The Rudolf Steiner Archive

30. The Bible and Wisdom

[ 1 ] When we speak of the patriarchs and their ages are given as enormous numbers, we must understand that these so-called patriarchs are to be regarded as representatives of tribes. The Bible Students had been doing this for a long time, but they did not know what was actually behind it. If we now recall the lecture “Blood Is a Special Fluid,” we find a special application of the word “consciousness.” Anyone who maintains that there is a process of development must also admit that everything is in a state of development—including consciousness. The consciousness we possess today was not always there; it evolved from a different kind of consciousness that was dim and dreamlike, one that lived within people through images. This type of consciousness, which was both dull and clairvoyant at the same time, was tied to a very specific fact. People lived in small communities back then; all peoples, into whose distant origins we delve, show the same pattern: the further spiritual science goes back, the smaller the tribal groups it reveals. It was considered immoral to marry outside these small tribal groups. It was only later that this principle of endogamy was interrupted by the principle of exogamy, and with this interruption began the development from twilight consciousness to today’s intellectual consciousness. The members of those ancient tribes possessed a very different kind of memory; what the father or grandfather had experienced lived on in the son as if he himself had experienced it. The permeating forces of the forefathers flowed through the blood of these tribes, united in close blood ties, to such an extent that the descendant remembered the events of his ancestors as if he himself had experienced them; this was in the blood, which flowed through the generations. The son remembered and said: “I have experienced—what my father and grandfather, and so on, had experienced.” As long as this “I”—this tribal “I”—persisted, people spoke of the same entity by the same name. It is Adam’s enduring “I”; this term refers to what has been passed down through many generations from Adam, not to the person of Adam.

[ 2 ] Likewise, we must interpret the passage where it says: “Enoch, the man of God, disappeared from the earth.” (Gen. 5:24) This does not mean that he dissolved into mist and fog; rather, “Enoch” refers to one of those shared “I”s. This is resolved by his becoming the man of God—that is, the one who devotes himself to the Spirit, who renounces having offspring, who devotes himself to a kind of asceticism, and who therefore disappears, since he does not live on in a son and has passed on what flows in the blood.

[ 3 ] Those who today approach the Bible with faith do not really have a clear idea of what the relationship to the Bible was like in ancient times. For the ancients, the Bible was the “Word of God,” they knew that those who wrote it down were initiates inspired by divine wisdom, and the more they believed that only truth could emanate from the divine Spirit, the more they regarded every word of the Bible as sacred—as an outpouring of this divine Spirit, which revealed itself to them through these inspired men. It is difficult for people today to put themselves in that reverent frame of mind, which harbored absolutely no criticism toward this inspired wisdom.

[ 4 ] It is only natural that modern people should apply a critical eye, but we ask ourselves: How is it possible that, over the course of centuries, even those by no means foolish minds who held these books in their hands did not also apply a critical eye—why did they not, for example, subject the differences found in the four Gospels to this same critical scrutiny? Are we to imagine that the few who held the Bible in their hands before the invention of the printing press did not see what modern criticism sees—and from which it draws doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels? They certainly saw these differences, but they knew to what they were attributable. They knew that at that momentous historical juncture—the founding of Christianity—the sequence of initiatory stages had descended onto the physical plane and been fulfilled in the Mystery of Golgotha. From then on, the “Son of Man”—that is, the one who had developed universal consciousness within himself—was able to undergo this process on the physical plane. The Son of Man carried the mystery of initiation out into the physical world, and the lives of these initiates had to be described in such a way that they were a reflection of the ancient canon of initiation in the ancient mysteries and the ancient temple sites. This canon of initiation was established in one way in this region and differently in that region, yet one can see shining through them the mode of initiation practiced by the ancient schools of initiation.

[ 5 ] The physical life of Christ Jesus, as described in the four Gospels, truly unfolded in the same way as the life of a disciple in the ancient mystery schools; in the four Gospels we see nothing but the various forms of the initiation canon, as the different initiation schools had established it. There are minor variations, yet they form a whole; a single current runs through all four. Jesus Christ, the only Son of Man, embodies that mighty truth in his physical life, exemplifying it through his physical body: that life conquers death! What the initiate experiences in his etheric body, Jesus Christ experiences on the physical plane. The symbol has become outer reality; it has become a historical fact. Spiritual science sees in these three days, during which Christ Jesus is in death, the very thing carried out onto the physical plane that the initiate experienced in the depths of the crypts. When he then awoke to life again in his physical body, when, having returned from the spiritual worlds, he was able to bear witness to their reality, when he had become a herald of the spiritual worlds, then, in the exuberance of these lofty, sacred feelings, the words burst forth from his soul—the very words that Christ Jesus also spoke on Golgotha: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me!” — “Eli, eli, lama …” (Matthew 27:46; cf. Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34) It must not be rendered as “forsaken”; that is an incorrect translation. This phrase—“My God, my God, how you have glorified me!”—was what everyone cried out when they awoke from this three-day sleep, when they realized that life in the Spirit had conquered death.

[ 6 ] The principle of initiation before Christ was different from what it is today. Only the chosen few were admitted to the Mysteries, from which the schools on the one hand and the churches on the other later developed. The teachings were transmitted orally; in the Mystery schools, once admitted, the student was subject to a very specific rhythm of life and had to adapt his life to it. This rhythm, laid down in the ancient canon of initiation, was fixed and unchanging; as fixed and certain as the course of the sun, so surely did a student follow the path of life. These students were called “sun heroes” once they had reached a certain level; and it was this life of a student that Christ Jesus brought forth onto the physical plane, and which is described in the four Gospels.

