In Steiner's reading, the Gospel that traces Jesus of Nazareth back to Abraham and presents the Solomon-line child who bore the reborn Zarathustra individuality.
The Gospel of Matthew in Anthroposophy is the New Testament account Rudolf Steiner read as the record of the Solomon line of descent, the Jesus child who carried the reborn Zarathustra individuality. In his 1910 lecture cycle The Gospel of St Matthew (GA 123), Steiner showed that this Gospel opens not with the cosmic Logos but with a human genealogy, tracing Jesus of Nazareth through three times fourteen generations back to Abraham, founder of the Hebrew people. Its standpoint is earthly and human rather than cosmic: where Mark points to the stars themselves, Matthew shows the star working in three men, the Magi, who followed Zarathustra's own star-wisdom to the birthplace. The Gospel's task is to prepare, in the blood of one people, a body fit to receive the most advanced human individuality. Today it anchors the esoteric-Christian reading of the two Jesus children.
Among the four Gospels, Steiner held that the Gospel of Matthew is the most human document of them all. It does not raise the reader's eyes to the Logos, as John does, nor to the boundless cosmos, as Mark does. It begins with a register of fathers and sons, and so it presents the Christ Event as it touched one prepared people and one prepared body. This is the Gospel that names the genealogy, the Magi, and the star.
In Steiner's Own Words
I had in the first place to describe the nature, the whole milieu, within which Zarathustra was placed; for you are aware that the individual who incarnated in the blood which passed from Abraham through three times fourteen generations, and who appears in the Gospel of Matthew as Jesus of Nazareth, was the Zarathustra individuality. He is met with here for the first time in post-Atlantean times, and we are faced with the question: ‘Why was the blood which flowed through the generations from Abraham in Asia Minor best suited for the subsequent return of Zarathustra in bodily form?’ For one of the subsequent incarnations of Zarathustra is that of Jesus of Nazareth.
What it Means Today
The Gospel of Matthew sits at the heart of what Steiner called esoteric Christianity, the reading of the Gospels as records of spiritual fact rather than pious legend. Its distinctive contribution is the figure scholars of Anthroposophy call the Solomon Jesus: the child whose descent Matthew traces from Abraham down the royal line of Solomon, and who, on Steiner's account, bore the individuality that had once been Zarathustra, the founder of the ancient Persian star-wisdom. The Magi who follow the star are not bystanders in this view. They are the later pupils of Zarathustra's own school, reading in the heavens the return of their teacher, and the Hebrew genealogy from Abraham is the long preparation that made one bloodstream fit to receive him.
This reading is carried forward most directly in the Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded with Steiner's help in 1922 under Friedrich Rittelmeyer, whose priests still treat the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke as pointing to two distinct Jesus children. A reader working with the Matthew Gospel in this spirit does not ask only what the text says. They ask which individuality stands behind the words, which earlier life prepared the figure now described, and what the star meant to the men who knelt before it. The Gospel of Matthew, read this way, becomes the account of how the most advanced human soul of the pre-Christian world was made ready to meet the Christ.
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