IX
THE PROPHETICAL DOCUMENTS
and
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY
During the
whole course of our lectures, you have seen what our position
is in relation to the document called the Gospel of St. John,
standing as we do upon the foundation of Spiritual Science.
You have seen that it is not a question of gaining out of
this document some particular truths about the spiritual
world, but of showing that, independent of all human and
other documents, it is possible to penetrate into that world,
just as anyone wishing to learn mathematics at present does
so independent of every original document by means of which,
in the course of human evolution, different branches of
mathematics have first been communicated. What, for example,
do those students know who begin to study elementary
geometry, acquiring it by means of their own faculties from
geometry itself, what do they know of the geometry of Euclid,
of the original document in which this elementary geometry
was presented to the world for the first time? If the student
has first learned geometry by means of his own faculties, he
can judge and appreciate better the nature and meaning of the
original documents. This should show us more and more that
those truths which deal with this spiritual life can be
gained out of the life of the spirit itself. If a person has
found these truths for himself and then is directed to the
historical documents, he finds in them again what he already
knows. In this way he acquires a right and true human
valuation of them. We have seen in the course of these
lectures, that the Gospel of St. John really loses nothing in
value by this method; we have seen that the respect for and
appreciation of documents do not become less for anyone
standing upon the foundation of Spiritual Science than for
those who have stood entirely upon the foundation of such
documents. Indeed, we have seen that we find again in the
Gospel of St. John the most profound teaching concerning
Christianity, a teaching which we can also call the teaching
of Universal Wisdom. We have also seen that only when we have
grasped this profound meaning of the Christian teaching, can
we understand why the Christ had to enter into human
evolution just at a definite time at the beginning of our
era.
We have seen
how humanity developed in the post-Atlantean age. It has been
pointed out that the original Indian civilization was the
first great post-Atlantean cultural epoch after the Atlantean
Flood; that the characteristic of this original Indian
civilization was that the souls of men were filled with
longing and memory. We have characterized memory and longing
by saying that they consisted in the preservation of living
traditions from an epoch of human evolution ante-dating the
Atlantean Flood. At that time, quite in conformity with their
nature and inner being, men existed in a kind of nebulous,
clairvoyant state in which they could gaze into the spiritual
world, thus becoming acquainted with it through personal
experience and knowledge, just as men of the present time are
acquainted with the four kingdoms of nature, the mineral,
plant, animal and human kingdoms. We have seen that prior to
the Atlantean Flood, there existed as yet no such sharp
distinction as we have today between the states of
consciousness during the day and the night. At that time,
when the human being sank into sleep at night, his inner
experiences were not so unconscious and dark as they are now,
for when the images of day life submerged, those of the
spiritual life emerged, and he was then in the midst of the
things of the spirit world. In the morning, when he again
dipped down into his physical body, the experiences and
realities of the divine-spiritual world sank into darkness,
and around him arose the images of present reality, images of
the present mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. The sharp
distinction between the unconsciousness of the night and day
waking-consciousness appeared only after the Atlantean Flood,
that is to say, in our post-Atlantean age. Then, in a certain
sense, as far as direct perception is concerned, men were cut
off from spiritual reality and were more and more placed
outside in purely physical reality. All that remained was the
memory of the existence of another kingdom, a kingdom of
spiritual beings, and united with this memory was the soul's
longing to rise again by means of some exceptional condition
into the regions out of which it had descended. Those
exceptional conditions were only granted to a few chosen
people — the initiates — whose inner faculties
had been awakened in the Mystery Places enabling them to gaze
into the spiritual world; to those others who were not able
to do this, these initiates were able to give information
about that world and testify to its reality. In the original
Indian cultural period, Yoga was the process by which men
were able to revert to the ancient nebulous, clairvoyant
state of consciousness. When certain exceptional natures were
initiated, they became, as a result, the leaders of mankind,
witnesses of the spiritual world.
