Introduction
by Will Marsh

To read the biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is to enter the realm of mystery. A human being was born, into whom a spiritual being of the highest order, the Son of God, would later descend and indwell for three and a half years. How are we to go about understanding this event, so beyond our normal understanding? What human vehicle could be adequate to undertake the indwelling of the Son of God? What sort of human being was the babe born in Bethlehem?

The place to begin is with the Gospels themselves. We are told that the Jesus child was conceived by a virgin when the Holy Spirit came upon her and the power of the Most High overshadowed her. In Matthew the nature of the conception is made known only after the fact; Mary is "found to be with child of the Holy Spirit," and when Joseph, her betrothed, is troubled by this, an Angel appears in a dream to tell him the nature of the conception. In Luke, the Archangel Gabriel appears directly to Mary beforehand to tell her what will happen, and this event has been foreshadowed by Gabriel's appearance to Zechariah telling him that his wife Elizabeth, a kinswoman of Mary, will bear him a son, who is to be named John. Elizabeth was previously barren and is well past childbearing age, so we are presented with two pregnancies normally outside the range of human possibility. And when the pregnant Mary, arriving for a visit, greets the pregnant Elizabeth, the babe in Elizabeth's womb leaps in recognition, so Jesus and John the Baptist are connected even before they are born. We are told that Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months, which means she would have been there until just before John birth. In both accounts, Angels and an Archangel appear to humans, acting as messengers from God, and in Luke an Angel is joined by a multitude of the Heavenly Host to announce Jesus' birth to the shepherds, so we see that many levels of the Spiritual Hierarchies are involved in the birth. Cosmic events are also involved, for a special star appears in the heavens. In Matthew the child is first visited by three kingly wise men from the East who have special knowledge that has enabled them to recognize and follow the star, and who bring special gifts, while in Luke the child is born in a humble stable and the first visitors we are told of are humble shepherds.

There are many things about the Gospel accounts that cause us to pause. It seems easier for us to understand that the Son of God could somehow appear to us in human form than it is for us to understand that a being could be both fully human in every sense and the Son of God. Given the unique spiritual mission that awaited him, we want to know more about the baby Jesus himself, how he acted, how he grew, what sort of child he became and what his childhood was like, how he interacted with the children and adults in his village and with the natural world,, how he was trained, and what he was like as an adolescent and a young man—but here the Gospels present us with almost a total blank. Luke is the only Evangelist who tells us anything about the childhood, and he relates only one event, the teaching by the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple; the next, event in Luke's narrative is the Baptism, when Jesus is about thirty years old. Matthew mentions only the flight of the holy family into Egypt immediately after Jesus' birth to avoid Herod's slaughter of the innocents, and their eventual return to live in Nazareth, then skips to the Baptism. Mark and John (after the Prologue) both begin with the descent of the Spirit at the Baptism. We are left with much to ponder.

Although we tend to conflate the Nativity narratives in Matthew and in Luke into one picture, we note immediately upon comparing them that many of the events, which all seem so important, appear only in Matthew or only in Luke. Mary is barely mentioned in Matthew, which, after the opening genealogy, focuses on the Angel's appearance to Joseph, the visit of the wise men, and the reactions of Herod. In Luke's account, Mary is the most prominent figure, recognized as "favored one" and "blessed among women" by Archangel and human alike; she is also shown to have had a deep awareness of what was going on, for she knew that her soul "magnifies the Lord," and she "kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." How can the two Nativity accounts be so dissimilar? Even the genealogy of Jesus, which would seem to be straightforward, is not the same in the two accounts and is completely different for the generations between David and Joseph. Surely both Evangelists would be aware of most of the key elements of this central event in their message, equalled in importance only by the events surrounding the Mystery of Golgotha? The descriptions of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are nearly identical in the synoptic Gospels and are very similar in John; the same is true for the Baptism. Many other events of the ministry of Jesus Christ are described in similar terms in the synoptic Gospels. Why is that not the case for the Nativity?

The differences between the Matthew and Luke accounts are so great that they almost seem to be describing the births of two different children. And, as hard to comprehend as it may be, that is precisely what Edward Smith tells us is the case—there were two Jesus babies, the one in Matthew born of the kingly lineage of David's son Solomon, and the one in Luke born of the priestly lineage of David's son Nathan. How this can be, how it came about, what became of the two children so that there was only one, why this has been generally unknown until this century, what it means for a true understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ, of Christianity, and of human and world evolution—all are discussed in The Incredible Births of Jesus. It is an amazing story.

