The Nativity, Page 9

To find out what happened to the Solomon Jesus child and the two families, we continue with the last part of Lect. 5, GSL:

Not long afterwards the mother of the Nathan Jesus died, so that the [Nathan] child . . . was orphaned on the mother’s side. As we shall see, the fact that the mother died and the child was left an orphan is especially significant. Nor could the . . . Solomon child continue to live under ordinary conditions when the Zarathustra-Ego had gone out of him. [The Solomon] Joseph . . . had already died, and the mother of the [Solomon] child, together with her children James, Joseph, Simon, Judas and the two daughters [Mk 6,3], were taken into the house of the Nathan Joseph; so that Zarathustra (now in the body of the Nathan Jesus-child) was again living in the family (with the exception of the father) in which he had incarnated. In this way the two families were combined into one, and the mother of the brothers and sisters—as we may call them, for in respect of the Ego they were brothers and sisters—lived in the house of the [Nathan] Joseph with the Jesus whose native town—in the bodily sense—was Nazareth.

Here we see the actual fusion [see “Fusion”] of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. For the body now harboring the mature Ego-soul of Zarathustra had been able to assimilate everything that resulted from the union of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha with the discarded astral sheath. Thus the Individuality now growing up as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ bore within him the Ego of Zarathustra irradiated and pervaded by the spiritual power of the rejuvenated Nirmanakaya of Buddha. In this sense Buddhism and Zoroastrianism united in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth.

When Joseph of the Nathan line also died, comparatively soon, the Zarathustra-child was in very fact an orphan and felt himself as such; he was not the being he appeared to be according to his bodily descent; in respect of the spirit he was the reborn Zarathustra; in spect of bodily descent the father was Joseph of the Nathan line and the external world could have no other view. St Luke relates it and we must take his words exactly:

Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him and a voice came from heaven which said, Thou art my beloved Son, this day have I begotten Thee. And Jesus himself, when he began to teach, was about thirty years of age....

and now it is not said simply that he was a “son” of Joseph, but: “being as was supposed the son of Joseph” (Luke III,21-23)—for the Ego had originally incarnated in the Solomon Jesus and was therefore not connected fundamentally with the Nathan Joseph.

“Jesus of Nazareth” was now a Being whose inmost nature comprised all the blessings of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. A momentous destiny awaited him—a destiny altogether different from that of any others baptized by John in the Jordan. And we shall see that later on, when the Baptism took place, the Christ was received into the inmost nature of this Being. Then, too, the immortal part of the original mother of the Nathan Jesus descended from the spiritual world and transformed the mother who had been taken into the house of the Nathan Joseph, making her again virginal. Thus the soul of the mother whom the Nathan Jesus had lost was restored to him at the time of the Baptism in the Jordan. The mother who had remained to him harbored within her the soul of his original mother, called in the Bible the “Blessed Mary.”

Aside from his The Course of My Life (CML), GSL was the first Steiner book I read. Startling as the idea of two Jesus children was, it was provisionally acceptable because it explained so many other seemingly inexplicable things in the Nativity accounts. However, the infusion of the Solomon Mary with the soul of the Nathan Mary, and then the regaining or restoration of the former’s virginity, seemed extremely perplexing as I could not then make any connection. But the “Spiritual Economy” principle (which follows) relates to the matter of soul fusion, allowing the possibility for the etheric body to remold the physical. The soul passage is related in The Fifth Gospel (FG), Lect. 6, and the restoration of virginity is thrice related in The Gospel of St. John and its Relation to the Other Gospels (Jn-Rel), Lect. 10.

It may seem strange that this Nativity account has gone over into the twelve-year-old in the temple and even on briefly to the Baptism, but it seems necessary to reach ahead and show how the two Jesus children became one, and how it is that each Mary, but most especially Nathan Mary, is properly referred to as virginal.²¹

In the light of all this, we now need to look back at the significance of the numerology in the Nativity. We have already seen the significance in the 42 generations from Abraham to the Solomon Jesus of the Matthew account. In Luke, we come to the more remote ancestry of Adam and metamorphose the septenary into the zodiacal twelve, a pattern we shall see portraying the human being’s reascent in the Apocalypse of John. We know that Time (evolutionary development) is expressed in terms of Seven and Timelessness²² in terms of Twelve.²³

At the outset of the discussion of the Solomon Jesus above, 42 generations were said to be necessary for the perfection of the three bodies of a descendent of Abraham that would be adequate to receive the Zarathustra Individuality (GSMt, Lect. 3). The requisite degree of perfection of the physical caused there to be a certain degree of perfection in the younger etheric and astral bodies, and thus could be considered the degree of perfection of the three. In Lect. 5, the matter is approached somewhat differently and refined further. To begin with, we are told, to make a long story short, that the Essenes recognized that a divine Being, the Folk-Spirit of the Hebrew people, laid into the organic constitution of Abraham the seed for the bodies that were to descend from him, and that the seed was to work through the force of the Blood, i.e., heredity. Further, the Essenes perceived a spiritual law that the influence of heredity ceases only after 42 stages: In other words, all traces of heredity have been eliminated from a human being’s soul, and no influence exists, after 42 generations. This was perceived as six cycles of seven generations, with the seventh cycle of seven representing the stage of perfection. (These cycles of seven are also present in the development of individuals: every seven years a stage of development is completed.)