Table of Contents
This page summarises the second lecture in Rudolf Steiner’s cycle Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew (GA 117), given in Berlin on 9 November 1909. The English translation used here is by Dorothy S. Osmond and A. P. Shepherd (1957). What follows is Steiner’s view, set out as he gave it.
Why St Matthew
Steiner had begun a study of the four Gospels. He opens this lecture by saying he starts with St Matthew because it shows the most human side of Christ-Jesus, and because it ties his coming to the whole course of human history. In the Gospel of St Luke, he says, two older streams meet: the stream of Zarathustra and the stream that reached its peak in Buddhism. St Matthew has a different theme. It shows how the body was prepared in which the individuality of Zarathustra was born again. In Steiner’s view, it was not enough for Zarathustra simply to be reborn in a Hebrew body. The Hebrew line itself had to be shaped, over many generations, to make that body ready.
The body and the planets
Steiner reminds his listeners that, in his teaching, the human Ego lives in three sheaths that are older than itself. The astral body began on the Old Moon, the etheric body on the Old Sun and the physical body on Old Saturn. So the physical body has four stages of planetary evolution behind it, and it is the most finished instrument a high spiritual being can use.
Abraham and Jahve
Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people, came from Ur in Chaldea and travelled west to Canaan. The cultures around him, in Egypt and Babylon, still worked with the last of an old, dim clairvoyance. Abraham, Steiner says, was chosen because his brain was suited to knowing the world through reason and outer observation instead.
Other gods, in this lecture, were first found deep in the soul. Jahve is the god who is met first in the outer world, through number, measure and weight.
Steiner describes Jahve as the god who comes from outside.
Jahve, however, is the Divine Being who gazes down upon men from outside, who comes to men from outside, manifesting Himself in wind and weather.
Rudolf Steiner, GA 117, Lecture Two, para. 9, tr. Osmond and Shepherd (1957), short excerpt for review and study
Heredity and the sacrifice of Isaac
Abraham’s mission had to pass down by blood, so his descendants had to inherit the same kind of body. Steiner links the twelve sons of Jacob with the twelve signs of the Zodiac. He reads Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac as total devotion to Jahve, through which Abraham received his mission back as a gift. The ram offered in Isaac’s place, he says, stands for giving up the last gift of the old clairvoyance.
Joseph and Egypt
Joseph still had prophetic dreams, a trace of the old clairvoyance. For that reason, Steiner says, he was thrust out from his own people. Yet Joseph became the link between the Hebrews and the Egyptians, the people from whom the Hebrews could learn what they no longer saw for themselves.
Moses
For Steiner, Moses joined the clear, number-based picture of the world held by the Hebrews with the inner, imaginative experience of Egypt. He points to the old image of Moses with two ram’s horns on his forehead as a sign of that role. After this, the Hebrews could return and work out what they had learned in their own way.
The Babylonian exile and Zarathustra
During the exile in Babylon, Steiner says, Zarathustra was teaching in that region in the person of Nazarathos or Zaratas. Some of the greatest Hebrew prophets came under his influence.
Steiner compares the whole history of the Hebrew people to a person growing up. First comes the bodily care of early childhood, then the growth of an inner life, and then teaching that comes from outside.
Forty-two generations
Steiner reads the genealogy at the start of St Matthew (Matthew 1:17) as a picture of this process: 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Babylonian exile, and 14 from the exile to Christ-Jesus, 42 in all.
He then reads the birth story as a repeat of Hebrew history. The star is the incarnating Zarathustra, and the Magi follow it as they once followed their teacher. Their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh repeat, in spirit, the offering of Isaac. A second Joseph is guided by dreams. The child is taken to Egypt and brought back, as the Hebrew people once were.
A turning point in human history
In the earliest times, Steiner says, love was bound up with blood ties and marriage took place only between close kin. With the Roman Empire, peoples mixed widely and this reached a crisis. The Ego now had to grow mature enough for freedom and for a love no longer tied to blood. In the next lecture of the cycle (23 November 1909), Steiner calls this new realm of the full human Ego “the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The temple and the three streams
The lecture closes by bringing three streams together. Zarathustra gives the individuality, Buddha gives his influence to the other Jesus child, and the Hebrew people give the body.
Steiner names the Hebrew people as the builders of the temple.
But a temple had to be provided and this could be done only through the ancient Hebrew people, who produced the temple which was the physical body of Jesus.
Rudolf Steiner, GA 117, Lecture Two, para. 33, tr. Osmond and Shepherd (1957), short excerpt for review and study
Steiner ends by saying he has only sketched these matters, and that the cycle will go on to look further at the mission of the Hebrew people and at how Christ-Jesus emerged from human evolution.
For more on the figures here, see Moses, Zoroaster and the Akashic Records, which Steiner names as his source for Abraham’s route.
