1. The Johannine Christians

The day of the year bearing this name was a festival as far back as the time of ancient Persia. There, on a day corresponding to a June day as we know it, the so-called Festival of the Baptism by Water and Fire was celebrated. In ancient Rome the Festival of Vesta was held on a similar day in June, and that again was a festival of the baptism by fire. Going back to the time of pre-Christian culture in Europe and including the period before Christianity had become widely disseminated, we find a similar June festival coinciding with the time when the days are longest and the nights shortest, when the days start to become shorter again, when the sun once more begins to lose some of the power that provides for all earthly growth and thriving. This June festival seemed to our European forefathers like a retrogression, a gradual evanescence, of the God Baldur who was thought of as associated with the sun. Then in Christian times this June festival gradually became the Festival of St. John in memory of the Forerunner of Christ Jesus. In this way it can form the starting point, as it were, for our discussions during the coming days of that most significant event in human evolution which we call the deed of Christ Jesus. This deed, its whole significance for the development of mankind, the way it is revealed primarily in the most important Christian document, the Gospel of St. John—and then a comparison of this with the other Gospels—a study of all this will form the subject of this lecture cycle.