Under the
effect of this longing and memory within this original
Indian, pre-Vedic civilization, that soul-mood was
particularly developed which regarded physical reality as
Maya or illusion. These primitive Indian people said that
actual reality exists alone in the spiritual world into which
we can be reinstated only by means of an exceptional
condition, through Yoga. This world of spiritual beings and
processes is the true one. What is seen with the eyes, is
unreal, is illusion, Maya. That was the first religious
fundamental experience of the post-Atlantean age, and Yoga
was the first form of initiation of this period. In fact
there was yet no comprehension of the true mission of the
post-Atlantean age. For it was not the mission of humanity to
consider the reality, which we call physical existence, as
Maya or illusion and then to flee from it and become foreign
to it. Post-Atlantean humanity had another mission, that of
conquering more and more the physical reality, of becoming
master of the world of physical phenomena. But it is also
quite comprehensible that men, now for the first time
transferred to this physical plane, should in the beginning
consider as Maya or illusion what previously had hardly
emerged within the spiritual reality, but what was now all
that they were able to perceive. This attitude toward reality
could never have continued. This understanding of the
physical reality as an illusion could not remain the vital
nerve of the post-Atlantean period. And we have seen that
postAtlantean humanity, in the different cultural epochs,
conquered bit by bit the connection with the physical
reality.
In that period
of civilization which we designate the ancient Persian
— the periods which history knows as the Persian and
Zarathustrian periods are the last echoes of what is meant
here — in that second period, we saw mankind taking the
first step toward growing out of the ancient Indian principle
and conquering physical reality. Still nowhere was there a
fondness for sinking into the physical reality, also there
existed nowhere anything like a study of the physical world.
There was, however, more of this in the Persian period than
in the ancient Indian period. We get a reverberation of the
mood that looks upon physical reality as illusion in what has
survived in later epochs of ancient Indian civilization. Yet
our present civilization could never have arisen out of that
Indian culture. All the wisdom of that period turned its gaze
away from the physical world and directed it upward toward
spiritual worlds which existed as a memory. The study of
physical reality and its elaboration seemed to them futile,
therefore the actual Indian principle could never have
brought forth a science serviceable to our earthly world; it
could never have produced that mastery of the laws of nature
which forms the foundation of our present civilization. This
could never have sprung from ancient India, for why should
one seek to learn to know the forces of a world resting only
upon illusion! If this was changed in the Indian cultural
period also, it was not because of something flowing out of
itself, but was due to subsequent foreign influences.
For the
ancient Persian civilization, the external, physical reality
exists as a sphere of activity. It was looked upon as the
expression of a hostile Deity, but the hope arose that with
the aid of the God of Light this substantial field of reality
might be penetrated, that it might be changed into something
permeated by spiritual powers and good divinities. Thus the
adherents of the Persian civilization already sensed somewhat
the reality of the physical world. It is true they still
considered it the realm of the God of Darkness, but for all
that, they always hoped that they might be able to
incorporate within it the forces of the good gods.
Humanity then
passed over into that period of civilization which found its
historical expression in the
Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egyptian culture and we have
seen how it happened that the starry heavens were no longer
Maya to these people of the third epoch, but something whose
written characters could be read. In all that still seemed a
Maya to the Indians in the course and splendour of the stars,
the Persian saw an expression of the resolutions and purposes
of divine-spiritual beings. They gradually accustomed
themselves to the idea that outer reality is not illusion but
a revelation, a manifestation of divine-spiritual beings.
Then in the Egyptian civilization, men began to apply what
they read in the stars to the divisions of the earth. Why was
it the Egyptians became the masters of Geometry? It was
because they believed that through thought, which subdivides
the earth, matter can also be controlled, and that matter,
which can be grasped by the human spirit, is easily
transformed. Thus gradually a later humanity permeated this
material world — looked upon at first as only Maya
— with the spirit, and this spirit also gradually
emerged within the inner soul life of the human being.
We have seen,
in fact, that only in the later Atlantean age, humanity had
reached the point where it could experience the ego or the
“I AM.” For as long as men beheld spiritual
images, they knew that they themselves belonged to the
spiritual world, that they were themselves images among other
images. Then came a comprehension of the spirit within the
depths of the human being. Let us now consider, in connection
with what we have partially reviewed today, the evolution of
the inner nature of men.
