LECTURE ELEVEN
KYRIOS, THE LORD OF THE SOUL
In several
lecture-courses
[See the list of
publications]
given over the years in the different Groups and attended by many
of the friends here to-day, we have endeavoured to study the Gospels
of St. John, St. Luke and St. Matthew and the great event in
Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different
points of view.
One result of
these studies should have been to establish in our souls a
growing realisation of the greatness of this unique event. We
have understood that the reason why there are four Gospels is
that their authors, writing as inspired occultists, each
wished to describe the great event from a special angle, just
as a photograph of an object is taken from a particular side.
By combining the pictures, each taken from a different angle,
an idea of the reality can be obtained. Each of the
Evangelists makes it possible for us to study one aspect in
particular of the great event in Palestine.
The Gospel of
St. John gives us insight into the great events in Palestine
by opening out a vista of the highest human goals and at the
same time of the sublime realities of the spiritual
worlds.
The Gospel of
St. Luke unveils the mysteries connected with the personality
of Jesus of Nazareth, with the Solomon Jesus and the Nathan
Jesus, until the moment when the Christ descends into
him.
The Gospel of
St. Matthew, as those of you who heard the lectures will know
and others will be able to read, shows how the bodily nature
in which the Christ was to incarnate for three years was
prepared by mysterious processes connected with the racial
stock of the ancient Hebrew people.
In a certain
respect the Gospel of St. Mark can lead us to supreme heights
in our study of Christianity and give us insight into many
matters communicated by the other Gospels but in a less
dramatic way. And so this evening I will take the opportunity
of saying something in reference to the Gospel of St.
Mark.
We must
realise how necessary it is to study many subjects with which
superficial modern thought has no inclination to concern
itself. If we are to understand the Gospel of St. Mark in its
depths we must acquaint ourselves to some extent with the
very different character of the language in which men
expressed themselves at the time when Christ Jesus was on the
Earth. Let me try to convey to you what I mean by using
contrasts as it were of light and shadow.
We make use of
language to express what we want to say and to reveal what
lives in our souls. It is in the way in which language is
used as a means of expressing the inner life of soul that the
several epochs in the evolution of humanity differ radically
from one another. If we go back to the ancient Hebrew epoch
and to the wonderful modes of expression used in the
temple-language, we find that there was a quite different way
of clothing the secrets of the soul in words — a way
undreamed of nowadays. In the old Hebrew language only the
consonants were written, the vowels being inserted
afterwards; and when a word was uttered the echoes of a whole
world reverberated in it — not, as is the case to-day, some
more or less abstract concept. The reason why the vowels were
not written was that they were an indication of the
speaker's inmost being, whereas the consonants were
intended to depict external objects or conditions. For
example, whenever an ancient Hebrew wrote the letter B — or
what corresponded to our present B — it always evoked in him
a sense of warmth and a picture of some outer condition, in
this case something in which one could be enclosed, as in a
shelter or a house. The sound B could not be uttered without
this feeling as an accompaniment. Again, the sound A (ah)
could not be uttered without conveying the impression or
image of something inwardly powerful, of a radiating force.
The content of the soul thus projected into words streamed
out into space and into other souls. Language was therefore
much more alive, much more related to the secrets of
existence than is the case nowadays.
This is one
side — the light side I wanted to convey. But there is also
the other side — the shadow side — constituted by the fact
that in the use of our language we have to a great extent
become utterly shallow. Our language expresses only
abstractions, generalisations. People no longer have any
feeling about this but it could not be otherwise in times
when language is used, even for literary purposes, before
writers have any spiritual content to convey, when enormous
masses of printed matter circulate everywhere, when everyone
feels that he must write something and nothing is considered
unsuitable as subject-matter. When our Society was founded I
discovered that certain authors were attaching themselves to
it simply out of curiosity, in the hope of finding material
for their novels. Why, they thought, should they not find
characters among the Members who could be portrayed in their
stories? So it behoves us to realise that our language
nowadays has become abstract, commonplace and vacuous and
there is neither a sense of its holiness nor, as was once the
case, a feeling of responsibility towards its use. That is
why it is so extraordinarily difficult to put into modern
words the great facts proclaimed by the Gospels. People
cannot understand that our modern language is empty when
compared, for example, with the fulness of meaning implicit
in a word of the ancient Greek language. When we read the
Bible to-day we are reading something that in comparison with
the original wording has been sifted not once but two or
three times, and it is not the best but the worst that has
remained. It does, of course, seem natural to quote from
modern versions of the Bible, but we go astray most
disastrously of all when we quote the Gospel of St. Mark in
its modern rendering.
