XLV. Occult Research on the Gospels
GA 90a/1904-07-18/p004
·1904-07-18
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Frühe Vortragsreihen und Einzelvorträge für Mitglieder in Berlin 1903–1904 nach ausführlichen und z.T. fragmentarischen Mitschriften.» (Early lecture series and single lectures for members in Berlin 1903-1904, from detailed and in part fragmentary listeners' transcripts.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 90a); the description calls them "Hörermitschriften", and the served text carries the note-taker's gap marker "[Lücke in der Mitschrift]". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Today I would like to present the results of occult research to you as a supplement to this, even in outline, and I note that these results are facts for those who are able to examine them, but that they can only be examined with specially trained abilities, abilities that not everyone has, and that can therefore easily be doubted. What is to be said about this is not taught only today. What I have to say has been taught in the occult schools of all times since the founding of Christianity and most vividly in the first centuries of Christianity. The teachers have spoken not literally, but faithfully in the sense in which we want to look at the testimony of the Gospel of John from the occult point of view. The learned theologian Bunsen has already said that Christianity stands and falls with the Gospel of John. And we have seen that literal scholarship has first excluded the Gospel of John and does not want to accept it.
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