XLV. Occult Research on the Gospels
GA 90a/1904-07-18/p035
·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.
The Jewish confession erases the intimate relationship with all the intermediaries that stand between God and man. God becomes the otherworldly Jehovah, of whom no one is allowed to form an image, and the only thing that man is allowed to know about him is the law that he has given. This is the Logos, which can only become an idea in man; this is the completely abstract, shadowy Logos. This fact exists. From Judaism, with its conception of the doctrine of Logos and the doctrine of the law, the disciple whom Jesus loved had to proclaim the truth: that this Jesus, who lived among his disciples, was himself the messenger, the Son of God. In other words, just as devas, angels and so forth were once the bearers of the Word, so it has now become the case that Jesus, having become Christ, was the Word made flesh. It was difficult at that time to make this understandable, because in the following period the connection between man and God through the intermediate link had been lost: the Logos had become flesh, the Logos was God Himself.
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