You know that
at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark, in
Weizsacker's supposedly excellent translation —
although as might be guessed from the high reputation it
enjoys to-day, it is anything but excellent! — these words
are found:
“As it is
written in the prophet Isaiah: Behold I send my messenger
before you who shall prepare the way before you. Listen how
the voice is heard in the wilderness: Prepare the way of
the Lord, make his paths straight.”
[The words in the
English Authorised Version are:
‘As it is written in the Prophets, Behold, I send my
messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way
before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths
straight.’]
When we read a
passage like this it would be self-deception to pretend that
we understand it; if we are honest we shall admit that it is
utterly incomprehensible to us. The passage is either of no
significance or it says something we cannot understand. The
first thing to do, then, is to assemble concepts enabling us
to grasp the meaning of this saying of Isaiah. Isaiah was
referring to the event which was to be of supreme
significance for the evolution of humanity. What has already
been said gives some indication of what Isaiah was
foretelling in these words.
In ancient
days man was endowed with a kind of clairvoyance and through
the forces of his soul was able to rise into the
divine-spiritual world. When this happened he was not using
his Ego, his ‘I’, at the stage of development it
had then reached; he was using his astral body which
contained the powers of seership, whereas the forces rooted
in the Ego were only gradually being awakened by perception
of the physical world. The ‘I’ uses physical
instruments, but in earlier times, if a man were seeking
revelation, he used his astral body, seeing and perceiving
through it. The process of evolution itself consisted in the
transition from use of the astral body to use of the
‘I’. The Christ Impulse was to be the most
powerful factor in the development of the ‘I’. If
the words of St. Paul: ‘Not I but Christ in me’
are fulfilled in the ‘I’, then the
‘I’ is able to grow into the spiritual world
through its own forces, whereas formerly this was possible
only for the astral body.
This, then, is
how evolution proceeded: Man once used his astral body as an
organ of perception, but the astral body became less and less
able to serve that purpose. When the time of Christ's
coming was drawing near, it was losing its power to see into
the spiritual world. Man could no longer be united with that
world through his astral body and the ‘I’ was not
yet strong enough to reveal it. That was the state of things
when the time of Christ's coming was approaching.
In the course
of human evolution the important steps which are eventually
to take place have always to be prepared in advance. This was
so in the case of the Christ Impulse too; but there was
necessarily a period of transition. There could be no sudden
change from the time when man felt his astral body becoming
unreceptive to the spiritual world, becoming barren and
desolate, to a time when the ‘I’ was kindled into
activity through the Christ Impulse. What happened was that
as the result of a certain influence from the spiritual world
a few human beings were able to experience in the astral body
something of what was later to be seen and known by the
‘I’. Egohood was prepared for, anticipated as it
were in the astral body. It was through the ‘I’
and its development that man became Earth-Man in the real
sense. The astral body properly belonged to the evolutionary
period of the Old Moon, when the Angels were at the
human stage. Man is at the human stage on the Earth. On the
Old Moon it was appropriate for man to use his astral body.
Everything else was merely preparation for the development of
the ‘I’. The earliest stages of Earth-evolution
proper were a recapitulation of the Old Moon-evolution, for
man could never become fully man in the astral body; on the
Old Moon it was only the Angels who could reach the human
stage in the astral body. And just as the Christ lived in
earthly man in order to inspire his ‘I’, so there
were Angels who, having reached the human stage on the Old
Moon, prophetically inspired man's astral body as a
preparation for Egohood. A time was to come in human
evolution on the Earth when man would be ready for the
development of the ‘I’. On the Old Moon the
Angels had developed to the highest stage, but as we have
heard, only in the astral body. Now, in order that man might
be prepared for Egohood, it was necessary that in exceptional
conditions, and through grace, certain individuals should be
inspired to work on the Earth as Angels; although they were
men, the reality was that Angels were working in and through
them.