As long as the
human being of the Atlantean period looked outward with a
kind of dream-like, clairvoyant consciousness he did not
really give much attention to his own inner nature. The inner
world, which is encompassed by the ego or the “I
AM,” was not yet delineated in sharp contours. In
proportion as the outer spiritual world disappeared, men
became conscious of their own inner world of the spirit. In
the ancient Indian civilization there still existed in the
individual an extraordinary attitude of soul toward his own
spiritual life. People said: If we wish to penetrate into the
spiritual world, to raise ourselves above illusion, we must
lose ourselves in the spiritual world, we must obliterate as
much as possible the “I AM” and become absorbed
into the All-Spirit, into Brahman. Thus especially in ancient
initiation, it was a matter of a loss of personality. An
impersonal absorption into the spiritual world is what
distinguished the most ancient form of initiation. This was
no longer so, for example, in the third epoch of
civilization, for right up to that time the human
self-consciousness had by degrees been developing
stronger and stronger. The human being became continually
more and more conscious within the inner part of his ego
being. By developing a fondness for the physical matter about
him, by deepening his knowledge of it by means of the laws
which the human spirit had thought out, but which had not
been acquired in any sort of shadowy dream-state, he became
gradually more aware of his ego, until this consciousness of
personality reached a certain high point in the ancient
Egyptian civilization. In this awareness of the personality,
there was present something else that appeared at the same
time inferior and as though now bound to the physical world
and absorbed into it, something that had no possibility of
acquiring a connection with that from which the human being
had been born.
If we wish to
grasp the whole course of events, we must picture to our
souls two fundamental soul-moods in human evolution. We must
remember how humanity of the Atlantean and ancient Indian
periods longed to strip off personality. The Atlanteans were
able to accomplish this, and they took it for granted that
they would each night strip off their personality and live in
the land of the spirit. The Indians could do this, because
their principle of initiation led them, by means of their
Yoga, into what was impersonal. To repose in the universal
divine substance was their desire. In a later branch of the
human family, this reposing within the universal was
preserved in the consciousness of being united with preceding
generations. It remained in the consciousness of the people
that they had been born out of a line of ancestry, and an
individual human being felt himself united through the blood
with generations as far back as his earliest ancestor. This
was the mood which grew out of that ancient soul-mood of
feeling oneself spiritually sheltered within the
divine-spiritual substance. Thus it happened that those human
beings who had passed through a normal evolution began in the
third cultural epoch to feel themselves as individuals, yet,
at the same time, knowing that they were sheltered within the
whole, within the divine-spiritual, that they belonged
through the blood relationship to the entire line of
forefathers, and that God lived for them in the blood flowing
down to them through the generations. We have seen how a
certain degree of perfection of this mood had been developed
within those people who composed the followers of the Old
Testament. “I and Father Abraham are one,” means
that the individual felt himself preserved within the whole
line of descent back to Abraham. That was, in general, what
constituted the fundamental mood of all normally developed
races of the third cultural period. However, only to the
followers of the Old Testament was it predicted that there
existed something spiritually more profound than the Divine
Fatherhood that ran through the blood of successive
generations. We have already called attention to that great
moment in human evolution when this was prophesied. When
Moses heard the voice calling unto him saying: “When
thou wouldst proclaim My Name, say that ‘I AM’
hath said it unto thee!”, then here for the first time
sounds forth the knowledge and manifestation of the Logos, of
the Christ. Here for the first time, for those who could
comprehend, was prophetically proclaimed that in God there
existed something that not only had to do with the blood
relationship, but that in Him there existed something purely
spiritual. What ran through the Old Testament was like a
prophecy. Who was it, in fact, who at that time in a prophecy
revealed His name to Moses? We must now dwell a little on
this question. Here again we have a passage which the
commentators of the Gospel consider very superficially, not
recognizing the fact that one must examine these records as
thoroughly as possible.
Who was it who
announced His name prophetically, to Whom the name “I
AM” must be given? Who was it? We find the answer, if
with earnestness and dignity we properly grasp a certain
passage of the Gospel. It is the passage which we find in the
12th Chapter, beginning with the 37th verse. Here
Christ-Jesus points to the fulfilment of the words of the
Prophet Isaiah, to the prophecy with its reference to the
fact that the Jews would not believe in Christ-Jesus. Jesus
Himself refers to Isaiah:
He hath
blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, that they
should not see with their eyes nor understand with their
hearts and be converted and I should heal them.
These things
said Isaiah when he saw His glory and spake with Him.
Isaiah
spake with Him! With Whom did Isaiah
speak? Reference is made here to the passage in Isaiah 6: 1
which reads:
In the year
that the King of Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting
upon a throne high and lifted up and His train filled the
Temple.
Whom did
Isaiah see? This is clearly told here in the Gospel of St.
