Rudolf Steiner tells us:

“The miraculous, spiritualized fire, the Christ-light which was revealed to Paul on the road to Damascus in glorious divine revelation will appear to others in the etheric clouds. The greatest mystery of our time is the Second Coming of Christ of the Etheric Realm – in the next age, the Damascus Event will come to life…” “When once human beings are able to immerse their gaze into Shamballa, they will be able to understand the Gospels – they will need a kind of Damascus Event.”

“Then in the course of the next three thousand years, He [Christ] will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass in the natural course of development. A number of individuals will see the Etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. But this will depend upon such men learning to be alert to the moment when Christ draws near to them.”

The Etherization of the Blood, GA 130 “In a certain sense, as preparation, this Mystery had already been accomplished three times before for the salvation of mankind: once in the old Lemurian Epoch, then in the Atlantean, and once again at the end of Atlantean times. That is, three times and then a fourth time in the Post-Atlantean Epoch at the beginning of our own era. That which we know as the Mystery of Golgotha, however, was the only one enacted on the physical plane. The other events, which were preparatory, took place wholly in the spiritual world; but the forces which were thus developed flowed down into the earthly souls and bodies for the salvation of mankind.”

The Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ, GA 152