The moment at the river Jordan when, for Steiner, the cosmic Christ-Being descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and began the three years to Golgotha.
The Baptism in the Jordan is the event by which, in Rudolf Steiner's reading, the Christ-Being entered earthly life. As John baptised Jesus of Nazareth in his thirtieth year, the individuality that had carried that body until then withdrew, and the cosmic Christ took its place within the human sheaths. From this hour until the death on Golgotha, a being from beyond the earth lived inside a single human form.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now let us suppose that at a certain point of time in life the Ego were to go out from a human organism, so that there stood before us physical, etheric and astral bodies, but not the Ego. This is what happened in the case of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year of His life. The human Ego then left this cohesion of physical, etheric and astral bodies. And into this cohesion the Christ-Being entered at the Baptism in Jordan. We now have the physical, etheric and astral bodies of a man, and the Christ-Being. The Christ-Being had now taken up His abode in a human organism, as otherwise the Ego would have done.
What it Means Today
For ordinary Christian devotion the baptism is the opening scene of the public ministry: John pours water, a dove descends, a voice names the Son. Steiner reads the same scene as the literal entry-point of the Christ into the stream of earthly evolution, and that reading still shapes a living church. The Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded at Dornach in September 1922 by Friedrich Rittelmeyer with Steiner's counsel, builds its sacramental year around exactly this descent. Its central rite, the Act of Consecration of Man, treats the union of a divine being with human substance not as doctrine to be argued but as a reality to be enacted at the altar. Priests trained at its seminaries in Stuttgart and Spring Valley, New York, preach the Jordan as the hinge of the gospels: the day a cosmic "I" replaced a human one.
What makes the anthroposophical account distinct is its precision about the bearer. Steiner separates the man Jesus, whom early Christians rightly called "truly man," from the Christ who entered him. The body at the Jordan is, in his words, the organism of a simple man once the Zarathustra-individuality has gone; what arrives is a being who had never before bound himself to a single earthly life. Read this way, the baptism is not Jesus receiving a blessing but the cosmos taking up residence in a biography, and the three years that follow belong to history's only fully divine deed performed on the physical plane.
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