Edward Smith, now "retired" after a successful career as a lawyer and businessman, has been a lifelong student of the Scriptures and of theology, and has long pondered them in his mind and in his heart. While still a young man, he was given a near-death experience on a hospital operating table, during which he was enveloped in what he describes as a tangible light and love that he felt as the immediate presence of the Christ. This experience strengthened his faith and gave him spiritual assurance as he continued to struggle with the issues raised by his continuing study of the Bible, which he taught as the leader of an adult Sunday School class for over twenty-five years. Growing increasingly unsatisfied with mainstream theological interpretations, he was led in the mid-1980s to reconsider reincarnation as a possible key to understanding the many dilemmas the Bible presents to the serious seeker, and began to study the subject with his usual intensity. In the course of this study, he came across the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and finding in it many of the answers he sought, he devoted six years to investigating Steiner's "spiritual science." He now sees it as his main task to present the anthroposophical understanding of the Bible to mainstream Christianity; The Incredible Births of Jesus and his longer, recently published The Burning Bush are the first steps in that direction.

Reading Edward Smith's presentation of such a radical new way of looking at the Nativity, we naturally want to know more about its source, the spiritual research done by Rudolf Steiner in the first two decades of this century. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher, cognitive scientist, and spiritual teacher, probably best known in this country, to the extent that he is known at all, as the founder of the Waldorf School movement and the biodynamic agriculture movement. From childhood he had experienced not only the world of sense perceptions that we all experience, but also another dimension not based on sense perceptions, which he came to know as the spiritual world. He could not ignore this experience of the other dimension, as most children are taught to do in our rationalistic, materialistic culture, and as an adolescent he set himself the task of understanding how these two worlds, the sense world and the spiritual world, are connected; further, he felt he had to gain this understanding by using the exacting scientific approach of the natural sciences. To achieve this he undertook a rigorous scientific training, focused on the natural sciences, mathematics, and an experimental, phenomenological study of science and epistemology—how we know what we know. While in his twenties, Steiner was asked to edit the scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for a new German edition of the Complete Works. (Goethe, great poet and dramatist that he was, felt that his scientific writings, such as The Metamorphosis of Plants, were his most important work.) Goethe had developed a phenomenological, participatory approach to science, in which the observer's qualitative experience of nature is not treated as just subjective but is taken as a primary perception as much as the quantitative; in this method the part can only be understood in its relation to the whole1. Steiner, who knew from his own experience that it was within the capacity of the human being to know the world's actual spiritual reality, found in Goethe's science a key to developing a scientific methodology by which one could move from the sense world of ordinary consciousness to the recognition of the world of pure thinking that lies behind it, and thence to the higher world of spirit: he had bridged the gulf between the sense world and the spiritual world. He laid out this methodology in Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom (I894), which is both an original contribution to cognitive science and the basis for all his spiritual researches.

Then, as Rudolf Steiner wrote in his Autobiography, he was granted an experience that initiated him into the reality of Christ in cosmic evolution: "Conscious knowledge of true Christianity began to dawn in me. Around the turn of the century this knowledge grew deeper... This experience culminated in my standing in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge"2. The experience convinced him that the time had come to begin elaborating and making available the results of his spiritual researches. He found an understanding audience in the Theosophical Society, which had been founded by H. P. Blavatsky to work for the renewal of spiritual knowledge, and linked himself with it, under the condition that he would have complete autonomy and independence, as the Secretary of the German Section until 1912, when he founded the Anthroposophical Society. Before the First World War, Steiner's researches, lectures, and writings were mostly concerned with the evolution and true nature of the human being, the development of the human capacity for knowing the spiritual world, and the development of an understanding of true Christianity. After the devastation of the war, he felt that social renewal was the most pressing spiritual need and shifted his focus there, touching in one way or another on most areas of human endeavor.

