1. The Johannine Christians

How did this appear to a man like, for instance, the author of the Luke Gospel? He reasoned as follows: The genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth goes back to Adam and to God himself. What today is mankind, what now inhabits a physical human body, once descended from divine heights: it was born of the spirit, it was once with God. Adam was he who had been sent down out of spiritual heights into matter, and in this sense he is the son of God. So there was at one time a divine-spiritual realm—thus the argument would continue—that condensed, as it were, into an ephemeral, tellurian realm: Adam came into being. Adam was an earthly image of the Son of God, and from him are descended the human beings that dwell in a physical body. And in a special way there lived in Jesus of Nazareth not only what exists in every man and all that pertains to it, but something the essence of which can be found only when one is aware that the true being of man derives from the divine. In Jesus of Nazareth something of this divine descent is still apparent. For this reason the writer of the Luke Gospel feels constrained to say, Behold Him Who was baptized by John! He bears special marks of the divine out of which Adam was originally born. This can come to life again in Him. Just as the God descended into matter and disappeared as such from the human race, so He reappears. In Jesus of Nazareth mankind could be reborn in its innermost divine principle. What the author of the Luke Gospel meant was this: If we trace the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth to its source, we find the divine origin and the characteristics of the Son of God appearing in Him in a new way, and in a higher degree than would hitherto have been possible for mankind.