Jakob Lorber

The Prophet Jakob Lorber

With Jakob Lorber (1800-1864) we meet a special person who led a simple and modest life as a musician and tutor, but had access to an immeasurable spiritual wealth. At the age of forty, on March 15, 1840, he clearly heard an inner voice saying to him: "Get up, take up your stylus and write!" He obeyed this mysterious call, and within twenty-four years, until his death, several books and several secondary words were dictated to him. Jakob Lorber perceived the source of the spirit speaking in him as the voice of Jesus Christ, the living Word of God. He heard the inner word like a very clear thought, like pronounced words, from the region of the heart.

Jakob Lorber wrote down thousands of pages himself, but was not at all a writing medium or automatic writer. His hand was not led by a foreign intelligence, nor was he in a trance while writing down the inner word or dictating to a friend. He was also not dependent on special aids and circumstances; only a quiet and undisturbed place was necessary for reception and transcription, but friends could be present without any problems. The writing of the announcements was also not completely error-free, as is sometimes reported; the texts are only written in one go, the result of a dictation and not that of the production of an author who has to improve his work several times. The erroneous idea that Jakob Lorber is an automatic writing medium is based on a contradictory remark in Karl Gottfried von Leitner's Lorber biography. There he writes: "He (Lorber) writes fastest and at the same time most correctly when he allows his hand to move mechanically with his pen". At the same time, however, Leitner also makes it clear that Jakob Lorber's hand was not "mechanically guided by a foreign intelligence". Probably the biographer tried to emphasize the supernatural origin of the announcements, but overlooked his own statements elsewhere and those of Jakob Lorber himself.

Although Jakob Lorber's writings already had a crowd of enthusiastic followers during his lifetime and he himself was deeply impressed and touched by the received messages, he remained very modest and humble. He did not see himself as a missionary, preacher, or founder of a religion, not even a prophet, though he acted as such. He called himself merely a scribe of God, who wrote down the word of the Lord that came to him. Lorber lived at a time of censorship and oppression by the authoritarian state and the church. Therefore his writings had to be kept hidden. He could not find a publisher for a long time, because nobody dared to publish the books. He was even threatened with legal persecution if he allowed himself to be called a prophet or a scribe of God. The announcements about Robert Blum, who had been executed during the March Revolution in 1848, could only be published decades after Jakob Lorber's passing away.

During the 24 years of writing down the announcements (1840-1864), Jakob Lorber spent most of the morning at his desk. He considered his writing to be his real vocation in life, for which he gave up giving concerts. To make a living, he gave music lessons and tuned pianos. Although his needs were very modest, in later years, when he had become frail, he found himself in existential distress, and his friends helped him out. His books were printed by other persons under great financial sacrifices; Jakob Lorber himself never received a bookseller's fee. He remained unmarried and suffered in the last years of his life from a gouty dropsy, which often tied him to his bed, so that from 11 April 1864 he no longer wrote down the announcements himself, but dictated them to a friend. He died in 1864 in Graz, materially impoverished. The physician Dr. Rainer Uhlmann stated that Jakob Lorber probably did not die of a lung disease, as assumed in various studies, but of bleeding from esophageal varices, as can occur in cirrhosis of the liver, or from gastric bleeding from a chronic ulcer, or from cancer. In order to prevent false conclusions, he also emphasizes that cirrhosis of the liver is by no means proof of alcoholism.

In the announcements received Jakob Lorber is called the scribe of the revelation of the Word of God, the servant of the Lord to the announcement of the eternal kingdom, which is the love of God. Genealogically, Lorber belonged to the tribe of David and descended from Joel, the eldest son of Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. In the announcements Jacob Lorber is compared on the one hand with the prophet Elijah and with Lot, on the other hand he is admonished because of various weaknesses, whereby encouragements and admonitions are balanced. The proclaimed descent and high comparisons certainly did not go to Jakob Lorber's head; he remained a simple man and described himself as unworthy, sinful and worst servant.

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