Bill Darlison: Roads for Travelling Souls

Part 4: A Few Problems Solved, and a Few Conjectures 'A dialectical soul-constitution can make nothing of the Gospels, which in the hands of scholars have become just a well-picked carcass.' Rudolph Steiner   We have noticed how a number of incidents in this Gospel cease to be problematic when considered in the above fashion. ·       Jesus’s behaviour towards the Syrophoenician Woman is just a dramatic enactment of our own clannishness, made all the more striking because Jesus is doing it. ·      Jesus’s strange journey is a clever way of putting yet another Cancerian signature upon the section. ·     Walking on water is symbolic of the need for human beings to be in control of their emotions. ·       The two feeding stories emphasise the universal availability of God’s saving grace.          The zodiacal structure also helps us to solve other conundrums presented by this Gospel. ·      Mark does not begin his Gospel with stories of

Part 3: Mark as a Guide to the Spiritual Life Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. 'Do you understand what you are reading?' Philip asked. 'How can I,' he said, 'unless someone explains it to me?' (Acts 8:30-31)   This constellation-based schema – clear, consistent, irrefutable – prompts a number of questions about the nature of Mark’s Gospel, the most important one being, ‘What kind of document is this?’ It is certainly not a hastily compiled, rudimentary biography of Jesus, which Matthew and Luke added to and improved upon, as many believe; still less is it likely to be a series of random reminiscences made to the author of the Gospel by the Apostle Peter and presented   ‘in no particular order’ [1] as Papias claimed in the second century, and which some branches of orthodoxy still teach. [2] Scholars have found this particular statement by Papias quite puzzling because