1 November 2009
Dear Bahá’í Friend,
Your email letter of 13 October 2009, seeking the source of a passage from a talk given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on 2 May 1912 describing a “spiritual consultation” that the disciples of Christ participated in after His ascension, has been received at the Bahá’í World Centre and forwarded to the Research Department for study.
The Research Department states that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke extemporaneously and did not refer to notes. His talks in The Promulgation of Universal Peace were translated as He spoke and stenographically recorded into English and Persian, but He did not have the opportunity to read and authenticate all of the transcripts. Further, the passage in question appears in a talk for which, to date, no original Persian transcript has been identified. The talk remains unauthenticated, and the English text cannot be taken necessarily to be his exact words.
Regarding the story in the passage in question, the Research Department has not yet found a rendering of it in the Biblical and Christian sources available to them.
With loving Bahá’í greetings,
Department of the Secretariat
(Baha’i Library Online)