Between 1906 and 1912 Rudolf Steiner gave several long lecture series on Christianity and the Gospels, and these, particularly The Gospel of St. Matthew and The Gospel of St. Luke, are the primary sources of the material that Edward Smith presents below. The lectures were based on Steiner's spiritual researches using his consciously trained and directed clairvoyance, which somehow made what he investigated a living experience for him—he stressed over and over that he spoke and wrote of nothing he had not experienced himself. Experience, he said, is the sole guide to reality and truth. It should be pointed out that this conscious clairvoyance has nothing to do with either mediumship or unconscious channeling, which could often be found in the Theosophical Society at that time and in the New Age movement today. Steiner insisted that conscious clairvoyance, as well as related faculties of inspiration and intuition that give direct access to the spiritual world, while unusual in our time, are not special gifts, but are innate possibilities within every human being, undeveloped organs of perception that can be developed by training the thinking, feeling, and willing. Steiner's basic writings, the "basic books" of anthroposophy, or spiritual science, lay out how such training can be undertaken, starting from where we are with short exercises that are surprisingly simple on the surface, yet require disciplined practice3. One final point should be made: Given the sheer volume of Rudolf Steiner's writings and lectures, and their radical nature for our ordinary consciousness, it is important not to take their content as information—we should not and are not expected to accept them passively or on blind faith. Rather they should be seen as records of the experiences of someone farther along the path, which can light and prod us along our own paths so that we too can participate more fully, freely, and consciously in the divine and human world process. The things Edward Smith tells us can be seen as part of a revolutionary movement in Christianity in this century brought about by startling discoveries of long-lost early Christian documents, documents that support the understanding of Christianity presented below. The libraries found earlier in this century at Nag Hammadi and at Qumran have shown beyond reasonable doubt that at the time of Christian beginnings these worlds were intermingled. By restoring the living context of early Christianity, these discoveries are providing keys necessary for a fuller understanding of the role and meaning of Christianity in human evolution and of the teachings of Jesus Christ as given in the Gospels and the writings of Paul. They are also giving a clearer picture of the world Jesus was born into, and it is a different picture than the one we have been given by traditional Christian doctrine.

In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd stumbled upon a cave in a cliff at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. In the cave he found several large jars containing long scrolls, some twenty feet or longer. His discovery set off a search by scholars and peasants that unearthed numerous other scrolls in the vicinity. These Dead Sea Scrolls, as they became known, proved to be preserved ancient manuscripts, in Hebrew, of biblical and other texts, which were eventually determined by scholars to have been the library of a community of Jewish Essenes, dating from the first or second century B.C. Complete scrolls or fragments of all of the books of the Old Testament, except the Book of Esther, were found, as well as much of the Old Testament apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, including the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In addition to these familiar books, there were also texts of teachings and practices of the Essenes, who had been little known before, although Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, and a few other contemporaries had written briefly of them. Philo (Every Good Man Is Free, XII) wrote that they were Jews living in Judea and Syria who derived their name "from their piety." They were pacifists who lived communally without private property or covetousness, did not sacrifice living animals, and were above all devoted to the study of God and to preserving their minds in a state of holiness and purity. Despite the previous lack of knowledge about the Essenes, they must have played an important role in Jewish society, for Josephus (The Jewish War, 11) placed them on an equal footing with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the major religious parties of the time, and there was an Essene quarter in Jerusalem and an Essene gate.

The Community Rule found at Qumran contains the central teachings of the Essenes. Part of it lays out strict rules for living together in a spiritually vital society, some of them similar to those in the discourses of Jesus Christ in chapters 10 and 18 of the Gospel of Matthew. These ordinances were based on a strict, spiritualized interpretation of the Torah that disagreed with the interpretation of the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Here we come to the key element of Essene teaching, for their understanding of the Scriptures was based on an "illumination" attained through initiation; only those who had undergone initiation could remain in the community beyond an initial probationary period. The preparatory stages for this initiation, described in the Community Rule, involved a lengthy period of probation, study, and purification, followed by initiatory rites that included repeated baptism by full submersion and instruction in secret knowledge, leading to direct experience of the spiritual world. We see in this initiatory process the same elements—strict spiritual disciplines, initiatory rites, the experience of illumination—found in the ancient pagan Mysteries that flourished in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and later in Greece. That is to say, the Essenes were a Jewish sect carrying on the ancient Mystery tradition in the heartland of Judea just before the birth of Jesus—but the Essenes added an adherence to the Law and an emphasis on community that came from their Jewish heritage.

Essene initiation brought about a metanoia, a profound change of consciousness experienced as an inner rebirth that bestowed a divine knowledge. Initiates were known as "sons of Light" and joined in a cosmic struggle with the powers of Darkness. The Essenes' esoteric understanding of the Old Testament was based on their ability to see the cosmic struggle between the forces of Light and Darkness that lies behind the events narrated there. Their library also included the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch, which describes this cosmic struggle as well as a vision of the heavenly spheres and higher realms. The Essenes used a Sun-based calendar, like the one described in Enoch, not the traditional Moon-based Jewish calendar, so the proper days for the observance of the holy feasts were another point of disagreement with the Sadducees and the Pharisees. In their struggle with the forces of Darkness, the sons of Light were aided by a knowledge of esoteric sciences, particularly astrology and occult physiology; fragmentary technical texts on these subjects were found at Qumran4. As we will see, this esoteric knowledge was used in preparing for the coming of the Christ Being to Earth.

