The Essence of Christianity
GA 68a — 25 April 1907, Berlin
30. The Bible and Wisdom
When the patriarchs are spoken of and their age is given in huge numbers, then we have to understand that these so-called patriarchs must be seen as representatives of tribes. The Bible students had been doing this for a long time, but they did not know what was actually behind it. If we now remember the lecture “Blood is a Special Juice”, we find a special application of the word “consciousness”. Those who firmly believe that there is development must also admit that everything is in development, including consciousness. The consciousness that we have today was not always there; it developed out of another consciousness that was dim and dream-like, that lived in images in people. This kind of consciousness, which was dull and clairvoyant at the same time, was dependent on a very specific fact. In those days, people lived in small communities. All nations, in whose distant origin we delve, show the same thing. The further back we go in the history of civilization, the smaller the communities of people become. It was considered immoral to marry outside of these small communities. It was only later that this principle of close marriage was interrupted by the principle of distant marriage, and it is with this interruption that the development of the dim consciousness to the present rational consciousness begins. In the members of those ancient tribes a very different memory lived; what the father and grandfather experienced lived in the son as if he himself had experienced it. The ancestral powers passed down through the blood of these tribes, which were united in close blood ties, to such an extent that the descendant remembered the events of his ancestors as if he had experienced them himself; that was in the blood, which rolled through generations. The son remembered and said: I have experienced this - what father and grandfather, etc., had experienced. As long as this I - this tribal I - was preserved, one spoke of the same entity with the same name. It is Adam, the continuous I of Adam, it refers to what is inherited through many generations from Adam, not the person of Adam.
Likewise, we must understand the passage where it says, “Enoch, the man of God, disappeared from the earth.” (Genesis 5:24) This does not mean that he dissolved into vapor and mist, but “Enoch” means one of those common “I”. This is dissolved by him becoming the man of God, that is, the one who devotes himself to the spirit, who gives up having offspring, who devotes himself in a kind of asceticism and therefore disappears, since he does not live on in the son and has given what runs in the blood.
Those who believe in the Bible today have no real idea of what the relationship to the Bible was in ancient times. For the ancients, the Bible was the “Word of God”; they knew that those who wrote it were initiates inspired by divine wisdom, and the more they believed that only truth could come from the divine spirit, the more each word of the Bible was sacred to them as the outpouring of that divine spirit, which revealed itself to them through these inspired men. For today's man, it is difficult to put oneself in this reverent frame of mind, which did not criticize this inspired wisdom at all.
It is only natural to see that the modern man must criticize, but we ask ourselves: How is it possible that through the centuries truly not stupid minds, who had these books in their hands, did not also criticize, why they did not also, for example, subject the differences that the four gospels show to this criticism? Are we to imagine that those few who had the Bible in their hands before the invention of printing did not see what today's critics see and from which they draw doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels? They saw these differences, but they knew how they came about. They knew that at this momentous historical moment, in the founding of Christianity, the sequence of initiation had been drawn down onto the physical plane and completed in the Mystery of Golgotha. From then on, the “Son of Man” could undergo this on the physical plane, that is, the one who had developed the consciousness of the general in himself. The Son of Man brought the secret of initiation into the physical world, and the life of these initiates had to be described in such a way that it was a reflection of the old canon of initiation in the old mystery schools, the old temple sites. This canon of initiation was fixed in this area in one way, in another area in another, but you can see the initiation mode of the old initiation schools shining through it.
The physical life of Christ Jesus, as described in the four Gospels, really did unfold as the life of a disciple in the ancient mystery schools; we see in the four Gospels only the various forms of the initiation canon as it was established by the different schools of initiation. There are small deviations, but one whole, one single stream runs through all four. The Jesus Christ, the only Son of Man, presents this mighty sentence in the physical life, living it in the physical body: that life conquers death! What the initiate experiences in his etheric body, Jesus Christ experiences on the physical plane. The symbol has become outer reality, has become an historical fact. In these three days, in which the Christ is dead, spiritual science sees carried out onto the physical plane that which the initiate experienced in the depths of the crypts. When he then awakened to life in his physical body again, when he, having returned from the spiritual worlds, was able to bear witness to their reality, when he had become a proclaimer of the spiritual worlds, then, in the exuberance of these high and holy feelings, the words that Christ Jesus also spoke on Golgotha broke free from his soul: “My God, my God, how have you glorified me!” — “Eli, eli, lama...” (Matthew 27:46, cf. Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34) The word “forsaken” is not to be used; it is an incorrect translation. These words, “My God, My God, how have You glorified Me!” were the words of each one when he awoke from this three-day sleep, when he had experienced that life in the spirit conquers death.
The principle of initiation before Christ was different from today's. Only the chosen were admitted to the mysteries, from which the schools on the one hand and the churches on the other later developed. The teachings were oral, and in the mystery schools, once admitted, the student was subjected to a very special rhythm of life, which he had to integrate into his life. This rhythm, given in the ancient initiation canon, was fixed and unchangeable; as fixed and sure as the course of the sun, as surely as that, a disciple walked the path of life. These disciples were called solar heroes when they had reached a certain degree; and this life of a disciple, that is what the Christ Jesus carried out onto the physical plane, and that is described in the four Gospels.
