many incarnations, the same individual was not a Buddha, but a Bodhisattva. What is that? Bodhisattvas have very specific tasks. They are the teachers and guides of humanity. All of humanity has gone through various stages.

[ 6 ] Human beings have attained their present consciousness over the course of time. Previously, our own souls possessed different qualities. Human beings have acquired reason, etc., over the course of time; in the past, human beings were endowed with other qualities. If we look back to the time before the Lemurian epoch, we find that human beings possessed a certain dim, clairvoyant perception. Human life as a whole was not characterized by spiritual self-awareness. In ancient times, vague images arose in the soul. Therefore, it was not possible to influence people as we do today, but only in a way comparable to inspiration or suggestion. And what was communicated to them was not grasped by the intellect. The leaders and teachers of humanity worked through suggestion, through inspiration, through their immediate presence, through the disciple’s gaze upon the great teacher.

[ 7 ] The Bodhisattva had to teach in this way as long as he was not yet a Buddha. Before becoming a Buddha, he had repeatedly incarnated among humanity on Earth, but he did not act through a physical body, only through his etheric body, and he could teach only by not fully entering the human personality with his essence, with his true self. The disciple possessed clairvoyant awareness and saw, behind the teacher’s personality, something like a powerful aura that had no place within the human personality. The Bodhisattva allowed powerful images to flow, as it were, into the disciple’s soul.

[ 8 ] But people should not always unconsciously accept this as a mere image; rather, they should recognize, through their own power of judgment, what the human being’s goal was. What people had to master as their own impulse—namely, love and compassion—was present as forces within the human soul, but had been submerged there unconsciously. Now the time was to come when people were to bring love and compassion forth from within themselves as something that springs from the human soul. Previously, these qualities were an outflow from the Bodhisattva; now they were to emerge from the human soul itself.

[ 9 ] Today, many people say: It is human nature to show love and compassion; but that was not the case before the Bodhisattva appeared. Love did exist back then, but it was more like an instinct in the blood and was limited to the family and the clan. The liberating, spiritual love, which is independent of all blood ties, was only to become a reality with Christ Jesus. In order to lead people to consciously develop love and compassion from within themselves, it first had to be experienced in a human body that love and compassion spring from the human soul. Then this can be passed on to other people. To this end, the Bodhisattva had to descend once into the physical world, take on a physical body, and, in the person of Gautama Buddha, work among humanity. This Gautama was not Buddha at the time of his birth, but in the twenty-ninth year of his life he became Buddha, after leaving his royal palace and encountering grief and suffering outside the palace.

[ 10 ] That is when love and compassion were awakened within him. It is said that a clarity dawned within him, and he understood that the human body can become an instrument of love and compassion. No individual had ever had this experience before. Through this experience, he attained a higher dignity of his being; thus, the Bodhisattva became a Buddha. He felt the inner impulse of compassion and love. This made it possible for more and more people to experience the same thing and to feel it as their own impulse arising from their own soul. Everything must first be present in an outstanding personality.

[ 11 ] When a Bodhisattva attains Buddhahood, he receives a successor. The legend says: When he descended, he gave his heavenly tiara to his successor—3,000 years will pass before that Bodhisattva, who is one today, ascends to Buddhahood. Eastern teachings call the new Buddha Maitreya Buddha. When can this happen? When a sufficiently large number of people have experienced as inner truth what Gautama Buddha experienced of love and compassion while sitting under the Bodhi tree. Then a new mission will come to Earth through a new Buddha—the Maitreya Buddha.

[ 12 ] This is how we have summarized what the wonderful Eastern legend has to say about the mission of Gautama Buddha.

[ 13 ] What became of the Buddha after he left his earthly body? [The answer to this question is important for Christianity.] When a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, he no longer needs to descend into a physical body. The legend also tells that immediately after his birth, the Buddha took seven steps and said that this was his final incarnation. He can work through the etheric or life body. He thus incarnated into an etheric body. I ask my listeners to note how different such an incarnation is from incarnation into a physical body.

