The Zarathustra-individuality who, after carrying the Christ in the Nathan Jesus body for three years, continued through history as one of the great teaching-masters of the Christian-Rosicrucian stream.
Master Jesus in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the I-being known to earlier incarnations as Zarathustra, who indwelt the Solomon Jesus child from birth to age twelve, passed at the temple unification into the body of the Nathan Jesus, and continued there until the Jordan baptism when the cosmic Christ-Being entered that same body. After three years the Christ left at Golgotha and the Zarathustra-I, leaving the Nathan body at the Cross, drew back his own preserved etheric body and reincarnated. Steiner gave this teaching in the lecture cycle The Gospel of St. Luke (GA 114, Basel, September 1909), with esoteric-school clarifications in GA 264. Master Jesus is distinct from the cosmic Christ-Being and from Jeshu ben Pandira, the Bodhisattva-successor of GA 130.
The Master Jesus is the Zarathustra-individuality who, in Steiner's Christology, twice prepared and once carried the body destined for the Christ. After the Mystery of Golgotha he reunites with the preserved etheric body of the Solomon Jesus child and walks through history with short intervals between death and rebirth as the inspirer of the esoteric Christian stream, alongside Christian Rosenkreuz.
In Steiner's Own Words
Having sought and found the etheric body he had once relinquished in the circumstances indicated, this Being went on his way through history as the 'Master Jesus', becoming, as you can well imagine, the great helper of those who have endeavoured to understand the Event of Palestine. Thus it was the Zarathustra-Ego, Zarathustra himself, who having found his etheric body again began to move through the evolution of mankind as the Master Jesus, incarnating again and again to give guidance and direction to the spiritual stream of Christianity. He is the Inspirer of those who strive to understand Christianity in its living growth and development.
What it Means Today
The Master Jesus figure has had a careful modern champion in Sergei Prokofieff, whose Rudolf Steiner and the Masters of Esoteric Christianity (Temple Lodge, 2009) places Master Jesus inside a defined collegium of seven: Manes, Master Jesus, Scythianos, Gautama Buddha, the Maitreya Bodhisattva, Novalis, and Christian Rosenkreuz. Prokofieff insists, with Steiner, that this is not the same teaching as the Theosophical Society's Masters of Wisdom: the anthroposophical Master Jesus is not a Mahatma in Tibet receiving Western postulants by letter. He is a historically traced individuality, the bearer of the body that received the Christ, who continues in the Christian-Rosicrucian stream as a teaching presence rather than a public personage.
For the contemplative practitioner today this matters in a precise way. The Christian Community, founded by Friedrich Rittelmeyer in 1922 with Steiner's counsel, carries the Easter teaching of the Master-stream in its renewed sacraments and its Act of Consecration of Man. A practitioner working with the second part of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, or with the meditations from GA 264 that touch the Easter content, can hold the Master Jesus as one of the inner teachers whose contribution is not abstract devotion but the cultivated capacity to read the four Gospels as four different angles on one event. The branded Thalira reading we hold to: the Master is encountered as a Peter-pattern transfigured, the one who carried what he could not yet understand and was made fit to teach it later. He is the patron of every soul who carried the Christ before they had words for him. The Master Jesus stands within the great economy described in the principle of spiritual economy.
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