This is a
concept of great importance, without which there can be no
understanding of human evolution in line with that of
occultism. It is easy enough to say simply that everything is
maya, but that is a mere abstraction. We must be able to say:
Yes, a man is standing in front of me, but he is maya —
indeed who knows if he is really a man? Perhaps what seems to
be a human figure is only the outer sheath; perhaps some
quite other being is using this sheath in order to accomplish
a task that is beyond man's capacity. — I have given
an indication of this in
The Portal of Initiation.
Such an event
in the history of humanity actually took place when the
Individuality who had lived in Elijah was reborn as John the
Baptist. An Angel entered into the soul of John the Baptist
in that incarnation, using his bodily nature and also his
soul to accomplish what no human being could have
accomplished. In John the Baptist there lived an Angel whose
mission was to herald in advance the Egohood that was to be
present in its fulness in Jesus of Nazareth. It is of the
greatest importance to realise that John the Baptist was maya
and that an Angel, a Messenger, was living in him. This is
indeed what the Greek says: Lo, I send my Messenger. The
Messenger is an Angel. But nobody pays attention to what is
actually said here. A deep mystery, enacted in the Baptist
and foretold by Isaiah, is indicated. Isaiah foretold that
the future John the Baptist would be maya — in reality he
was to be the vehicle for the Angel, the Messenger who was to
proclaim what man will become if he takes the Christ Impulse
into himself. Angels announce in advance what man will later
become. The passage in question might therefore be
translated: Lo, the bestower of Egohood sends his Messenger
(Angel) before you to whom Egohood is to be given.
Let us now see
if we can discover the meaning of the third sentence. We must
first try to picture the conditions prevailing in man's
inner life when the astral body had gradually lost the power
to send out its forces like feelers and to see clairvoyantly
into the divine-spiritual world. Formerly, when the astral
body was activated, man was able to look into that world, but
this faculty was disappearing and darkness spreading within
him. He had once been able to expand his astral body over all
the beings of the spiritual world, but now he was inwardly
desolate, inwardly isolated — the Greek word is
ἔρημος.
At that time the human soul lived in isolation, in
desolation. This is what the Greek text tells us: Lo, a voice
seems to speak in the desolation of the soul — call it
‘wilderness’ of the soul if you like — when the
astral body can no longer expand into the divine-spiritual
world. Hear the cry in the wilderness, in the desolation of
the soul!
What is it
that is being proclaimed in advance? First of all we must be
clear about the meaning of the word Kyrios, when it
was used in Hebrew but also still in Greek in reference to
manifestations of the soul and spirit. To translate it simply
as ‘the Lord’, with the usual connotation, is
sheer nonsense. In ancient times everyone using the word
Kyrios knew perfectly well that its meaning was
connected with the development of man's soul-life and
its mysteries. In the astral body, as we know, are the forces
of thinking, feeling and willing; the soul thinks, feels and
wills. These are the three forces working in the soul but
they are actually its servants. In earlier times man was
under their domination and he obeyed them, but as his
evolution progressed these forces were to become the servants
of the Kyrios, the Ruler, the Lord — in short, of the
‘I’. Used in relation to the soul, the word
Kyrios actually meant the ‘I’. At this stage it
would no longer be true to say: ‘The Divine-Spiritual
thinks, feels and wills in me’, but rather: ‘I
think, I feel, I will.’ The passage should be rendered
more or less as follows. — Prepare yourselves, you human
souls, to move along those paths that will awaken the Kyrios,
the powerful ‘I’ within you; listen to the cry in
the solitude of the soul. Make ready the path (or way) of the
‘I’, the Lord of the soul. Open the way for his
forces so that he may no longer be the slave but the Ruler of
thinking, feeling and willing. Lo, the power that is the
‘I’ sends his Angel before you, the Angel who is
to give you the possibility of understanding the cry in the
solitude of the astral soul. Prepare the paths of the
‘I’, open the way for the forces of the
‘I’. — Such is the meaning of these significant
words of the prophet Isaiah; they point to the greatest of
all events in the evolution of humanity. You will now
understand the sense in which he speaks about the future John
the Baptist, indicating how man's soul in its solitude
longs for the coming of its Lord and Ruler, the
‘I’. Such is the real meaning of this passage and
in this sense it is to be understood.
Why was John
the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angel? It was
because he had received a particular form of Initiation.