John. He saw the Christ! He was always to be seen in the
spirit and now you will no longer find it incomprehensible
when Spiritual Science points out that He whom Moses saw, who
proclaimed the words “I AM” as His name, was the
same Being who then appeared upon the earth as the Christ.
The actual Spirit of God of antiquity is none other than the
Christ. We are now at a point in this religious record which
is very difficult to understand, especially for those who do
not go at it properly. This passage must be clearly
understood, particularly because with the words Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, the most extraordinary confusion has arisen.
It is a fact that exoterically these words have always been
used in the most manifold ways in order that the real
esoteric meaning might not be directly evident. When,
according to ancient Judaism, the “father” was
mentioned, the physical father whose blood flowed down
through the generations was meant. When they spoke of Him who
revealed Himself spiritually, as Isaiah spoke of the
“Lord,” they were referring to the Logos of which
the Gospel of St. John speaks. The writer of this Gospel
means nothing more nor less than that the One who could
always be perceived in the spirit became flesh and dwelt
among us!
When it has
become clear to us that in a certain sense the Christ was
also spoken of in the Old Testament, we shall understand what
place the ancient Hebrew peoples have held in our evolution.
The ancient Hebrew-principle grew out of the Egyptian
civilization. It stands out in bold relief against the
background of the Egyptian principle.
Thus we see
how the normal course of human evolution progressed as it was
described yesterday. The first cultural period of the
postAtlantean age is the ancient Indian, the second the
ancient Persian, the third the
Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egyptian civilization; then
follows the fourth, the Greco-Latin and the fifth which is
our own present cultural epoch. Before the fourth epoch
began, that people which with its traditions provided the
soil for Christianity emerged out of the third epoch like a
mysterious branch. When we summarize all that we have been
hearing in these lectures, we shall find it much more
comprehensible that the appearance of the Christ had to take
place in the fourth era.
We have
already emphasized the fact that in the fourth epoch the
human being had reached the point where he objectified his
own spirituality, his own ego and had placed it out in the
world. We perceive how gradually he permeated matter with his
own spirit, with his ego-spirit. We behold the works of the
Greek sculptors, and dramatists and see how they have
presented, embodied before the soul, what they call their own
soul qualities. Later, in the Roman period, we see how the
human being also becomes conscious of what he is, and we see
how he established this in the outer world as
“Justice” (Jus), although a distorted
Jurisprudence disguised it. For the deeper students of
Jurisprudence, it is clear that real justice, which considers
the human being its subject, first arose in this fourth
cultural epoch. At that time the people had become conscious
enough of their own personality to feel themselves for the
first time as real citizens of the State. Even in the Greek
period, the individual felt himself as a member of the whole
municipal State. This was more important to an Athenian than
to be an individual man. But to say “I am a
Roman” or “I am an Athenian” meant two very
different things. For to say, “I am a Roman”
meant that, as an individual human being, as a citizen of the
State, he had an importance, he had a will. Thus it could
also be proven that the origin of the concept of a
“testament” first became possible in this epoch,
for this is a Roman concept. Only at that time did the human
being make his will so personal, so individualized, that he
wished to be active in it even beyond death. The things which
Spiritual Science has to say harmonize even in the details
with the actual facts.
The human
being gradually reached the point of permeating matter with
his spirit and this increased as time went on. The fourth
epoch was that in which he thoroughly incorporated into
matter what he comprehended with his spirit. In the Egyptian
Pyramids you can see how spirit and matter are still
wrestling with one another, how what had been grasped by the
spirit had not yet fully expressed itself in matter. In the
Greek Temple is expressed the complete turning point of the
postAtlantean age. For one who understands a little of this,
there is no more significant, no more perfect architecture
than the Greek which is the purest expression of the inner
characteristic of space. The pillars are considered
wholly as supports, and what rests upon them is felt as
something that must be supported, something that presses
down. The supreme, emancipated concept of space is here in
the Greek Temple carried to its ultimate conclusions. Few
people have subsequently felt the concept of space in this
way, yet there have been those who could have felt it, but
they felt it pictorially. Let anyone test the space
in the Sistine Chapel. Stand at the rear wall which bears the
great picture of the Last Judgment, and look up. You will see
that the rear wall rises obliquely upward. It inclines thus
because the architect felt the concept of space, but
did not think it so abstractly as others. Therefore
this wall stands there so marvellously at an angle. This
means that he no longer experienced the concept of space as
did the Greeks. There is an artistic sense which feels the
mysterious measure concealed in space. To sense it
architecturally does not mean to sense it by means of the
eyes, but by means of something else. People easily believe
today that right is the same as left, above the same as
below, forward the same as backward. If one would only
consider the following: There are pictures in which three,
four or five angels can be seen floating about. They can be
painted in such a way that one would be right in thinking
that they are in danger of falling at any moment. They can
likewise be painted by someone who has developed the right
sense for space, in such a manner that there is no
possibility of such a thought arising; they could not fall
because they mutually support each other. We then have the
dynamic relationships in space pictorially represented before
us. The Greeks had it architecturally before them.
