Lecture II

The Evangelists were not biographers in the ordinary sense of the word when things are written which really do not concern the world, and which no one requires to know about any actively creative personality. They were not biographers like those who ferret out each private concern of the person they write of, but they were biographers in so far as they described the life of Christ by saying:—“Something happened at a certain time to Jesus of Nazareth, into whom the Christ entered, which we have seen happen again and again in the Mysteries; but there it was not compressed as a historic event into a few short years; here, on the contrary, it has become an event of history, yet is at the same time a repetition of Temple-ritual; we can therefore describe this life by describing the different stages formerly passed through during initiation.”