Jakob Lorber

How Lorber's writings were damaged

Already in the Great Gospel of John (1.197.5) it is proclaimed that the world destroys everything and does not even spare the purest teaching of Jesus. Seen in this light, it was inevitable that the Lorber Scriptures would suffer as well. There are unintentional changes, mistakes in copying and misprints which can hardly be avoided, since man is not infallible. These mistakes are easily forgivable and rarely dramatic. The intentional changes are critical. The publisher Christoph Friedrich Landbeck (1840-1921), student of the medially gifted Gottfried Mayerhofer (1807-1877), whose writings he corrected, began with this, but this happened in agreement with Mayerhofer. Landbeck now worked on the Lorber works in a similar way as he had already done with Mayerhofer's works. He "improved" the German, sometimes left something out and inserted brackets with his own comments into the text. The (so far known) worst intervention concerned the work "Die Erde", of which Landbeck deleted the last 12 chapters, since this section "caused annoying reactions". These interventions did not go unnoticed and unchallenged. Franz Schumi, who acted as a father medium, tried to dispute Landbeck's right to publish - allegedly even on Jesus' instructions. Ida Kling's "Weisung an die Pollierlust" is also addressed to Landbeck. In it Jesus rejects changes to the revealed word. Landbeck, for his part, claimed to censor and correct on the Lord's instructions, but without being able to credibly prove this.

The idea of the "Prophet's own", which allegedly had been introduced into the writings, was quite common among people close to the publishing house: The writer's thoughts and ideas had flowed into the writings and had polluted them. Thus some things could be explained more easily. But this is not the doctrine of the New Revelation. Margit Eckel summed this doctrine up as follows: "There is absolutely nothing negative in the writings of Lorber, nothing really wrong. But there are some things in it that can be misunderstood, as there are in the Bible. But whoever fulfils the Lord's orders of love (to which one is particularly strongly inspired by the work of Lorber), His Spirit shows him the access to the riddles which have been given to us, so that we do not stop to exercise our spirit, to think and to make decisions."

Walter Lutz formulated a profoundly contradictory philosophy, for which he used the Bible passage "but test everything; hold fast what is good" (1.Thess 5.21), which had already been quoted by Friedrich Landbeck. Some clouding things would have interfered, not only with Jakob Lorber, but also with the biblical prophets, he claimed. Curiously, he also regarded the Bible, which he quoted as proof of his idea, as "a strange mixture of what is true and good from God on the one hand and what is false and questionable from human viewpoints on the other". But at the same time he also claimed that the Bible was the indisputably sacred foundation of the faith of Christians, a glorious word of revelation from the heavenly Father, a great gift of light to mankind. In order to be able to follow his absurd argumentation, one must in reality accept Walter Lutz's view as a dogma that Paul's quotation is coincidentally to be assigned to the divine truth and not to the human false and that it contains something that Paul did not say at all. He had merely warned against accepting prophetic revelations unchecked and being misled by false prophets. He did not mention at all that a prophet would occasionally proclaim evil and false things. According to Walter Lutz, God was involved in all divine revelations worldwide, but at the same time human ignorance and human inadequacy had played their part. Thus the writings of Lorber also allegedly consist partly of the good of God and the own, the bad, of Jakob Lorber. The incorrectness of such a view is pointed out in the New Revelation, for instance in the preface of the Lord to the "Household of God". Although the Lord teaches completely different things in the New Revelation and the words of Paul are not to be interpreted in this sense, Walter Lutz's remarks were widespread among the readers of Lorber's writings as a result of his reputation. This favoured further modifications in the writings of Lorber. Viktor Mohr, who thought like his mentor Walter Lutz, finally radically revised and modified some of Lorber's writings. Although these editions state Jakob Lorber as the author, they can no longer be described as actually written down by Jakob Lorber, making Viktor Mohr a pseudo-Lorber.

Already in 1923 changes in the writings were complained about. At that time, the management of the publishing house claimed that the new prints were more faithful to the original, that they were improvements. However, this did not apply to the majority of the changes. Later on changes were always defended with the statement that the meaning or spirit had been retained and that one should not stick to the letter. In reality, however, much more than just the letter was changed. When the matter could no longer be covered up, the management of the publishing house resorted to diversionary manoeuvres and personal defamation, shamelessly referring to the manuscripts they had withheld from concerned readers who had dared to make discrepancies public. It found support from people with self-made halos who had either fallen for the deception manoeuvres or actually wanted to accept the cover-up of the alterations so as not to interfere with the distribution of the tampered writings of the New Revelation (or rather with the publisher's business). The unteachable "fanatical letter zealers" should rather first seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, was their patronizingly well-meaning advice. But that was not enough of a strange kind of enlightenment: Jesus had entrusted the writings to the publisher, so His Holiness - the publisher and his co-workers - should be blessed and not criticized, so that newcomers would not be confused. Even the fledgling German Lorber Association, which had the task of paying attention to the authenticity of the writings, was not spared. In doing so, it did nothing other than what corresponded to its statutes.

In order for a written work to remain accessible to the general public, and not only to scholars, for centuries, it must occasionally be carefully and conscientiously adapted to current linguistic usage. The New Revelation does not claim infallibility in the literal sense. On the contrary, it is fully aware that Jakob Lorber sometimes misheard when writing it down and made spelling mistakes, which of course can be corrected. Unfortunately, not only were spelling mistakes adjusted and corrected, as was repeatedly claimed, but a great deal was changed and censored. In addition, the manuscripts must be open to public access, since the faithful cannot be expected to blindly trust publishers and publishing staff in this very important matter - and now even after everything that has already happened.

Some of Lorber's writings are to be described as damaged in the currently available editions and must be checked and repaired by independent persons of trust. Fortunately, the damage is not so dramatic that works have become ineffective or even lost. For some time now, there has been the "Project True-blue Jakob Lorber", which aims at the restoration of the Lorber works. Some books have already been published and are available in bookshops.

As far as the English translations are concerned, they are usually not based on the relatively reliable first editions, but on later, modified editions. So there are changes in content and there is censorship, but to my knowledge they are still true to the spirit. "Project True-blue Jakob Lorber" documents the changes in content compared to the first editions, so it should not be too difficult for translators to adapt the translations to the original texts.

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