Initiations are not all identical in character and
individuals who have a definite mission to fulfil must
undergo a special form of Initiation. Now the writing of the
stars in the heavens is so ordered as to reveal the nature
and facts of happenings in the spiritual world. Thus a man
may receive the Sun-Initiation, which means that he is
initiated into the mysteries of the spiritual world of Ahura
Mazdao — the spiritual world of which the Sun is the outer
expression. But there are twelve forms of the Sun-Initiation,
each of which differs from the other eleven. A man will
receive a particular form of Initiation according to the
mission he is to fulfil for humanity. His Initiation, though
still a Sun-Initiation, may be of such a kind that the forces
stream in as they do when the Sun is standing, for instance,
in the constellation of Cancer; and these forces will be very
different in the case of an Initiation connected with the Sun
in Libra. These are the expressions used to indicate
specialised Initiations. Individuals chosen for a mission as
lofty as that of John the Baptist must receive Initiation in
the form that can give the strength necessary for the
fulfilment of their mission. And so in order that he might
become the bearer of the Angel, John the Baptist received the
Sun-Initiation originating from the constellation of
Aquarius. The Sun in Aquarius is the symbol for the form of
Initiation received by John the Baptist in order that he
might become the bearer of the Angel. He received the
Sun-forces which flow when the Sun is standing in Aquarius —
the Waterman. The sign was the symbol indicating that John
the Baptist had received this particular Initiation. In
actual fact the name Aquarius, or Waterman, was given to the
zodiacal sign because those who had received that Initiation
acquired the faculty which enabled John the Baptist, for
example, to achieve what he did. When men were plunged under
water, their etheric bodies were momentarily loosened and in
that condition it was possible for them to perceive what
action was of the greatest importance at that particular
time. Baptism in the Jordan revealed to those who underwent
it the momentous significance of that period in history. It
was to this end that John had received the baptismal
Initiation and because this was connected with the rays of
the Sun streaming from its position in a particular
constellation, the constellation too was known symbolically
as the Waterman. The name of the constellation was derived
from the human faculty connected with it, and not vice
versa.
Nowadays many
learned ignoramuses try to explain spiritual happenings of
this character by bringing Heaven down to Earth, saying that
such things are simply indications of the movement of the Sun
through the Zodiac. These learned gentlemen, who
fundamentally know nothing, explain events in humanity by
reference to the heavens. In the case of John the Baptist,
actually the opposite was true: the zodiacal sign was used to
express something that had occurred on Earth and was then
transferred to the Heavens.
John the
Baptist could therefore rightly say: ‘I baptise you
with water.’ This was the same as saying to his
intimate disciples, as he might well have done, that he had
received the Aquarius Initiation. The movement of the Sun
through the Zodiac as seen with physical eyes is in the
direction from Leo to Virgo; the spiritual movement is from
Aquarius to Pisces. Consequently John the Baptist was able to
proclaim something that would work as the forces of the Sun
in Pisces and not in Aquarius; also that the Being who was to
come would give a higher kind of Baptism than he himself was
able to give. The spiritual Sun progresses from Aquarius to
Pisces and when this happens the Aquarius Baptism becomes a
Baptism with spiritual water — Pisces, the Fishes. Hence the
ancient symbol of fishes for the Being who was the bearer of
the Christ. Just as John, through very special influences,
had received the Aquarius Initiation, so all the mysteries
enacted around and in Jesus of Nazareth belonged to a Pisces
Initiation. The Sun had moved forward, spiritually, from one
zodiacal constellation to another, indicating that Jesus of
Nazareth had passed through a Pisces Initiation.
All this is
hinted at in St. Mark's Gospel but such things have to
be presented in pictures. Christ Jesus draws to Himself those
who are seeking that of which Pisces is the symbol. Hence His
first disciples are all of them fishermen. The indication of
the Sun's progression into Pisces is clear when we read
the words of John the Baptist: ‘I have baptised you
with water, but He will baptise you with the Holy
Spirit.’ And as Christ passes along the shore of the
Sea of Galilee, that is to say, when the Sun has moved so far
that its counterpart could be seen rising in Pisces, the
fishermen known as Simon and Simon's brother, James and
James's brother, are inspired to follow Him.
How can we
understand all this? We shall not understand it unless we go
more deeply into the linguistic expressions used in those
times. Our modern way of expressing ourselves is slovenly and
banal. Thus when a human being is standing in front of us, we
say: Here is a man — similarly when there are two or three.
