Jakob Lorber
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Jakob Lorber (July 22, 1800–August 24, 1864) was a Christian mystic and visionary who referred to himself as "God's scribe". He wrote that on 15 March 1840 he began hearing an 'inner voice' from the region of his heart and thereafter transcribed what it said. By the time of his death 24 years later he had written manuscripts equivalent to 10,000 pages in print, expecting and receiving no financial reward for his work.
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[edit] Life of solitude
A brief biography by his friend Karl Gottfried Ritter von Leitner indicates that Lorber was an uncomplicated person.[1] He was born in Kaniža, a small village in Slovenia (then administered by Austria) and trained as a village teacher. He had musical talent and learned the violin, taking lessons from the virtuoso violinist Paganini, and once giving a violin concert at the La Scala Opera House in Milan. In 1840--the same year he claimed to begin hearing the inner voice--Lorber was offered the position of assistant musical director at the theater in Trieste. He claimed that the inner voice, however, directed him to decline and take up a life of solitude instead. Lorber's writings reveal that the inner voice spoke freely in first person as the voice of Jesus Christ.[2]
Lorber was open and friendly regarding his transcriptions yet found himself involved in small intrigues designed to prove that he was a fake. For instance, the wife of one of his friends was certain that Lorber had studied the material he was pretending to hear from the inner voice, but she never found the scientific books she had supposed he was hiding, eventually finding his only research material to be a single copy of the Bible.[3]
He was observed while writing by well-educated men in the city of Graz, such as Dr. Justinus Kerner, Dr. Ch. F. Zimpel, the mayor of Graz, Anton Hüttenbrenner, his brother the composer Anselm Hüttenbrenner, the poet and Secretary to the Estates Karl Gottfried von Leitner, Dr. Anton Kammerhuber, Leopold Cantily, pharmacist of Graz, and others. These men observed him writing and verified his simple life.[4]. Leopold Engel was one of his followers.
[edit] Visionary writings
Lorber claimed to be unable to understand many of the things he was told by the inner voice, writing about scientific objects or concepts such as atoms, elementary particles and the tremendous energy potential in matter long before they had been invented or discovered.[5] He wrote of an age of technology when man would invent wireless communication, fly across oceans and build iron wagons travelling faster than arrows; but also of the consequences of burning fossil fuels, of air pollution, deforestation and their potential for great devastation, causing great storms and earthquakes.[6] He wrote that machines like living beings would perform human tasks "and thereby many human hands will become idle and the stomachs of the poor and jobless will go hungry". He also made assertions such as the Sun or Saturn being inhabited (in spiritual rather than material form). Even though only a few pages of his manuscript were published during his lifetime, he predicted that eventually it would all be published and studied throughout the world, as it is today.
While describing the Second Coming of Christ, for example, Lorber gives what some readers consider to be a description of the Internet:
On the occasion of My Second Coming, I shall not again be born as a child somewhere of a woman, for this My body remains transfigured as do I, as a spirit, in eternity, and so I shall never again need another body in the manner indicated by you. However, first I shall come invisibly in the clouds of heaven, which means to say: I shall first approach humanity through true seers, wise men and newly awakened prophets. And in those days also maidens will prophesy and young men will have clairvoyant dreams announcing My advent. Many will listen to them and mend their ways, but the world will call them mad fanatics and not believe them, as was also the case with the prophets. Moreover, I shall from time to time awaken persons to whom I shall dictate through their heart all that is now, during My presence here, happening and being discussed. What is written down will, within only a few weeks and days, be multiplied in many thousands of identical copies in an artful manner well-known to the then living people and thus become accessible to them. And the people in those days, almost all of whom will be able to read and write, will be able to read and also understand the new books. This way of spreading My teaching from the heavens, given anew and uncontaminated, will then make it possible to reach the people all over the earth much more quickly and effectively than is possible now through messengers in My name by word of mouth. When in this way My teaching will have been brought to the people of good will and active faith and at least one third of humanity will know of it, then I will also, here and there, come personally and bodily visible to those who love Me most, are longing for My return and have a fully alive faith.[7]
[edit] Theology, geology, history, free will
Lorber's prose has been described as compelling, moving some readers to compare it with writings by other mystics such Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Boehme. His Great Gospel of John is a detailed first-person narrative of Jesus' three-year ministry, around 2,000 pages in length and based on the same structure as the Gospel of John, which is described as an eternal book because of John's continual desire to understand the spiritual interpretation of Jesus' parables. The larger book reiterates Jesus' claim to be God himself by revealing many more astonishing miracles than are found in the original gospels. In the Great Gospel of John, the narrator, Jesus, explains that he is the creator of the material universe, which was designed both as a confinement of Satan, and so he could take upon himself the condition of a man. He says he did this to inspire his children who could otherwise not perceive him in his primordial form as a spirit. He gives descriptions of the eons of time involved in creating the Earth. He does so in a manner similar to the modern theory of Evolution all the way up to the point several thousand years ago when Jesus placed Adam upon the Earth, which at the time contained man-like creatures who did not have free will, being simply the most clever of the animals.[8] Readers have noted that Lorber was writing such things before Darwin published his famous insights on evolution in 1859.
In such comprehensive manner, the Great Gospel of John continually emphasises the importance of free will. In this book, heaven and hell are presented as conditions already within us, expressed according to whether we live in harmony or contrary to God's divine order. The Great Gospel of John also states that the gospels of John and Matthew were written at the time of the events they chronicle; for instance, Lorber writes that Jesus specifically told Matthew to take notes during the Sermon on the Mount.[9] Such an account seems at first contrary to orthodox Christian theology which typically places the authorship of Matthew some years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that of John even later. However, in the Great Gospel of John the narrator explains how this happened. He claims that there were many writers who described him, including several authors named Matthew, who all wrote similarly over a period of many years. The original author's manuscript is lost today, so there is no extant evidence of its age. According to Lorber, God specifically allowed this to be lost in order to prevent idolization. As explained in chapter 134 of the first book of the Great Gospel of John:
The originals have been wisely removed for the simple reason that before long idolatry would have been practiced with such relics. This does still happen, and even with false and assumed relics, although My true pure teaching strictly forbids this with a warning against the leaven of the Pharisees. Now imagine a historically proven true relic. I tell you that with such a one more idolatry would be practiced than with the so-called Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem where, except for the locality, not a grain of sand is authentic. That is the real reason why all the originals have been removed.[10]
Lorber's work is divided into several books which, in aggregate, are called the New Revelation.
