Overview, Page 7

In spite of their seeming “synopticity,” the first three Gospels cannot be understood as giving historical facts for the sake of giving an historical account; they are rather spiritual accounts from the perspective of three different Mystery traditions. Facts are not always used to establish historical chronology but rather to establish spiritual development. Thus one version cannot safely be used to interpret the meaning in another, aside from the latter’s own mission. Similarities in mission explain the use of similar language, but different nuances in mission mean that seemingly conflicting factual statements are not so at all.

For the first time it becomes clear that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” was Lazarus who, having been initiated into the highest Mysteries by Christ himself in the ancient manner of the 3 1/2 day “temple sleep,” was brought forth from a deathlike state as described in Jn 11. As in the case of so many others whose names were changed to reflect the impact of a significant spiritual event (e.g., Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Peter and Paul), Lazarus was thereafter called John. After the prologue of his Gospel, Lazarus/ John gives us the testimony of John the Baptist up through Chapter 10. The architectural middle or peak of the Gospel is the account of the Evangelist’s own Initiation. What follows is the testimony of Lazarus/ John himself, and it is he who is the author of the Epistles and the Apocalypse. His Gospel is said by Steiner to be the highest spiritual writing ever given to humanity. We will explore why that is so.

No book of the Bible has thrown humanity into such a state of obfuscation as has John’s Apocalypse. It is almost universally thought to have been a book emanating from persecution, perhaps even from a mind virtually crazed by it. Now it can be seen that persecution must surely have had little, probably nothing, to do with the vision or its recordation. Lazarus/ John was an old man, presumably alone on Patmos. His immense spiritual insight opened the windows of heaven to him, and the risen Christ came again to him in signs and symbols that he set down. It will be seen that the book sets out four series of seven (letters, seals, trumpets and bowls of wrath) followed by a trend from sevens to twelves culminating in the “new heaven and new earth,” the Holy City, and the restoration of the “tree of life” with its “twelve kinds of fruit.” We have moved from the sevens of the solar system to the twelves of the zodiac. But what is so startling in its authenticity, when realized, is how Lazarus/ John is giving us the picture, starting with the seven Cultural Eras of the post-Atlantean Epoch and carrying us then ever higher in the cycles of seven, portrayed by Steiner in his principal lecture cycle on the Apocalypse (see I-1). When we get to the end of the seven trumpets, the last of which Paul also spoke of (1 Cor 15,52), we are told of a “beast” whose “human number” is 666. That represents the human being who has come to the end of the third cycle of seven, namely, the end of the “Physical Condition of Form,” without having sufficiently taken the Christ into his or her being.

The degree to which a careful examination of the entire Bible confirms the above becomes increasingly amazing. And as it does so, the uncertainties about the reality of karma and reincarnation fade away, for the entire scenario is meaningless without it. Careful reflection upon this divine scheme will bring the realization that each human being has been, and will continue to be, a part of it from the time of Old Saturn until that of Vulcan ( Job 38,21). The usual objections to the concept will be seen to be incompatible with the divine scheme; scriptural passages so often quoted as negating reincarnation will be seen to actually confirm it; and authentic new understanding of countless passages will demand nothing less. Further reflection upon the life-changing implications of karma and reincarnation, when Christians understand and take it seriously, offers the power of a glorious new Hope for addressing the awesome demonic evils that so grip our agonizing world today.

This Overview is necessarily fragmentary and skeletal. It does, however, point to a beginning, a critical midpoint, and an ending. In doing so it shows how humanity fell, how Christ incarnated at precisely the “Right Time,” and how the human being must make its way back, by evolutionary stages, to the point beyond which death is no more.

Aside from the obvious elementary relevance of the “parable” of the Prodigal Son in illustrating the parental love of the Father, we see in it the deeper “allegory” of the outgoing and return of humanity itself, the reenactment, if you will, of the prodigal “son of God” (Adam, Lk 3,38) who “left home,” and of the divine “Son of God” who stayed with the Father save only to go after the Prodigal. The Father sacrificed what belonged to the “Son” to celebrate the salvation of the “son.”