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Why Worry?
In the not too distant future the Western world, in particular, will face potential moral chaos when Christians realize that the Judeo-Christian concepts of right and wrong are built upon a house of straw. And in a world progressing towards Godlessness, whose opinions will or should prevail?
The reason for this gloom and doom? Since the 1967 war between Israel and the Arab nations, and the occupation by Israel of Palestinian territories, there has been an enormous effort made by the staff of professional Israeli archaeology institutions to gather supporting evidence for the biblical history of both Jerusalem and the occupied lands. The purpose?--to justify the claim that these belong to Israel by divine decree--that God himself gave them to Israel!
The result has been a disaster for Jew, Christian, and Islam. Professor Ze'ev Herzog of the Tel Aviv University writes1: "This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.
"Worse still, in the days of Moses, the supposedly monotheistic deity of the Israelites, YHWH, had a female consort! Also, intensive archaeology has revealed that at the time of David and Solomon, Jerusalem and its surroundings consisted of about 20 small villages with a total population of about five thousand2--a small kingdom indeed to have been the center of an empire described in 1 Kings 5:4 as stretching from Gaza in the south to Syria in the north and to the Euphrates river in the east."
How does this collapse of Old Testament legitimacy affect Christianity? One Christian cleric3 has pointed out that it has profound theological effects--for example, Jesus could not be the embodiment of ancient covenant hopes or the fulfilment of divine messianic promises made to Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets et al, concluding that "these individuals did not exist and God never made any such promises to them. We have to face the shocking fact that most of the Old Testament is late Judean propaganda with little historical worth, just as the Gospels are mostly Christian propaganda."
Another Christian minister4 speculates:
"Given what they knew, Christians in the first century made sense of God and Jesus as best they could. The result is the New Testament.
"And given what they knew, Christians in the fourth century made sense of God and Jesus as best they could. The result is the Trinity.
"Now, Christians in the twenty first century must make sense of God and Jesus as best they can. The results are yet to be seen."
Urantia Book readers are not unaffected by all this. The Papers support much of what is written in the Old Testament that is now rejected outright as plain wrong.
About Solomon, the Papers say: "Solomon bankrupted the nation by his lavish court and by his elaborate building program: There was the house of Lebanon, the palace of Pharaoh's daughter, the temple of Yahweh, the king's palace, and the restoration of the walls of many cities. Solomon created a vast Hebrew navy, operated by Syrian sailors and trading with all the world. His harem numbered almost one thousand."
But Israeli archaeology concludes that Solomon, at best, was the minor tribal chief of a scattering of small villages in a sparsely populated area of the hill country in the region of another small village called Jerusalem.
In studying these Urantia Papers, and pondering on why they were written as they are (a strange mix of erroneous science and history plus remarkable revelation), it is critical that we take into account the mentality of their initial recipients, the so-called "Forum," the prejudices of the times, what might have been acceptable as revelatory truth in the 1920-35 period, what might have caused abandonment of the revelations as spurious, and the inevitability that some Forum members would treat everything they were told as divine, infallible revelation.
Parts 1-3 of the book were initially the result of questions posed by the Forum members to test the credentials of the revelators.5 Hence,in hindsight, it seems possible that the original aim of the revelators was confined to preparing a group of people for receipt of, Part 4, The Life of Jesus.
Taken by itself, this is written in a way that would never have gained the status of divine revelation--and the error content of the science and history present in what became "The Urantia Book" would never have become a contentious issue.
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