SECTION 3
I earlier broached the fact that the authors of The Urantia Book made use of human sources, doing so when such humanly derived content met their strict criteria.
As I understand it, their task was to present revelatory content pertaining to hundreds of topics. These are ideas and issues they were required to cover by virtue of their revelatory mandate. For example, it can easily be inferred that they were charged with restating Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount for the upliftment and edification of modern ears, while also making sure that the new version of this teaching conformed to what Jesus really said and meant.
But how far they could go with unique revelation also had limits; wisdom demands that new truths being imparted to a planet not be too far ahead of the evolutionary trajectory of its peoples at the time of revelation. The following statement clarifies this important point:
Revelation is evolutionary but always progressive. Down through the ages of a world’s history, the revelations of religion are ever-expanding and successively more enlightening. It is the mission of revelation to sort and censor the successive religions of evolution. But if revelation is to exalt and upstep the religions of evolution, then must such divine visitations portray teachings which are not too far removed from the thought and reactions of the age in which they are presented. Thus must and does revelation always keep in touch with evolution. Always must the religion of revelation be limited by man’s capacity of receptivity. [92:4.1]
The immediate intended audience for the UB, it seems to me, was educated English-speaking men and women who had been enculturated in the modernist mindset of the mid-twentieth century, especially in the milieu of liberal Christianity. The crucial task of the revelators, I believe, was to significantly upstep the worldview of this first generation of readers while remaining a potent disclosure for other progressive people around the world and in future generations.
To make this work, they engaged in what might be called “revelatory grafting.” Their charter was to attach new limbs of truth to the existing stream of human thought; but to do so successfully, the writers had to insure that an “immune response” was not triggered in their readers that would cause them to reject the new material. At the same time, they needed to supplant certain mistaken ideas, and do so authoritatively. (For a typical example of such a correction, see “Erroneous Ideas of God” at 4:5.) And so, what might be called a rhetorical revelatory protocol was adopted: First, the celestial writers were obliged to seek out the finest examples available at that time of the previous human expressions of a particular idea needing clarification—for example, the existing concepts of the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross. Next, they were to carefully select suitable passages and phrasings from this humanly derived text and insert them in such a way as to create an infrastructure of meaning around which they could weave new superhuman concepts that they were permitted to reveal. Finally, they added facts and concepts about this topic that they were mandated to communicate but which were entirely absent from the annals of human thought.
Thus, for example, if the proper understanding of the crucifixion could not be found in the Bible, the writings of the Church Fathers, or in any extant theological works, then the UB’s authors could freely weave in purely revelatory material. The result in this case is the section called “The Meaning of the Death on the Cross” at the end of Paper 188, which breaks new ground in Christology. While this particular section departs widely from mainstream Christian thought, it should be noted that most of the humanly sourced material presented in Part IV, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus,” is derived in part from the New Testament. But great deal of this narrative is also entirely revelatory, such as the story of the missing years of Jesus in Papers 124 through 135.
The extraordinary Part IV contains 77 Papers and spans 774 pages in the original edition. It is remarkable that its depiction of Jesus affirms cardinal points of Christian doctrine, including the Incarnation, the resurrection, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and other miracles; but the UB also states that the virgin birth, the blood atonement, and the physical resurrection of the dead at the end of the age are myths. (Turn to chapter 6 for more on this subject.)
The revelators provide two explicit acknowledgments of their revelation methodology in the text. The first appears at the end of the Foreword, where the celestial author known as a Divine Counselor states that “more than one thousand human concepts . . . assembled from the God-knowing mortals of the past and the present” were utilized in the writing of Part I. He also states that this mandate was promulgated by “the superuniverse rulers.” (For more on these beings, see Section 2. The Divine Counselor’s disclaimer includes this important statement:
In formulating the succeeding presentations . . . we are to be guided by the mandate of the superuniverse rulers which directs that we shall, in all our efforts to reveal truth and co-ordinate essential knowledge, give preference to the highest existing human concepts pertaining to the subjects to be presented. We may resort to pure revelation only when the concept of presentation has had no adequate previous expression by the human mind. [0:12.12].
At the opening of Part IV, the writer of the narrative indicates that the ideas of “more than two thousand human beings who have lived on earth from the days of Jesus down to the time of the inditing of these revelations” were used as sources. The passage below sheds additional light on the revelatory mandate and how it was applied to the forthcoming biography of Jesus:
As far as possible I have derived my information from purely human sources. Only when such sources failed, have I resorted to those records which are superhuman. When ideas and concepts of Jesus’ life and teachings have been acceptably expressed by a human mind, I invariably gave preference to such apparently human thought patterns. . . . My revelatory commission forbade me to resort to extrahuman sources of either information or expression until such a time as I could testify that I had failed in my efforts to find the required conceptual expression in purely human sources. [121:8.13]
Note that this celestial author, a so-called midwayer being, also states that a superhuman “revelatory commission” set the parameters of his work.
In the early decades after the publication of the Urantia Revelation in 1955, it was enough for most readers just to cope with the shock of revelation. Few were concerned about human sources in those days. But UB students eventually began to make exciting discoveries. For example, a book authored by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a prominent liberal theologian and minister of the 1920s and 1930s, was recognized as a source early on.
The rigorous search for what are now known as the source texts accelerated in the early nineties and was led by Matthew Block, an independent scholar who had been a graduate student in theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Since then, he and other researchers have discovered innumerable parallelisms—passages found in more than one hundred books that can be correlated with specific sections in The Urantia Book. Block now believes that he and his colleagues have identified the human sources used in portions of about 150 of the UB’s 196 papers. According to Block, “The source texts were all published in English and the source authors were, with few exceptions, Americans or Britons born in the 19th or 20th centuries.”139
Block provides what he calls parallel charts that graphically illustrate the technique, displaying in the left column the source material that was used by the revelators and, in the right column, the correlated UB passage. In hundreds of cases, we can see that the revelators have inserted lines, sentences, and even whole passages from books by prominent thinkers of the day, and then have deftly interlaced the revelatory materials in and around this humanly derived skeleton of ideas. Sometimes the writers depart widely from an original source text after they “quote” it (almost always without attribution); other times they deviate moderately from it; but in some instances they rely on the human material substantively. It’s comparable to a journalist who accurately quotes a source, if even just one phrase, after which they go on to refute, modify, or support the source’s statement.
Block and others are far along in the effort to map out which parts of the UB were revealed for the first time and those that are in some portion humanly derived. This task is not as difficult as one might think, because the revelators make no attempt to disguise their human sources. It has now become obvious to researchers that the revelators want us to discover the source texts they utilized. We are meant to return to these books with due appreciation to the outstanding historic value of these human writings, much like some of us still enjoy the “Great Books of the Western World” that were once taught at colleges around the country.
But even more important is this crucial point: revelation, like soul-making, is a cocreative cultural activity carried out by superhumans in close cooperation with mortals. It’s a superior blend. Revelatory discourse is something like taking a superb wine that has been aged by the finest human vintner and combining these barrels with wine miraculously created by Jesus at a new wedding of Cana. The high achievements of human thought are rewarded by supplementation through a merciful downreach that provides new facts and truths. The result is a seamless integration of human observation with revelatory correction.
139 The most extensively used source, according to Block, is a four-volume textbook, The Science of Society (1927). The results of Matthew Block’s heroic effort to find and decipher source texts can be viewed at this comprehensive website: http://www.urantiabooksources.com/. His only printed book to date is entitled Source Authors of the Urantia Book (Square Circles Publishing, 2002), written under the pseudonym of J. T. Manning.