Jesus Initiating Lazarus in Public, Divulging Secrets from a Mystery Rite and Receiving a Death Sent

An artist's impression of Bethany in the first century

It is remarkable that the dates of the birth and death of Jesus are nowhere recorded in the New Testament. There are no descriptions of what he looked like and numerous details that would be essential for any modern Western biographer are lacking in the most authoritative records concerning the individual who became the Christos or Messiah (‘the anointed one’). These are sure signs that the four evangelists who composed the canonical gospels and the Pharisee Paul of Tarsus had different mentalities from us. Our consciousness is firmly rooted in the physical world disclosed by the five senses. In contrast the gospels refer to angels in connection with Jesus’ birth, temptation and resurrection, so we can infer that the standpoint adopted is a spiritual one.

Another interesting fact concerning the emergence of Christianity in ancient times is that there is evidence that the crucifix, the rather gruesome representation of Jesus nailed to a wooden cross, was not part of the worship and iconography of the earliest communities. The physical brutality of the Romans in scourging and beating Jesus during his trial and the barbaric nailing of his hands and ankles to the cross are prominent in the passion story, variously refracted in the four gospels. But it seems that in the devotional lives of the Followers of the Way (Acts 9:2; not ‘Christians,’ originally a Roman term of abuse), the power of the resurrection was the focal point. In other words the reality of Golgotha (the Aramaic name for the place of crucifixion, ‘Calvary’ in Latin), Paul’s ‘word of the cross’ (1 Corinthians 1:18) as a central motif of preaching, was received as an impulse in the present. It was only from the fourth century, in connection with the politicization of the church, that the crucifix became a kind of relic looking back to the sacrifice of the man Jesus. The fact of the empty tomb, and the proclamation by Mary Magdalene that ‘I have seen the Lord’ (John 20:18) were motivating truths that guided these pioneers of the spirit in walking the narrow path of the gospel.

So what was Golgotha and its consummation through the resurrection and ascension of Christ Jesus? Well, libraries have been filled by authors wanting to explain ‘the deed of Christ’ enacted through his entering the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The Austrian seer and philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) adopted an innovative approach that connects the beginnings of Christianity with the cults of the Essenes, Sadducees and Pharisees as well as the Greco-Roman mystery religions. His proposition is that the New Testament contains records of the responses of various influential cultic communities to the Christ impulse. One of the central motifs of the four gospels is the use of proof texts from the Old Testament cited to demonstrate how the life of Christ Jesus fulfilled what had been expected in earlier times concerning the Messiah. But rather than speaking of Israelite religion in generalities, like conventional biblical scholars, Steiner reframes this in terms of the ‘ideal initiate’ according to the various mystery streams operative in the ancient Near East (abbreviated ‘ANE’) and Greece during the first century.

From this radical perspective - still revolutionary a century after he taught these things ̶ he refers to ‘the mystery of Golgotha’ as dense shorthand for a complex web of truths woven into the numerous aspects of the incarnation of the Christ. What does he mean by this musterion, Greek for ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’? The first point is that this connects Christianity with the mystery religions of the first century, that is, what had existed in the seclusion of these cults was enacted as an event on the stage of world history. Second, he draws attention to the fact that Jesus taught his disciples deeper or ‘esoteric’ doctrines that were not accessible to ordinary people who crowded around him at times. This is explicit in connection with the parable of the reckless sower who scatters seed here, there and everywhere (Matthew 13:1-9, and parallels):

Then the disciples came and said to him, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ And he answered them, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets (musteria) of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. … This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand (Matthew 13:10-13).

When surrounded by the inner circle of the disciples Jesus discloses the deeper meaning of the parable of the sower by interpreting it as an extended metaphor or allegory (13:18-23). The kinds of soil are metaphors for the heart condition and receptivity of a person. The seed that falls on the path signifies the person who does not understand the seed-like power of the gospel. The rocky ground is the inner condition of a superficial person who is initially enthusiastic but cannot endure. The seed sown amongst thorns represents the one who gives priority to the outer things of the world. The good soil denotes someone who understands the gospel and receives its transformative power deep within self, and this manifests as an abundant harvest.

When I attended theological college lecturers and authors of prescribed texts went to great lengths to try to rationalize away the obvious fact that Jesus taught some things in secret. The facts go against the grain of a humanistic gospel of Jesus as a good man from Galilee whose simple teachings were open to everyone. Yet the overt fact of esoteric teachings suggests that we need to approach the four gospels and the letters of Paul from the perspective of the mystery schools of the day, and it is here that battles with initiates of the old world order can be discerned.

This comes into focus in connection with the close relationship of Jesus with Lazarus, the one whom he has a special love for. Lazarus becomes ill and enters an unconscious state and his sisters Mary and Martha send word to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ The key to the meaning is given in Jesus’ response to the news:

But when Jesus heard it he said, ‘This illness is not unto death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it’ (John 11:4).

But he ‘stayed two days longer in the place where he was.’ When Jesus arrived in Bethany ‘Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days’ (John 11:3,6,17). Despite the literal sense of certain statements this cannot refer to the physical death of Lazarus, that is, a corpse beginning to decay in the tomb. Brain cells are extremely sensitive to the lack of oxygen. Some brain cells start dying less than five minutes after their oxygen supply ceases. As a result, brain hypoxia can rapidly cause severe brain damage or death. Anyone brain dead for even an hour or two (not on life support) is way beyond resuscitation. It would contravene everything that we know about the human body through biomedicine to propose that anyone, including Jesus, could resuscitate a corpse after nearly four days!