There seems to have been a higher stage of initiation among the Essenes that gave one the right to attend a ritual sacred meal, anticipating the bread and wine that would be shared with the Messiah. But here the story takes another twist, for the Essenes expected two Messiahs. There is a passage in the Community Rule specifying that the "men of holiness" shall be ruled by the Law and the precepts of the community "until there shall come the Prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel." The Messiah of Israel (or Jacob) is the kingly Davidic Messiah expected by traditional Judaism, but the Messiah of Aaron would be of the priestly lineage and had a more universal meaning for the Essenes, in that he would express their special wisdom and fulfill their esoteric vision. Two Messiahs are also mentioned in the Testaments of the Patriarchs. Some scrolls from Qumran show this expectation in a different light, for the Damascus Document and an interpretation of the Psalms seem to foretell a compound figure in whom the kingly and priestly Messiahs would be joined in one person. The Essene expectation of the coming of the Messiah and of his nature shows influences not only from the Jewish Old Testament tradition but also from the Zoroastrian tradition of ancient Persia, where there were prophecies or legends of the coming of as many as twelve "Saviors." But the forces of Darkness would only be ultimately overcome with the coming of a "world Savior" who would embody the "two dignities, Kingship and the Good Religion"5.

There is also an obvious connection between the Essene teaching of the struggle between Light and Darkness and the central teaching of the Zoroastrian mythology, the struggle between the two cosmic principles, Ohrmazd, Light, and Ahriman, Darkness. But Andrew Welburn points out that there has been a key change in the Essene teaching, reflecting what has been developing in Judaism throughout Old Testament history. The Community Rule (III-IV) says that "the God of Knowledge," from whom "comes all that is and happens," has created man to govern the world, and has appointed for him two Spirits in which to walk until the time of his visitation: the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Falsehood. Those born of Truth spring from a fountain of Light, but those born of falsehood spring from a source of Darkness." Here the two Zoroastrian cosmic principles have been transformed into "two Spirits in man": the great spiritual struggle has been shifted from the cosmos into the individual human soul. The crucial element in the struggle is now the human being in its ethical individuality. The Essene teaching merged the initiatic knowledge and experience of the divine from the Mystery tradition with the sense of the self, of individual moral responsibility, and of history as the revelation of the mysteries of God that had developed in the Jewish tradition; however the source of morality still lay outside the human being, in the Law. This synthesis represents the first stages of a new religious consciousness6.

Still more about the early Christian world has become known in the last twenty years through the analysis of another treasure trove of long-lost writings from that era, which was discovered near Nag, Hammadi in upper Egypt before the Qumran find but took longer to become available for study. In December 1945, two brothers digging nitrogenous soil to fertilize their fields near the ancient city of Chenoboskion on the east bank of the Nile unearthed a large sealed earthenware pot. Inside were twelve codices, books of bound papyrus sheets, totaling about fifteen hundred pages. These were impounded for decades in the Cairo Museum and, except for a few tractates that were smuggled to Europe and published by the Jung Institute in Zurich, only became available in English in 1977. The Nag Hammadi Library, as the codices became known, were determined to have most likely been the library of a Valentinian Gnostic sect active in upper Egypt in the early centuries of the Christian era. (Gnostic comes from gnosis, meaning knowledge, direct spiritual knowledge, but Gnosticism refers to a particular historical movement active from the first century B.C. to the third century A.D., believed to have developed out of the oriental mystical tradition of the ancient Mysteries.) Before the Nag Hammadi discovery, the Gnostics were known mainly through the writings of Church Fathers, such as Hippolytus, who quoted Gnostic writings only to show how heretical they were. Now for the first time the Gnostics were allowed to speak for themselves.