They experienced the horizontal not alone as line, but as the
force of pressure and they experienced the pillar not only as
a block of something, but as supporting power. This
feeling-with-the-lines-of-space means,
“feeling the living Spirit in the act of
geometrizing.” That is what Plato meant when he used
the tremendous expression, “God geometrizes
continually.”
These lines
really exist in space and the Greeks built their Temples in
accordance with them. What was in reality a Greek Temple?
From necessity it was the dwelling-house of their God. It was
something quite different from the Church of the present day.
The present Church is a place for preaching. The God Himself
dwelt within the Greek Temple. The people were only present
incidentally when they wished to be with their God. One who
understands the forms of the Greek Temple, experiences a
mysterious connection with the God dwelling within it. There,
in the columns, and in what rests upon them, is to be seen
not only what the human being has fashioned in imagination,
but something that his God would have thus made, had He
wished to create a dwelling place for Himself. This was the
climax of the permeation of Matter with Spirit.
Let us now
compare a Greek Temple with a Gothic Church. Nothing
derogatory of the Gothic is intended, for from another point
of view the Gothic Church stands upon a still higher level
than the Greek Temple. In a Gothic Church you can see that
what is expressed in its form cannot possibly be thought of
or felt without the presence of the devotional congregation.
In the arched forms of the Gothic there exists something (for
one who can experience it) which can only be expressed in the
following words: If the devotional congregation were not
within, and the hands were not placed together in the form of
an arch, the whole would be incomplete. The Gothic Church is
not only the dwelling-house of God, but it is at the same
time the meeting place for people who are praying to God.
Thus, in a certain sense, mankind again over-stepped the
zenith of its own evolution. We see how all that degenerated
which the Greeks felt in line, column and beam in such a
remarkable manner through their sense of space. A column
which does not support, but which is there only as a
decorative motif, was for the Greek feeling no column at all.
Everything in human evolution is in perfect accord. The Greek
cultural period was the most beautiful expression of the
interpenetration of humanity's consciousness discovered
within itself, and of what was felt as the Divine in outer
space. The human being had wholly coalesced with the physical
sense-world in this epoch.
It is nonsense
when modern scholars wish to obscure what was felt in earlier
ages. From the Spiritual-Scientific point of view, we look
upon the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean age as an epoch
in which the human being harmonized perfectly with his
environment. That age — in which he seemed to coalesce
with the outer reality — was alone qualified to
understand that the Divine is able to appear in an individual
man. All earlier epochs would have understood almost anything
more easily than this. They would have felt that the Divine
was much too exalted and sublime to appear in a physical
human form. It was just this physical form against which they
desired to guard the Divine. Therefore, “Thou shalt
make no image” had to be announced to just that people
whose mission it was to grasp the idea of God in His
spiritual form. Out of concepts such as these, this people
evolved and out of its womb was begotten the idea of the
Christ, the idea that spirit was to appear in the flesh. For
this mission was the Jewish people chosen and within it, in
the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Christ Event had to
occur.
Thus for the
Christian consciousness, the whole of human existence falls
into a pre-Christian and a post-Christian period. The God-Man
could only be comprehended by the human being at a certain
time. Thus we see how the Gospel of St. John connects in full
consciousness and in its ideas, with what was — to use
a trivial expression — precisely in conformity with the
times, with what had its origin directly in the consciousness
of the age. Consequently it happened wholly of itself, that
the thought imagery, through which the writer of the Gospel
tried to grasp the greatest event in cosmic history, seemed
to him best expressed in the forms of Greek thought, as it
were, like something inwardly related. And gradually the
whole Christian feeling grew into these thought forms. We
shall see how something like the Gothic had to appear during
the progress of evolution, because Christianity was, as it
were, called upon to lead evolution again beyond the
material. Christianity could arise only at a time when men
were not yet so deeply immersed in matter that they were
likely to overestimate its worth; when they were not yet
plunged so deeply into matter as is the case in our age, but
were still able to spiritualize it and to penetrate it.