There is a certain organ in man that contains the Christ potential; through this organ, man enters into direct relationship with the Christ. The Christ consciousness is created by the historical Christ. Just as the eye beholds light, so does this organ behold the Christ, but the historical Christ has created the Christ possibility, the possibility that man, through this organ, may come into direct touch with the Christ.
When the human body was not yet the carrier of a soul, as long as it was still inanimate, it was, like the earth it inhabited, still quite differently formed. It had an organ within itself that still exists today as the swim bladder of fish. Man did not walk upright at that time; he moved forward by floating and swimming. He carried this organ within him, which has remained with the fish that have not developed further; in man it was transformed into lungs. This gave him the ability to breathe in and process air. We still find gill breathing in the embryonic development of man. This point in time, when the lungs capture oxygen from the air, is also the moment of ensoulment. This, expressed in terms of feeling and perception, is illustrated in the monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) That is to say, man inhaled the divine soul.
The ancients still felt every breath as a soul, hence the legends and myths that see in the air the body of the deity that has ensouled man. In all ancient forms of religion we find this clothed in images. It had to be clothed in images for humanity at that time, because if the great spiritual leaders of humanity had expressed these truths in the form in which they are expressed today, they would not have been understood; they had to speak in images. Everything, absolutely everything, is in a state of development, including consciousness! The form of imparting truths that was valid for the earlier dim consciousness of man was the pictorial one, so in the old religious documents the I also appears at the same time as the blowing, the one blowing in the air. This is the truth that individualizes itself in the breathing process. This is the same as Wotan, the one riding in the air stream, the one blowing.
Before its embodiment, the soul was sexless; here too, a development has taken place. Every spiritual researcher looks at this development. Before there were men and women, the God who unites both sexes within himself arose within the spiritual world order. This is the reason why the creation of man is told twice in the first chapters of Genesis. Once male-female (Gen 1:27), that is the divine spiritual man, who is neither male nor female, but unites the powers of both sexes in himself, and then the creation of man down on the physical plane; it says: Man came into being as a male-female being (Gen 1:27), not as Luther writes: “a little man and a little woman”.
The new instrument guides humanity towards a common bond that is more comprehensive than the bond of love. In the past there was a tribal ego, then, after long-distance marriage occurred, the same developed into a national consciousness, a national ego. Now, in humanity, there is a tendency to expand the national consciousness, which lies within this national ego, into that which holds all humanity together, into a brotherhood. To prepare this brotherhood, this blood brotherhood, which is independent of the blood that runs through the veins, that is the mission of Christianity. The old God, Jahve, the one who blows, who gave the ego, the one God who lives in the individual consciousness, will develop to recognize something common in all people, this human consciousness, that is the Christ consciousness! This encompasses an ego that will embrace all of humanity in one consciousness. There is a sentence that expresses this: “If anyone does not give up father, mother, son, or brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Christianity prepares for an all-encompassing human brotherhood; we must not understand this in an everyday, trivial sense.
We may call Jehovah the people-god who splits up humanity into separate peoples; Jahve also means the blowing of the breath with which the I-spirit enters into man, but in Christ, the Son of Man, as whom he designates himself – that that is, not the son of a man or of a family, but of all mankind. In Christ we see him who prepares the universal world-alliance of love; and as Yahweh pours a part of his humanity into man, so the Christ pours a part of his being into humanity from now on. This essence lived in supreme glory in Jesus of Nazareth. He was the most highly initiated of all, and therefore He could say, “Before Abraham was, I am,” or rather, “I am to be.” (John 8:58) In such words lies the esoteric teaching of Christianity, which is meant to live as a power in outer Christianity.
How did it come about that the Son of Man was embodied in a personality? To explain this question, I will describe to you what prophecy means and how the Mystery of Golgotha emerged from it. In the beginning there were only a few initiates, prophets. To initiate means to develop those higher abilities in man that lead him up into the higher worlds and allow him to experience their truths for himself. All spiritual realities that they see and experience there will one day descend to the physical plane. A prophet can ascend to the spiritual plane, he can see what is there, and so he can say what will later descend to the physical plane. That is prophecy!
The old prophets proclaimed the coming of the Son of Man, that is, they foresaw in the spiritual worlds the preparation of that which later became a physical fact at the momentous time when the Christ appeared on the physical plane. The Son of Man brought down to the physical plane that which had previously been in the spiritual worlds, the brotherhood of man, which is to unite people in love, independently of the bonds of blood. And in the blood that flowed from the wounds at Golgotha, there flowed out that which was superfluous, overcome, selfish in human blood; this blood was sacrificed on the cross. That is the mystery of Golgotha. Human blood sacrificed itself to purify the blood of human egoism. This purification of the blood from the ego took place at Golgotha.
If we compare the meaning of the first three gospels, we find that a certain mood underlies them all. The Gospel of Luke points to the initiation school of the Essenes and therapists, which is why we find a certain social character in his parables.