But what is there in front of us is only maya; if we see a
being with two legs and a human face the only way of
expressing what we see in our modern language is to say: That
is a man. But what does occultism take this ‘man’
to be? In the form in which he stands before us he is nothing
but maya — approximately as real as a rainbow in the sky. A
rainbow is a reality only as long as the necessary conditions
of rain and sunshine are present; as soon as the relation
between sunshine and rain changes, the rainbow vanishes. It
is exactly the same in the case of a man. He is only a
confluence of forces of the Macrocosm; we must look for
forces in the heavens, in the Macrocosm. For the occultist,
what we assume on Earth to be a man is simply nothingness.
The truth is that forces are streaming from above downwards
and from below upwards, and they intersect. And just as a
particular combination of rain and sun produces a rainbow, so
do forces streaming together from above and from below out of
the Macrocosm create a phenomenon, an illusory image, which
we take to be a man. But the man we see before us is really
nothing but maya. Where we think we see a man there are
intersecting cosmic forces. You must take this quite
seriously. The man as he stands before us is merely a shadow
of many forces. But the being who manifests in the man may
well be at a different place altogether from the point where
the man with his two legs is standing.
Now think of
three human beings. One is a peasant in ancient Persia,
working his plough in the Persian countryside. He looks like
a man, but in reality he is a soul whose forces are sustained
by some world from above or from below, and if we are to have
real knowledge of him we must ascend to the realm of these
forces. The second man is possibly some kind of official in
ancient Persia. He too is formed from another world through
intersecting forces and again, if we are to know him in the
real sense, we must ascend to the realm of those forces.
Finally, think of a third Persian, or one of whom we should
have to say even more emphatically: he is a veritable
illusion, a phantom. To discover the truth about him we
should have to ascend to the Sun to find the forces
sustaining this phantom figure. There above, among the
mysteries of the Sun, we should find what we might call the
Golden Star — Zarathustra. Rays are sent down and on the
Earth there lives the being we call Zarathustra, though his
essential being is not there at all.
The important
thing is to realise that in ancient times men were well aware
of the significance of names. Names were not given as they
are to-day but according to what was really living in a human
being, apart altogether from the outer appearance. An old man
at the time of Christ would have understood very well what
was meant if someone had pointed to John the Baptist, saying:
There is the Angel of God! The outer appearance would have
been disregarded as a secondary consideration and attention
paid only to the inner reality. — And now suppose the same
mode of expression had been used in connection with Christ
Jesus. What would have been said of Him in times when such
things were understood? Nobody would have so much as dreamed
of giving the appellation Christ Jesus to the body of flesh
moving about the land; the body was regarded merely as the
sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the Sun
had gathered together at this particular point. And when this
body — the body of Jesus — moved from one place to another
it was simply that the Sun-force was being made visible. This
Sun-force was able of itself to move from place to place,
independently of a physical body. Occasionally, Christ Jesus
was said to be ‘in the house’, that is to say, in
the flesh; but the Being in the flesh also moved about
without a body. In the Gospel of St. John, above all, the
Evangelist often writes exactly as if the Sun-force were
present in a body of flesh when in reality the Christ is
moving from place to place purely in the spirit.
That is why it
is so important for the deeds of Christ Jesus always to be
brought into relationship with the physical Sun — which is
the outward expression for the spiritual world when gathered
together at the point where the physical body is present. For
example, when Christ Jesus performs an act of healing, it is
the Sun-force that heals, but the Sun must be in the right
position in the heavens. Thus: ‘At even, when the sun
did set they brought unto Him all that were diseased ...’
and so on. It was important to indicate that this
healing force can flow down only when the physical Sun has
set and is working in a purely spiritual way. Again when
Christ Jesus needs special power in order to do His works, He
must draw it from the spiritual Sun, not from the physically
visible Sun. ‘And in the morning, rising up a great
while before day, He went out ...’ The path of the
Sun and the power of the Sun are expressly indicated,
furthermore that it is the Sun-force that is working, that
Jesus is simply the external sign and that this path taken by
the Sun-force could also become visible to the naked eye.