[ 7 ] There is a specific organ within human beings that contains the capacity for Christ; through this organ, human beings enter into a direct relationship with Christ. Christ-consciousness was created by the historical Christ. Just as the eye perceives light, so that organ perceives the Christ; yet it was the historical Christ who created the potential for Christ—the possibility that human beings can come into direct contact with the Christ through this organ.

[ 8 ] When the human body was not yet the vessel of a soul—when it was still lifeless—it was, just like the Earth it inhabited, shaped quite differently; it possessed an organ that still exists today as the swim bladder of fish. At that time, humans did not walk upright; they moved forward by gliding and swimming. They possessed this organ, which has remained in fish that have not evolved further; in humans, it transformed into the lungs. This gave them the ability to inhale and process air. We still find gill respiration in human embryonic development. This moment of capturing oxygen from the air through the lungs is also the moment of the infusion of the soul. Expressed in terms of feeling and sensation, this is depicted in the monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) That is to say, the human being breathed in the divine soul.

[ 9 ] The ancients still perceived every breath as a source of life; hence the legends and myths that see in the air the body of the deity who infused humanity with life. In all ancient forms of religion, we find this expressed through imagery. It had to be clothed in images for the people of that time, for if the great spiritual leaders of humanity had expressed these truths in the form we use today, they would not have been understood; they had to speak in imagery. Everything, everything is in the process of development, including consciousness! The form suitable for conveying these truths to humanity’s earlier, twilight-like consciousness was the pictorial one; thus, in the ancient religious texts, the “I” also appears as the “Blowing One,” the one blowing through the air. This is the truth that individualizes itself in the process of breathing. This is the same as Wotan, the one riding along in the air current, the “Blowing One.”

[ 10 ] Before incarnation, the soul was genderless; a process of development took place there as well. Every spiritual researcher focuses on this development. Before there were men and women, God—who unites both genders within Himself—came into being within the spiritual world order. This is the reason why the creation of humankind is recounted twice in the first chapters of Genesis. Once as male and female (Gen. 1:27)—this is the divine spiritual human, who is neither male nor female but unites the forces of both sexes within himself—and then the creation of humankind down on the physical plane; it states: Human beings came into being as male-female beings (Genesis 1:27), not as Luther writes: “a little boy and a little girl.”

[ 11 ] This new instrument guides humanity toward a common bond that is more comprehensive than the bond of love. In the past, there was a tribal “I”; then, after long-distance marriage became common, this evolved into a national consciousness, a national “I.” Humanity now has a tendency to expand the national consciousness—which lies within this “national self”—into that which binds all of humanity together: a brotherhood. To prepare this brotherhood, this blood brotherhood—which is independent of the blood that flows through the veins—is the mission of Christianity. The ancient God, Yahweh, the Breathing One, who bestowed the “I”—the God who lives within the individual consciousness—will evolve to recognize something shared by all human beings: this consciousness of humanity is the Christ-consciousness! It encompasses an “I” that will embrace all of humanity within a single consciousness. There is a saying that expresses this: “Whoever does not forsake father, mother, son, and brother cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Christianity prepares the way for a comprehensive brotherhood of humankind; we must not understand this in the everyday, trivial sense.

[ 12 ] We may describe Jehovah as the God of the nations, who divides humanity into separate peoples; Yahweh also signifies the breath with which the I-spirit enters into human beings; but in Christ—the Son of Man, as he designates himself—that is, not the son of a man or a family, but of all humanity—in Christ we see the one who prepares the universal covenant of love; and just as Yahweh pours a part of his humanity into human beings, so Christ pours a part of his being into humanity from now on. This lived in Jesus of Nazareth in its highest glory; he was the highest initiate, which is why he can say, “Before Abraham was, I was,” or rather, “I am.” (John 8:58) In such words lies the esoteric essence of Christianity, which is to live as a force within external Christianity.

[ 13 ] How did it come to pass that the Son of Man was incarnated in a human being? To explain this question, I will describe to you what prophecy means and how the Mystery of Golgotha arose from it. In the past, there were only a few initiates, enlightened ones, and prophets. Initiation means developing those higher abilities within a person that lead them up into the higher worlds and allow them to experience their truths for themselves. Everything spiritual that they see and experience there will one day descend onto the physical plane; a prophet can ascend to the spiritual plane, see what is there, and thus foretell what will later descend onto the physical plane—that is prophecy!

[ 14 ] The ancient prophets proclaimed the coming of the Son of Man; that is to say, they saw in the spiritual worlds the preparations for what later became a physical reality at that momentous time when Christ appeared on the physical plane. The Son of Man brought down to the physical plane what had previously existed in the spiritual worlds: the brotherhood of humanity, which is to unite people in love, regardless of blood ties. And in the blood that flowed from the wounds on Golgotha, that which was superfluous, overcome, and selfish in human blood was poured out; this blood was sacrificed on the cross. This is the Mystery of Golgotha. Human blood sacrificed itself to purify the blood of humanity from selfishness; this purification of the blood from the “I” took place on Golgotha.

[ 15 ] When we compare the meaning of the first three Gospels, we find that a certain underlying tone pervades them all. The Gospel of Luke points to the initiatory school of the Essenes and Therapeuts; hence, we find a certain social character in its parables. [Transcript breaks off.]