The codices were discovered to contain fifty-two tractates, including six that were already known and six duplicates. Ten of the others were fragmentary, but the remaining_thirty previously unknown texts were in reasonably good shape. Many of the tractates are Gnostic teachings, but others come from different sources; there is an excerpt from Plato's Republic and texts from the Egyptian Hermetic tradition, for example The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (spheres, or levels of consciousness), a description of the initiatory process that raised the neophyte's consciousness through levels corresponding to the planetary spheres, and higher. Many of the texts are Christian, but written from a decidedly Gnostic point of view, depicting Christ as a cosmic divinity and expressing his teachings and acts in terms of the initiatic Mysteries. These "Gnostic Gospels" have proven controversial, particularly The Gospel of Thomas, which claims to be "secret sayings" of Jesus Christ given to the apostle Thomas and written down by Matthias, and The Gospel of philip, which presents a Mystery form of Christianity with an elaborate system of sacraments. It was at first assumed that The Gospel of Thomas was derived from the canonical Gospels because many of the sayings were similar, but recent scholarship based on careful textual analysis indicates that it may have been written before them and may even have influenced them. Whether or not this is the case, the Nag Hammadi finds did show that in the second century there was an alternative vision of Christianity that included mystery teachings and also had more tolerant attitudes in such things as ritual, authority, individual experience, and the role of women7.

This is not to say that because Gnosticism contained elemerits of esoteric Christianity it was esoteric Christianity. Gnosticism was heretical because it did not comprehend or accept the full Christian message. In Gnostic teaching the human being is an alien here on Earth, which is something to be left behind since it was created by a lesser god, a Demiurge. Darkness exists as an eternal second principle, and human beings can escape its influence only by merging their identity with the Light. But without esoteric knowledge, revealed through initiation, human beings would not know the way to salvation; and to become knowers and to participate as knowers in the divine process, they must put aside the delusion of the physical body, of individuality, and of historical reality. In Gnosticism, unlike in Essenism, there was no individual or historical moral struggle. Gnosticism continued to cling to the ancient form of the Mystery tradition, which had fulfilled its mission in human evolution with the coming of Jesus Christ, who established a new Mystery, one that was to be experienced in the open, on the stage of world history. The Gnostics could not accept the historical reality of Jesus Christ or of the Mystery of Golgotha. One of the most intriguing texts found at Nag Hammadi is The Apocalypse ofadarn, which is believed to predate the others and not to be a Gnostic text at all. It may be of Essene origin and is written in the same style as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In it a seer projects himself back into the past, to the time of Adam, in order to follow the patterns of the cycles of time. It tells, in the form of parables, of thirteen different incarnations of a messenger called "the Illuminator." Andrew Welburn has shown that each parable uses the symbolism of one of the ancient Mysteries and that together they reveal a sequence of incarnations in the different civilizations of the ancient world—Persia, Media, Egypt, India, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Armenia, Ethiopia. The final incarnation, which still lies in the future for the writer, will combine the special qualities of the different Mystery streams in the person of the Royal Messiah. Welburn goes on to argue convincingly that "the Illuminator" is none other than Zarathustra, founder of the Zorominator astrian religions8. The significance of this will become apparent in Edward Smith's narrative of the events leading to the Nativity of Jesus.

The Nag Hammadi and Qumran discoveries show that the Mystery tradition was present in a vital form at the birth of Christianity, even in the heartland of Judea. The Essene synthesis of Judaism and the Mystery tradition looked forward and can be said to have prepared for and presaged Christianity, while Gnosticism looked backward and tried to maintain the ancient form of the Mysteries by grafting Christianity onto it. However, both the Essene and the Gnostic paths of salvation were only for the elite, the initiated, and were based on transporting the initiate away from the Earth, to the spiritual realms, to encounter God. That all changed with the appearance of Jesus Christ on Earth. The Christ Being freely joined his destiny with earthly and human destiny as "the free helper of humanity, not as a God working from above, but as the firstborn among many"9. In so doing, he returned to humankind the chance, not possible since the Fall, to become fully human spiritual beings and thereby to heal the rift between the Earth and the spiritual world. But to do so human beings, for their own part, must choose freely and individually to open their hearts to Christ, to join their destinies with him, and to be about the human task of bringing freedom and love into the world. The Qumran and Nag Hammadi documents provide evidence that the Mystery tradition, and most notably the Essenes, expected and helped prepare for the births of the two Jesus children and the subsequent descent of the Christ Being into Jesus of Nazareth. The Mystery knowledge was suppressed and lost until this century, but without the keys it provides a true understanding of Christianity has not been possible; the result has been confusion and strife, leading finally to the fragmentation, fundamentalism, relativism, and skepticism of our time. Humanity needs to come to a true understanding of Christianity and of Christ Jesus if it is to evolve and assume its proper place in the cosmos. In this radical little book, Edward Smith shows us the first steps toward that understanding, a new Mystery for our time, now not just for the elite few but for all who desire to open their eyes and see.