Zebedee

Zebedee (Hebrew: זְבַדְיָה zəvadjāh; Greek: Ζεβεδαῖος Zebedaios "Gift of God") was, according to the account of all four Gospels of the New Testament, the father of the two "sons of Zebedee" James and John, who were also called the Sons of Thunder (Greek: Βοανηργές Boanerges) because of their fiery temperament and their fiery power of speech.

According to Rudolf Steiner, John Zebedee is not identical with the favourite disciple of Christ, who later became the author of the Gospel of John as John the Evangelist. Rather, he was the raised Lazarus. John Zebedee had only acted as Lazarus' placeholder until his inauguration and had not been an apostle in the true sense.

„Among the twelve apostles, Lazarus-Johannes himself is again represented, as it were, by another. John, the brother of James and son of Zebedee, is not an apostle in the proper sense. James and John are in a certain sense one, they represent among the more intimate disciples of the Christ Jesus the power of the intellectual or mind soul, which has a double function in man, but is nevertheless a unity. Hence they are called "sons of thunder", for thunder is macrocosmically the same as thought is in the human microcosm. But when Lazarus becomes John, he takes the place of the one son of Zebedee, and as such he is the one who lay at the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper.“ (Lit.:GA 264, p. 232f)

The question is unclear whether the wife of Zebedee counted among the women under the cross in Matthew 27:56 is identical with Salome mentioned in Mark 15:40.

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1914, GA 264 (1987), ISBN 3-7274-2650-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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