[ 14 ] To understand this, we must take a look at the initiated person. What is initiation based on? It is based on the fact that in ordinary human life, observations can be made not only through the organs belonging to the physical body—eyes, ears, brain, heart, and so on—but that even in physical life one can become independent of the physical instruments. The initiate does not need his physical body to make observations in the world. He develops higher organs of perception in his etheric body when he enables himself to perceive supersensible things. Whereas in ordinary physical life a person thinks, feels, and wills, holding these faculties together through the physical body, in the initiate thinking, feeling, and willing appear as three independent beings, and he is in contact not with three forces but with three souls. When the Buddha died and his physical body no longer held the etheric body together through its elasticity, the latter disintegrated into three independent beings and later, through their division, into four more, making a total of seven souls—seven independently developed soul beings—over which he had to exercise dominion.

[ 15 ] During earthly life, the physical body, through its elasticity, holds together the etheric body and thus the soul forces of the human being. After death, the ego is the only unifying element. But if this ego is underdeveloped, the human being often runs a great risk of losing themselves after death.

[ 16 ] When such an individuality manifests as a Buddha, it does not manifest as a single spiritual being, but as a group of spiritual beings—the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya—that is, not in the physical world, but in a body that cannot be defined by anything in the physical world.

[ 17 ] When we speak of seven or twelve “disciples of the Buddha,” this is often symbolic of the soul forces emanating from the Buddha’s etheric body.

[ 18 ] This is how the Buddha lived at the time of the events in Palestine. In other words, if a person who had become clairvoyant had been there, he would have found the Buddha leading a group of seven soul-beings; but this Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, who was present in Palestine at the time of Jesus and was active there, was no longer the same Gautama who had worked in India, but rather this individuality as it had further developed during the 600 years that had elapsed since his death and had attained even higher qualities. The Buddhism we find in Christianity is also not the one preached in India 600 years before Christ Jesus, but the one that the Buddha—who had been raised to a higher stage of development at the time of Jesus Christ—allowed to flow into Christianity from his etheric body. What the Buddha had to give to Christianity will be described later.

[ 19 ] [If stagnation means death even for the average person, then it stands to reason that a being like the Buddha would not remain stagnant in his development.

[ 20 ] The second movement is Zoroastrianism.] What Zarathustra—Zoroaster—had to offer during the time when Jesus Christ walked the earth was not what was communicated to the ancient Persian people under this name, nor what history refers to as the teachings of Zarathustra or Zoroaster, and it is not what we mean by it. Just as the name of Buddha was borne by many teachers who proclaimed his doctrine, so too has the name of Zarathustra passed on to his proclaimers. 5,000 years before Christ, he was the great teacher of the ancient Persian people. He was a personality of the highest order, highly developed and a deeply initiated individual. He had not only to teach what we discussed yesterday, but also to produce great disciples who could carry on what he had taught.

[ 21 ] Zoroaster had two great disciples. He instructed them in that great mystery. To one he taught everything there is to know about what is simultaneously spread out in space—that is, all the mysteries of the cosmos as they already exist in space. To the other he taught all that can be known about the mysteries of the world’s development over the course of time. In doing so, he went back to the primeval era of development and showed how the Earth came into being. These two great disciples were reincarnated. One of them, the one to whom Zarathustra had imparted all spiritual knowledge concerning space, reincarnated into the personality who had the mission of founding the great Egyptian culture. He was thus reborn as the Egyptian Hermes.

[ 22 ] An individual of such high stature as Zarathustra acquires the ability to transfer the bodies that a human possesses to others. This is symbolically described in the Old Testament in the story of Shem. In this way, Zarathustra transferred his astral body and his etheric body, which had reached such a high level, to others. These bodies were preserved in secret ways. He gave his astral body to the Egyptian Hermes, the founder of Egyptian-Chaldean culture, so that the latter might receive the perfected form of Zarathustra. Thus takes place the first partial self-sacrifice of Zarathustra.