Thus the birth
of Christianity appears as something positively necessary in
the whole spiritual course of human events. If we desire to
understand what form Christianity should gradually assume,
understand what form was prophesied for it by such an
individuality as the writer of this Gospel, we must take
under consideration, in the next lecture, certain essential
and important concepts.
It has been
shown that everything must be taken literally, but that first
the alphabet must be really understood. It is not without
significance that the name of John appears nowhere in the
Gospel and that John is always spoken of as the
“Disciple whom the Lord loved.” We have seen what
mystery lies hidden behind this fact, a mystery of profound
significance.
Now we shall
consider another expression, one that makes it directly
possible for us to make a connection with the subsequent
evolutionary periods of Christianity. The manner of speaking
of the “Mother of Jesus” in the Gospel, is
usually overlooked. If the ordinary, average Christian were
asked: who was the Mother of Jesus? he would reply:
“The Mother of Jesus was Mary?” And many indeed
will believe that there is something in the Gospel of St.
John to the effect that the Mother of Jesus was called Mary.
But nowhere in this Gospel is there anything to indicate that
the Mother of Jesus was called Mary. Wherever reference is
made to her, she is quite intentionally called just the
Mother of Jesus. The meaning of this we shall learn later. In
the chapter on the Marriage in Cana, we read: “and the
Mother of Jesus was there;” and further on, it says:
“His Mother saith unto the servants.” Nowhere do
we find the name “Mary.” And when we meet her
again in the Gospel of St. John, when we see the Saviour upon
the Cross, we read:
“There
stood by the Cross of Jesus, His Mother, and His Mother's
sister Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and Mary
Magdalene.”
It is clearly
and definitely stated who stood by the Cross. The Mother was
there, then her sister who was the wife of Cleophas and who
was called Mary, and Mary Magdalene. Whoever thinks about it
at all, must say to himself: It is extraordinary that the two
sisters are both called Mary? That is not customary in our
day. It was also not customary at that time. And since the
writer of the Gospel calls the sister, Mary, it is clear that
the Mother of Jesus was not called Mary. In the Greek text,
it says clearly and distinctly: “Below stood the Mother
of Jesus, and His Mother's sister Mary who was the wife of
Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.” For a proper
understanding the question arises: “Who was the Mother
of Jesus?” Here we touch upon one of the most important
questions in the Gospel of St. John: “Who was the real
father of Jesus, and who was His mother?”
Who was the
father? Can this question be asked at all? Not only can it be
asked according to the Gospel of St. John, but also according
to St. Luke. For it would show an extraordinary absence of
thought not to see that at the Annunciation it was
proclaimed:
The Holy
Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest
shall overshadow thee; therefore also, that holy thing
which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of
God.
Even in the
Gospel of St. Luke it is pointed out that the father of Jesus
is the Holy Spirit. This must be taken literally and those
theologians who do not recognize it cannot really read the
Gospel. Thus we must ask the great question: — How does
all this harmonize with what we have heard in the words,
“I and the Father are one,” “I and Father
Abraham are one,” “Before Abraham was, was the I
AM?” How can we bring into harmony with all this, the
undeniable fact that the Evangelist sees the Father-Principle
in the Holy Spirit? And what must we think about the
Mother-Principle, according to the Gospel of St. John?
In order that
you may come tomorrow properly prepared in spirit to
formulate these questions, your attention should also be
called to the fact that a sort of series of generations is
presented in the Gospel of St. Luke; that we are told that
Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist; that He began to
teach in His thirtieth year and that He was the son of
“Mary and Joseph, who was the son of Eli,” etc.,
and there follows the whole line of generations. If we trace
this succession, we see that it goes back to Adam. Then
follows something extraordinary; here we find the words:
“who was the son of God.” Just as the generations
are traced back from son to father in the Gospel of St. Luke,
so is the succession traced back from Adam to God. Such a
passage must be taken very seriously! Now we have gathered
together the questions which should lead us tomorrow directly
into the very center of the Gospel of St. John.
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