Richard C. Cook comments: Today is the Tuesday of Holy Week 2026. Here at Three Sages we have been following Holy Week with posts from the Christian Bible, along with material on Resurrection from the writings of the German Luminary Bô Yin Râ.

Bô Yin Râ was born to a Catholic family in Aschaffenburg, Germany, in 1876 and died in Switzerland in 1943. His birth name was Joseph Anton Schneider, later lengthened to Schneiderfranken to denote his origins in the ancient German region of Franconia that extends from east of Frankfurt to the environs of Nuremberg.

He became a professional painter and was initiated at a young age into the Order of Luminaries of the Eternal Light (Leuchtenden des Urlichts), which is the central spiritual body responsible for conveying and guarding the spiritual heritage of all humanity. Very few Luminaries have ever performed their duties in public. Another who did so was the Luminary we know as Jesus Christ.

The life and mission of Jesus was one of the central themes of Bô Yin Râ’s written works, contained in his 32-volume “textbook” entitled Hortus Conclusus—“The Enclosed Garden.” Published in German over a period of about 20 years, Hortus Conclusus gained over a million readers in pre-World War II Germany and other German-speaking countries and today is seeing worldwide distribution through translations into English and other languages.

Bô Yin Râ makes it perfectly clear that Jesus Christ was a real person and that the outlines of his life and teachings are as pertinent today as when Jesus walked the earth 2,000 years ago. Just as real and pertinent were Jesus’s passion, crucifixion, and resurrection, along with the work that Jesus accomplished for the redemption of the entire human race, not just followers of the Christian religion.

At the same time, Bô Yin Râ’s writings make it clear that the Christian churches, while performing a vital role, have only a vague and often confusing idea of where Jesus came from, what his teachings meant, what his death and resurrection actually signified, where he is today, and how his living presence continues to guide humanity.

An understanding of Jesus as what Bô Yin Râ calls “the greatest of all Men of Love” is especially urgent today as we witness such outbreaks of hatred and war around the world.

We at Three Sages have tried to play our own small part in helping to introduce the writings of Bô Yin Râ to English-speaking audiences. In this spirit, we offer the following chapter on “The Master of Nazareth” from Volume 19 of Hortus Conclusus: “High Goal.” Only the spiritual vision of a Luminary could bring us such authenticity, confirming that even today, Jesus “can easily be found.”

For additional works by and about Bô Yin Râ available on the Three Sages archive, click and browse HERE. For the Books to Light website with ordering information for Bô Yin Râ’s books, click HERE. For the Books to Light YouTube channel, click HERE. Alternative English-language translations of Bô Yin Râ’s books may be found at Kober Press HERE. Also on Kober Press is a free PDF download of Bô Yin Râ’s The Book on the Living God.

We wish you well on your spiritual journey. We also wish you and your loved ones a joyous and happy Holy Week, leading within a few days to Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

“THOUGH I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.”

Thus spoke one who knew of love! – –Yet it was another who had lived this love previously in the intransient, elevated teaching of his life…

Of the one we call the greatest of all Men of Love many of his brothers, it is true, had a premonition; yet none of them reached the intensity of his love!

And many have come after him; many are still to appear who truly can be called Men of Love. Nevertheless, despite all the power of their love there was no one, nor can there be one, who could be compared to him – although I speak here of his ‘brothers’ united in spirit!

Yet what was once revealed in each of these his brothers was always the same as what was revealed within him in its full abundance.

And what can still be revealed in the course of time will only be the same revelation in an ever new form! – –

It is a delusion concocted by human mind to suppose that the figure of the carpenter from Nazareth has anything to do with the pious myth. The man known to later generations from the depiction which sought to portray his features centuries after his earthly appearance looked quite different from the fakir-like miracle worker he was turned into at a time when the superstitious minds of east and west fought for his image…

He who truly wishes to investigate the traces of truth must learn to expunge those additions, made by generations bound to the earth, from the picture he has regarded from his early youth as untouchable.

