The Gospel of St. Mark

In The Gospel of St Mark lectures, Rudolf Steiner describes how Mark was especially able to reveal Christ as a cosmic being, emphasizing his greatness and power, because, after having been a pupil of Peter, he moved to Alexandria during a time when Jewish philosophy and theology was at it’s peak. There he absorbed the best aspects and views of pagan gnosis and cosmology.

Mark was able to learn how humanity came into being through a descent from the spiritual world and how the luciferic and ahrimanic forces have been taken into the human soul in the course of evolution, compromising its original forces. He was able to understand what was revealed to him by pagan gnosis concerning our human origin out of the cosmos when our planet originally came into being in aeons past and the strong contrast between our original human destiny and what mankind had become, thus revealing the necessity of the Christ event for our further development and return to spiritual cognition.