[ 23 ] Zarathustra had entrusted his etheric body to that disciple—Moses—to whom he had revealed the successive stages of Earth’s evolution. How could this have happened?

[ 24 ] [Religious texts always speak in powerful imagery. For the spiritual researcher, these images become clear when spiritual research sheds light on them.]

[ 25 ] As a child develops, it is oblivious to its surroundings; only later do instincts, desires, and passions emerge. The child who was to take in the etheric body of Zarathustra therefore had to be shielded from external impressions until his astral life awoke, until his life of desire awoke. That is why the child Moses was placed in a basket and set adrift on the water. Here, everything contained in the etheric body of Zarathustra shone forth within him.

[ 26 ] [Thus, by sacrificing his bodies, Zarathustra brought about the founding of Egyptian and Hebrew culture—these two significant spiritual currents.]

[ 27 ] Thus did Zarathustra—the messenger of the spiritual solar being, Ahura-Mazdao—influence Egyptian and ancient Hebrew culture through Hermes and Moses.

[ 28 ] What has become of Zarathustra’s or Zoroaster’s self? This self has reappeared as a human being. Through his brilliant initiation, he was able to create his new astral and etheric bodies. He was reborn several times as a leader of Persian culture and appeared most recently, as Zaratas-Nazaratos, as a teacher in the ancient Chaldean mystery schools. At that time, he was a contemporary of Buddha and the teacher of Pythagoras; and when the Jews were taken into Babylonian captivity, many of them became his disciples in Babylonia.

[ 29 ] Thanks to research in the spiritual sciences, we have thus traced the paths by which the teachings of Zarathustra—or Zoroaster—found their way into Egyptian and ancient Hebrew cultures. The spiritual current that originated with him can be found in Palestine at the time of Jesus, side by side with the current that originated with Buddha.

[ 30 ] All of this had to take place in connection with the event in Palestine. The Gospels recount once again what spiritual science has taught us. In Palestine, 600 years after the death of the Buddha, two baby boys were born at the same time to different sets of parents, both belonging to the House of David. These two children became important for the further development of humanity.

[ 31 ] The House of David of the Hebrews had two lines: one through Solomon, the royal line; the other through Nathan, the Levitical line of the House of David. One set of parents came from the Solomonic line, and the other from the Nathanic line. One child was born to Joseph and Mary from the Solomonic line of the House of David. He was born in Bethlehem and given the name Jesus; all three names were very common in Palestine at that time. Another infant Jesus traces his origins to the Nathanic line of the House of David and was born in Nazareth. His parents were also named Joseph and Mary. Today we will focus primarily on the “Bethlehemite” Jesus.

[ 32 ] In these boys was embodied the individuality who was the founder of the ancient Persian culture and who, 600 years earlier, had been the teacher of Pythagoras and of many of the Jews taken into Babylonian captivity in the Chaldean mystery schools. This individuality appeared embodied in the boy Jesus, who had his origins in the Solomonic line of the House of David. This Jesus was thus the adolescent Zarathustra.

[ 33 ] The other boy named Jesus grew up alongside him. The two boys developed differently. The Solomonic Jesus developed all the qualities through which one gains clear and distinct concepts and insights into the surrounding world. How could it be otherwise? He grew up in a body of royal lineage to the highest capacities of human culture. He was a precocious child, capable of learning everything that had been accumulated over centuries and millennia.

[ 34 ] The other boy, the Nathanite Jesus, displayed very remarkable qualities. He cared little for the things that surrounded us in the outer world. He had attained the highest level of inner development of mind and heart. Never has there been such a lovely child. His gaze went beyond this world into a completely different world, one that had nothing to do with what the outer world had gone through over the centuries. He was the delight of those around him.

[ 35 ] These two children grew up side by side in the small town of Nazareth, where the parents of the Solomonic infant Jesus had moved some time after the child’s birth.

[ 36 ] The two children were together for up to twelve years. To understand the nature of the Nathanic Christ Child, we must try to grasp the nature of his etheric body and, with the help of spiritual scientific research, discover the hidden sources of his origin. We will return to this tomorrow.