Lecture VIII

Compare all that is told of the life of the “initiated” with the account you have in the Gospels. Perhaps you will observe—I have shown it in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact—that the writers of the Gospels needed only to take the ancient ritual in accordance with which initiation was carried out, in order to describe the life of Christ. In relating the ritual they were relating the events of the life of Christ Jesus. But they could never say that He actually underwent what they were describing. Take such a scene—pregnant with deep meaning—as the Transfiguration, or the Prayer on the Mount of Olives. These are events which if you had set out to relate them of some other initiated person you would have had to describe in quite a different way. You could not merely say that he went up to the Mount of Olives and that there drops of sweat fell from him like blood; in the case of another initiated person you would have to tell what he experienced there, how he was changed on the Mount of Olives. Christ was not changed. The meeting with His God on the Mount of Olives was not of such a character that we can feel He has anything to learn there. Similarly, what He passed through at the Transfiguration was not for Himself an enlightenment. For the others, for His companions, it was an enlightenment, but not for Him. For Him it was perfectly natural and comprehensible; He could not learn anything new from it.