The Gospels & the Life of Christ

The three Greek words of John’s prologue that Steiner reads as names for the higher human members: aletheia is Spirit Self, charis is Life Spirit, sophia is Spirit Man.

Steiner's teaching that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be proved from historical documents, so becoming a Christian is possible only as a free deed of the individual soul.

Steiner's 1902 thesis that Golgotha enacted openly, in history, the initiation the ancient Mysteries had long guarded in secret.

Steiner's name for humanity's passage from marriage inside the blood-tie to marriage between strangers, the shift that freed individual love from kinship.

Steiner's term for how a cosmic divine being, the Christ, entered the man Jesus of Nazareth at the Jordan and lived in him through to the Resurrection.

The garden agony where, in Steiner's reading, the Christ suffers not the fear of death but the loneliness of disciples who cannot stay awake to the cross.

Steiner reads Hagar and Sinai as one word, the great stone: the Law returned to Israel from without, through what Abraham's line had cast out in Ishmael.

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.

Steiner reads Christ's words to Nathanael, I saw you under the fig tree, as recognition of a fifth-degree initiate who had received the consciousness soul.

The first human being, in Steiner's account, to know the risen Christ directly: initiated by grace before Damascus, seed-bearer of Christianity's future evolution.

Prayer, for Rudolf Steiner, is the soul's devotional mood: warmth gained from the past, trust toward the future, and a preparation for mysticism and meditation.

Steiner taught that a child resembles its parents not through inherited matter but because the incarnating soul sculpts face, gait and form by unconscious imitation.

The three one-sided initiations of the pre-Christian Mysteries: sages raised thinking, healers raised feeling, magicians raised willing, with a fourth harmonised type called simply man.

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 closed Hebrew mystery order that, in Steiner's account, prepared the hereditary bodily vehicle for the Christ event through an initiation of forty-two degrees.

The continual transformation of physical blood into etheric substance, streaming from heart to head, which since Golgotha can unite with the etherized blood of Christ.

Steiner's warning from GA 117 (1909): when memory of past lives awakens, souls that never formed an individual I will recall only a group-ego, a new Fall of mankind.

Steiner's clairvoyant account of the life of Jesus, read from the Akashic Record in 1913 to supplement the four written Gospels.

In Steiner's reading of John 5, the five porches of Bethesda signify the five post-Atlantean ages of descent into matter, healed only by the approach of the Christ.

Steiner reads the five husbands of John 4:18 as the five principles working on the soul from outside; the sixth, the Spirit Self, purifies from within.

In Steiner's reading of Genesis 22, the ram sacrificed in place of Isaac pictures humanity's last clairvoyant faculty, surrendered so Abraham's line could develop pure reasoning.

In Steiner's reading, the initiate's gospel: a record of Christian initiation whose writer was the risen Lazarus and whose seven "I am" sayings are stages of union with the Logos.

In Steiner's reading, Luke is the Gospel of love and compassion, the Buddha-stream carried into Christianity through the gentle Nathan Jesus.

In Steiner's reading, the cosmic gospel: the briefest, most elemental of the four, where the Christ appears as a cosmic being whose power works into deed and will.

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 fourth kingdom beside mineral, plant and animal: Steiner's name for the kingdom of heaven, arising wherever a being becomes able to name itself I.

The ancestral chain a descending soul unites with centuries before birth, chosen during its second passage through the Sun sphere on the return journey to Earth.

The cosmic creative Word, the Christ-being through whom all things came to be, which became flesh once in Jesus of Nazareth.

Steiner read the Lord's Prayer as a sevenfold meditation: seven petitions mapped onto the seven members of the human being, three higher and four lower (GA 96, 1907).

The first of John's seven signs, where Steiner reads water turned to wine as the Christ-impulse beginning to work into the blood and the human I.

In Steiner's teaching, evil exists so that humanity, by overcoming it, gains the strength that raises good to holiness, a teleology he set out in 1906 (GA 95).

The sinless sister-soul of Adam, held back in the spiritual worlds, thrice permeated by Christ, and finally born as the Luke Jesus child.

The Hebrew preparation school whose members were trained, by strict rules of diet and life, to recognise the approaching Christ clairvoyantly; John the Baptist was its greatest member.

Steiner's reading of John 1:1, where "In the beginning was the Word" records the cosmic Logos as the origin of the world and the human body.

In Steiner's reading, an initiation Christ performed openly: Lazarus passed the three-day temple sleep, received the Christ force, and arose reborn as John.

Steiner's paired image for the arterial and venous systems: the red tree that made us knowing beings, the blue tree he called the Tree of Death.

Steiner's name, after Paul, for Christ as the new Adam whose incorruptible resurrection body reverses the Fall the first Adam set in motion.

The esoteric meaning of the Sermon on the Mount is ninefold initiation: each Beatitude shows one member of the human being receiving the Kingdoms of Heaven through the I.

Two forms of the loosened etheric body seen in water baptism: the Serpent of ancient Luciferic inspiration, and the Lamb announcing the rulership of the I.

The seven "I am" declarations in John's Gospel where, for Steiner, the Christ names himself as the I AM and marks the soul's stages toward union with it.

Steiner's reading of Christ in the wilderness as an initiation trial: the Tempter offers the kingdoms of the world, and the soul is asked to refuse them.

Steiner reads the three women of John 19:25 as the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls, while insisting they also stood bodily at the foot of the cross.

The span from the Baptism in the Jordan to Golgotha, when Steiner held the Christ-Being lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The mountain scene where Christ appears between Moses and Elijah, read by Steiner as a higher initiation of Peter, James, and John into the Mystery of Golgotha.

Steiner's name for the Mystery of Golgotha as the midpoint of earthly evolution, the hinge on which all history before and after it turns.

The first stage of the Christian path of initiation Steiner describes in GA 103: a sustained feeling of how the higher owes its being to the lower.

In Steiner's teaching, visionary clairvoyance delivers instant pictures the ego cannot enter, while thinking clairvoyance sees later but arrives already permeated with judgment.

Steiner reads Matthew's genealogy of three times fourteen generations as a developmental law: forty-two generations from Abraham prepared the body fit for the I of Zarathustra.