Wherever St. Mark's Gospel speaks of the Christ, what
is meant is the Sun-force which, in that epoch of
Earth-evolution, worked with special strength upon the land
called Palestine. Moreover the Sun-force, gathered into a
focus, was moving from place to place, and the body of Jesus
was the outward sign making the movement of the Sun-force
visible to physical sight. The paths of Jesus in Palestine
were the paths of the Sun-force that had come down to the
Earth. If you trace the paths of Jesus to form a kind of
chart you will have before you the indication of a cosmic
happening — the Sun-force had penetrated into the land of
Palestine. It is a macrocosmic process — that is the
essential point. This is made especially evident by the
writer of St. Mark's Gospel, who was well aware that a
body which was the bearer of a principle such as the
Christ-Principle must be entirely subservient to it. The
Gospel therefore directs attention to the world so gloriously
proclaimed by Zarathustra — the world which lies behind the
material world and influences the life of man. Through Christ
Jesus it was again made clear how the forces of this
spiritual world work into the Earth. Hence in the body — the
body of the Nathan Jesus as we have heard
[See Lecture-Course on the
Gospel of St. Luke,
lectures IV–VII.]
— which was influenced in a particular way
by the Zarathustra-Individuality, it was inevitable that a
kind of repetition should take place of happenings connected
with Zarathustra.
We know some
of the beautiful legends about Zarathustra. Almost
immediately after his birth occurred the first miracle, that
known as the ‘Zarathustra smile’. The second
miracle was when Duransurun, the King ruling the district
where Zarathustra was born, determined to murder the child
about whom retrograde Magi had made certain statements. But
when the King was on the point of stabbing the child his arm
was paralysed. Finding that he could not use his #8224 to do
away with the child, he ordered him to be taken out into the
wilderness and left among the wild beasts. This is the
expression used to indicate that already in earliest
childhood Zarathustra was destined to see what everyone is
bound to see if his gaze has not been cleansed of impurities.
Instead of the majestic Group-Souls and the higher spiritual
Beings, he sees the emanations of his untamed fantasies. This
is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left
in the wilderness among the wild beasts, but remained
unharmed. This was the third miracle; the fourth was again
connected with wild beasts. And always it was the good
spirits of Ahura Mazdao who ministered to him.
These miracles
are to some extent repeated in St. Mark's Gospel.
‘And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the
wilderness’ (the word really means solitude).
‘And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted
of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels
ministered unto him.’
It is made
clear to us here that the body was being prepared to become a
focus of macrocosmic processes. What had happened to
Zarathustra had to be repeated in the encounter with the wild
beasts. The body became the bearer of macrocosmic
processes.
In its very
first lines the Gospel of St. Mark presents us with a vista
of majestic grandeur and my aim in this lecture has been to
show you how this Gospel acquires new life and power if only
the words are understood in their right sense — not in that
of our commonplace modern speech but in the sense of ancient
language, when whole worlds lay behind each word. Our modern
language needs to be recast in many ways before it is
possible to discover what the words of ancient languages
contained. When we say that man lives on the Earth and
develops his ‘I’, or that he was present on the
Old Moon when it was the Angels who reached their human stage
— all this must be borne in mind when we read: Behold, I
send my Angel before men. These words cannot be understood
without the preliminary knowledge communicated by Spiritual
Science.
If people were
really honest to-day they would admit that the words at the
beginning of St. Mark's Gospel are unintelligible to
them. But instead they adopt an arrogant attitude and
maintain that Spiritual Science is so much fantasy and puts
all kinds of complications into what would otherwise be quite
simple. But the fact of the matter is that people to-day have
no real knowledge; they no longer recognise the principle
adopted, for instance, in ancient Persia, when the sacred
records were re-written from epoch to epoch in order to be
clothed in a new form suited to every period. In this way the
divine Word was recast in the form of the Zend Avesta, then
again recast, and what we have to-day is its latest form. The
Persian scriptures were, in fact, re-written seven times. One
of the tasks of Anthroposophy is to teach men how necessary
it is that records in which sacred mysteries are clothed in
words should be re-written from epoch to epoch. For if we
want to preserve the sublime language of the ancient writings
we should not attempt in our re-writing to adhere
pedantically to the old words; we should rather try to
translate them into words that are immediately intelligible
in the present age. An attempt to do this was made in the
summer in the lecture-course on
Genesis: The Bible Story of Creation,
and you will have realised then how many of
the words must be re-cast. The lecture today may have given
you some idea of how the same principle applies to the Gospel
of St. Mark.
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