Only then will he see the gleam of the Master’s eye meeting his; he will see the countenance of a man –united with God in the deepest sense of this word – who, still as man to men on earth, brought ‘glad tidings’ from that realm of essential spirit which he called ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’. – – –

IF I proclaim others – like myself – to be his ‘brothers’, my words would be misinterpreted if it was thought that I was saying that we sought to resemble the otherworldly magical picture, signed by the name of this carpenter from Nazareth at a later stage, that sought to equate him with the ‘Logos’.

This folly is far from our intentions!

Those who wished thereby to secure his place in the highest heavens through their dubious arts have only alienated him from all that is human on this earth. He is thereby no longer comprehensible to those he wished to lead upwards to the most elevated heights of the spirit!

No wonder if he ended up a myth for them!

LOOK, friends, I know well of what I speak when I call the greatest of all Men of Love the exalted ‘brother’!

None of us, regardless of how high the spirit has raised him, will ever embrace the error that he – the speaker – is the ‘First Word’ itself which speaks from him. Therefore it seems to us: an outrageous calumny to believe that he, the greatest Man of Love, fell into such error…

We wish to show him as he really was when he, like us, bore the travails of the earth – in the way he still today – gives daily witness of himself to us – as the spiritually united brother of his brothers – recognizable to us in his spiritual form and united with us!

If we who revere him so highly call ourselves his ‘brothers’, this means only that as an earthly man he was one of us. He also remains in spiritual form one of us, whether one wishes the Son of Man who experienced all that is human in himself when he lived on earth to take, in ancient times full of mystery, the form of ‘God’ who had to descend from his divine majesty because the vengeful idol of a small ancient people apparently could not harness his rage until his own ‘son’ had been brought to him as a sacrifice. – –

WE are not speaking of someone we only know from ancient, dark accounts! –

We are united with the one of whom we speak in a way that no earthly unification can ever unite man with man! – – –

We know, even if we could not know it otherwise, through the one of whom we speak, that he once walked upon this earth as a man, in every respect as human as we are; he was only superior to us in the power of his loving fire. Therefore he could perform the earth transcending exalted wonder of changing the spiritual aura of this earth so that those of ‘good will’ can now find their way back to the spirit in love. The way has been cleared as it were, in such a way that a wanderer in deep snow cannot lose it for it has been cleared by one who knows it…

In this way it is truly his very message which reaches you through our words!

If you see on us the mark of man, though we give witness of ourselves as his ‘brothers’, then know that he too, like us, was a real man for whom nothing human remained beyond his experience! –

Nothing human appeared to him too lowly that he did not share it at some time in himself and in his own experience! –

He would not have been who he was if he had not found room within himself for the whole expanse of everything human to make itself felt within him!

Truly he was given no power to escape his humanity, had he ever wished to escape it! Only the fact that in the end he was the victor defines his greatness.

Similarly any man wishing to follow him can only give witness of himself as ‘chosen’ if he sees as ‘nothingness’ the folly of the earth which he cannot escape as long as he lives on this earth. He must learn to wrest himself from all ‘guilt of sin’ to raise himself up into the light of redemption, consuming himself in the blaze of that love which in the Master, with whom he can unite only in love, performed the exalted miracle of his life…

THOSE who hope to find the great ‘Man of Love’ within the innermost part of their being – for he is truly that near to all born on earth that he can easily be found – must above all learn to renounce that delusion which would make of the purest man who ever lived on earth the ‘God’ who offered himself to his Father-God as a sacrifice to a frenzied thirst for vengeance. This is a human, all-too-human invention! –

Only then can he hear the exalted Master in himself: – the wise carpenter from Nazareth!

Copyright Information: “The Master of Nazareth” – From High Goal, Volume 19 of Hortus Conclusus (“The Enclosed Garden”) by German Luminary Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), English translation by Luminium Books, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2021. Copyright 2026 by Books to Light. Posted with permission by Three Sages Substack.