After this explanatory speech, of which Kisjonah said that it left him no further question, the coming day also began to dawn in the east, and a very cool morning breeze began to creep over our mountain peak, where we were still quite comfortable. Kisjonah proposed that in the meantime we should perhaps go down to the nearest alpine hut until the sun had risen.
I say: ‘Let us leave that; this little morning chill at this height harms no one, but strengthens everyone’s limbs. Besides, it does not last long, and it must be so; otherwise a certain kind of spirits, not to be designated more closely here, would bring the day bad weather if strong spirits of peace did not now, at sunrise, prevent them from rising into the air.’
Kisjonah was content with this, and we remained on the mountain peak until noon of the coming day; but after midday we went down again to the alpine farm and spent another couple of days there in all kinds of discussions about people’s duties in life and about the nature of the earth, the stars and all kinds of other things.
Much did not enter the understanding of the still somewhat darker part of the Jews and of the Pharisees who had remained with Me, but they nevertheless contradicted nothing; for these Jews and Pharisees who had turned to Me from the very first day of My visit to the toll collector Kisjonah’s house were in fact otherwise more alert and better spirits and sober thinkers. They also already esteemed Me greatly and accepted My word as divine, and are therefore not to be compared with those who were driven back to Capernaum, nor with those whom the mountain’s trembling drove back down to the depths a little over four days earlier.
But although the aforementioned better Jews and Pharisees now held firmly to Me, at some of My explanations of the actual origin, or rather gradual creation, of the earth and everything in and upon it, as also of all the countless other celestial bodies, they nevertheless shrugged their shoulders and said to themselves: ‘This is surely directly against Moses! Where are the six days of creation, where the Sabbath on which God had rested?! What, then, is what Moses reports about the origin of everything that now makes up the world in all its parts?! If this wonder-worker from Nazareth now gives us an entirely different teaching about it, completely abolishing the Mosaic teaching, what should we say to that? But if he abolishes Moses, through that he also abolishes all the prophets and in the end himself too; for if Moses is nothing, then the prophets are nothing, and the expected Messiah, who is supposedly he himself, is nothing too!
‘But fundamentally his teaching is correct, and creation may well have happened more as he has now explained it than as Moses tells of it!’
Then one came to Me and said: ‘Lord! If so, what then of Moses and all the prophets?
I say: ‘You should understand and grasp them in their proper sense and meaning!
‘In his account of creation, Moses sets forth only images that make known the founding of the first knowledge of God among the people of the earth, but not the material creation of the earth and all other worlds.