Steiner's rule that Christ performed initiations but never underwent one: the Gospels record no initiation He passed through, only initiations He gave.
Christ as Initiator, Not Initiate in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's rule that the Christ Being must be described as one who initiates others, never as one who was himself initiated. Steiner set it out in Lecture VIII of Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy (GA 137), given in Oslo on 10 June 1912. Every other founder of religion, he argued, can be explained through a supersensible event that made him what he became: Buddha under the Bodhi tree, Socrates and his daimon, Mohammed and his visions. The Gospels supply no such event for Christ. The single scene in the three years where He looks into the supersensible is the Temptation, and Steiner reads that as no temptation for Him from the start. The rule matters in practice because it forbids reading the Baptism, Transfiguration, Gethsemane, and Resurrection as graded stages on a path of schooling.
Christ as Initiator, Not Initiate names a boundary Steiner drew around the life of Christ. He was willing to call Christ an initiated one from the outset. He refused to describe how Christ became one, because the Gospels never say. Where the biography of an initiate records a schooling, the Gospels record a schooling given to Lazarus, not received by Christ.
In Steiner's Own Words
Although this life of Christ, as it takes its course on Earth, had indeed to make divine revelations, we are not to conceive of any process of initiation shining as it were into this life of Christ and enlightening it. No, Christ was Himself an initiator. Read in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact the passage concerning the true meaning of the miracle of the Raising of Lazarus. You will find it was an initiation that Christ then performed. He Himself was able to initiate; but we can by no means say that Christ was initiated on Earth in the same sense as we have to say Lazarus was initiated by Christ.
What it Means Today
Biblical scholarship reached the same fork from the other side. In 1958 Morton Smith, then a professor at Columbia University, catalogued the library of the Mar Saba monastery southeast of Jerusalem and reported finding a Greek letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria copied into the endpapers of a seventeenth-century printed book. He published the find in 1973 in two volumes, the technical Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark with Harvard University Press and the popular The Secret Gospel with Harper and Row. The letter quoted a longer Mark in which Jesus raises a young man at Bethany, and the youth then comes to him by night and is taught the mystery of the kingdom of God. Smith read that as an initiation rite Jesus administered. Whether the letter is genuine is still disputed: Stephen Carlson argued forgery in The Gospel Hoax (2005), Scott Brown defended it in Mark's Other Gospel the same year. The point for a reader of GA 137 is not who wins that argument. It is that the one Gospel episode modern scholarship keeps reaching for as an initiation scene is the Lazarus episode, the same one Steiner had already named in 1902, and on both readings Jesus is the one conferring, never the one receiving.
Thalira synthesis: the case Steiner is making is grammatical rather than devotional, since a biography can only be written in one voice, and the Gospels never once put Christ in the passive voice of a pupil.
Where to Read More
- Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, GA 137
- Christianity as Mystical Fact, GA 8
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]