Jesus has to spell out what is happening so that his disciples get the picture:

'Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him out of sleep.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.’ Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead’ (John 11:11-14; all subsequent biblical references are to John’s gospel).

First, the physical reality is that Lazarus was ‘asleep’ but not in the normal sense of resting the body. Rather, he was in a deep trance state and obviously his sisters were convinced that he was dead because they had wrapped his body in burial cloths (11:44). The events at Bethany need to be viewed in connection with the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus concerning the trials of initiation involving rebirth (3:1-10). Jesus tells the rabbi that ‘unless one is born anew he cannot see the kingdom of heaven’ (3:3). Rebirth implies the death of the old. The second point is that ‘Lazarus,’ the human personality or mask, had ceased to exist because his old self died through the rite of initiation.

In the initiation ceremonies conducted in ancient times the candidate remained in the chamber for a period of three and a half days, and if successful in passing the test then they emerged transformed. In other words the person who was called from the chamber by the words of the initiator was different from the one who had entered a few days earlier. In this role Jesus cries out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth’ (11:43). This is the last time that he refers to him as ‘Lazarus’ and henceforth within the inner circle of the disciples we encounter ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Lazarus is ‘dead.’ Through the initiatory trial he had been transformed into the Beloved Disciple who plays a central role in the stories of the last supper (13:23-26), the passion (18:15-16), the crucifixion (19:26-27) and the resurrection (20:1-10). As the distillation of these experiences that took him to the foot of the cross, he eventually wrote the Gospel of John.

An ancient mosaic from San Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, portraying the raising of Lazarus.

The clincher that links the Beloved Disciple to Lazarus is the shock of the Johannine community when he died. Peter asks the risen Lord about the disciple whom he loved:

Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ The saying spread abroad among the brethren that this disciple was not to die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’ (21:20-23)

When Lazarus was initiated by Jesus he was ostensibly raised from the dead as far as many people were concerned, and we can appreciate that those not privy to what actually happened may have assumed that this disciple was impervious to death. This looks like a spurious tradition designed to explain the mistaken belief that the Beloved Disciple was immortal. The text is intelligible as the gloss of a scribe who either did not know that Lazarus and the Beloved Disciple were one and the same person, or who did not want to divulge this secret linkage that constitutes the key to the deeper meaning of the Fourth Gospel.

The mysteries were considered to be dangerous and the candidate entered into a world of terrors, severely tested to determine if they were worthy of the honour being offered. Steiner comments:

There was no greater crime than the ‘betrayal’ of secrets to the uninitiated. The ‘traitor’ was punished with death and the confiscation of his property. We know that the poet Aeschylus was accused of having reproduced on the stage something from the Mysteries. He was able to escape death only by fleeing to the altar of Dionysos and by legally proving that he had never been initiated (Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity, 2nd ed., Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972, p. 18).

In the remarkable narrative of John 11 we can consult the work of a master storyteller who is able to paint vivid pictures with words, and who understands the drama of suspense and the catharsis of denouement. Unique to this gospel, the story takes us into the emotional life of a family in Bethany and records the fact that Jesus performed the final stage of initiating his pupil Lazarus in public. Divulging secrets associated with the mysteries was breaking a taboo and this grievous sin in the eyes of the Jewish religious authorities could not go unpunished. Witnesses informed the Pharisees of the shocking event at Bethany and they gathered with the chief Sadducean priests in the council of the Sanhedrin to discuss the matter:

One of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.’ He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not only for the nation but to gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day forward they took counsel how to put him to death (11:49-53).

It is no coincidence that immediately after he raised Lazarus from the trance-like sleep that the religious authorities pronounced a death penalty on Jesus. Clearly Caiaphas had occult knowledge concerning the power that would be released through Jesus’ death, but the evangelist expands the perspective to the calling of the Gentiles included in the ‘children of God.’ Theologians refer to this as Caiaphas’ ‘unconscious prophecy,’ but the relevant point for our discussion is the causal nexus. The Sanhedrin formally pronounced the death sentence on Jesus in absentia, the punishment for bringing a mystery rite into the public domain. The only problem was that in Roman-occupied Palestine the governor Pontius Pilate held the exclusive power of pronouncing and executing the death penalty (18:31). All that remained was to find a pretext for Pilate to decide that this course of action was necessary, and in the trial the trumped-up charge that Jesus regarded himself as a king who threatened the power of Caesar did the trick (19:12-16).

We have shown that the beginnings of Christianity in the earthly ministry of Jesus can be usefully investigated in connection with the mystery religions that constituted the cultural lifeblood of Palestine and the surrounding Greco-Roman world two thousand years ago.

In the next post I want to discuss the mystery of Golgotha as a unique externalization of what had previously lived within the mystery schools of Jewish and Greco-Roman cults. Then in subsequent posts I want to engage in conversations with you regarding the reception of the Christ impulse in diverse communities related to a range of mystery traditions. As a consequence we can explain the commonalities but also differences across the four canonical gospels and the letters of the Apostle Paul, and penetrate into the spirit rather than the letter of these precious writings.

#EsotericChristianity #Death