In Steiner's reading of St. Luke, John the Baptist is the reborn Elijah, his Ego awakened by the Nirmanakaya of Buddha to prepare the way for Christ.
John the Baptist in Anthroposophy is the reborn prophet Elijah, the herald whose mission was to prepare humanity for the entry of the Christ being into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Rudolf Steiner sets out this teaching in The Gospel of St. Luke (GA 114), ten lectures held in Basel in September 1909. There he describes the Elijah individuality as an Ego that never fully entered its earthly body: in the son of Zacharias and Elisabeth, that Ego was awakened from outside by the Nirmanakaya of Buddha, the spiritual sheath of the Buddha that hovered above the Nathan Jesus child. John's call to repentance by the Jordan renewed Buddha's Benares sermon for the West and culminated in the baptism through which the Christ united with Jesus. The Christian Community, founded in 1922, still works with this Elijah-John individuality in its biblical study and festival life.
Few figures in Steiner's Christology carry more weight than John the Baptist. Luke's Gospel names him the greatest among those born of women, and Steiner explains why: an Ego held back from full incarnation since the days of Elijah, kept open as an instrument through which higher beings could speak. His voice by the Jordan belonged at once to Elijah, to Buddha, and to the approaching Christ.
In Steiner's Own Words
Even as the words of power once spoken by Elijah in the ninth century before our era were in truth ‘God's words’, and the actions performed by his hands ‘God's actions’, it was now to be the same in the case of John the Baptist, inasmuch as what had been present in Elijah had come to life again. The Nirmanakaya of Buddha worked as an inspiration into the Ego of John the Baptist. That which manifested itself to the shepherds and hovered above the head of the Nathan Jesus extended its power into John the Baptist, whose preaching was primarily the re-awakened preaching of Buddha.
What it Means Today
Within esoteric Christianity the Elijah-John individuality became a working doctrine rather than a curiosity of biblical scholarship. The Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded in 1922 with Steiner's direct help under Friedrich Rittelmeyer, treats John as the hinge between prophecy and sacrament: its priests read the Jordan baptism as the moment the herald's task passed over into the Christ's own deed. Emil Bock, who succeeded Rittelmeyer as the movement's Erzoberlenker in 1938, devoted long chapters of his biblical studies, particularly The Three Years and The Childhood of Jesus, to the figure of the Baptist, following Steiner's indication that one individuality speaks through Elijah, through John, and onward. Steiner himself extended the line in his Last Address of 28 September 1924, naming the painter Raphael and the poet Novalis as later stations of the same being.
Thalira synthesis: John marks the point where borrowed inspiration ends and earned selfhood begins, an Ego lent to the divine word until humanity could carry that word in its own thinking, feeling, and willing. Whoever studies the Baptist in this light is studying a question that never ages: how far does any of us actually inhabit the self we speak from? Steiner traced this same individuality onward through Raphael to Novalis; see Elias-John-Raphael-Novalis.
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