IX. The Prophetical Documents and the Origin of Christianity

Thus we see how the normal course of human evolution progressed as it was described yesterday. The first cultural period of the post-Atlantean age is the ancient Indian, the second the ancient Persian, the third the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egyptian civilization; then follows the fourth, the Greco-Latin and the fifth which is our own present cultural epoch. Before the fourth epoch began, that people which with its traditions provided the soil for Christianity emerged out of the third epoch like a mysterious branch. When we summarize all that we have been hearing in these lectures, we shall find it much more comprehensible that the appearance of the Christ had to take place in the fourth era.