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Who Wrote the Urantia Papers?
Ken Glasziou
This article has been published previously in a paper entitled "Science, Archaeology, and Anthropology in The Urantia Book. Its results are given here for those who have not seen the original and also to make it available for perusal on the Fellowship's web site.
Various skeptics have put forward the names of a number of authors whom they think may have been responsible for writing the Urantia Papers. Among these suggestions are Dr W. Sadler, Wilfred Kellogg, Carl Jung, H.G. Wells, and Robert Millikan.
I first read the book in response to a request to give an opinion on the possibility of it being revelation. My initial attitude was highly skeptical, my reaction being that it must have been written by a group of well-meaning academics on a save-the-world mission.
As I became more familiar with the Papers, I was impressed by the consistency of their content. But at this early stage I was not prepared to suggest that this book was anything other than the work of human beings. Part 4, "The Life of Jesus," impressed me as being an outstanding exposition. In it, I again met the Jesus I had long known through an intense study of the Gospels.
For the remainder, I had noticed a number of statements, mainly on matters of science, that were remarkably prophetic if made in the mid-1930's. Some of these would even have been remarkable at the time of first publication of the book in 1955. So to my inquirers, I recommended that they take what they found valuable from its content and keep an open mind about its revelatory status.
Methods for assessing authorship
About 15 years later I came upon a book entitled The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny that discussed various ways of checking on works in which authorship is in doubt--for example, the various epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament. Some methods depended on the rate of occurrence of unusual words or phrases, others on statistical analysis of the length of sentences, or other characteristics that gave "style" to a particular author. The favored method, where it could be applied, was one used by Mosteller and Wallace that depended, not on unusual words and phrases, but on the way authors use common words to commence sentences or to join clauses and phrases. Such words were classed as "marker" and "function" words and included also, an, by, but, the, and, when, etc. Experience had shown that unusual words were virtually useless for statistical analysis purposes. It is the way authors habitually use frequently occurring words that best distinguishes one author from another.
While reading about the work of Mosteller and Wallace, I realized that the tools were already available to shed light on multiple authorship for the Urantia Papers. These tools were a searchable data base for the book (Folio Views), plus the means of transferring text to a word processor having the facility to provide word counts for individual papers. With these tools, it is relatively easy to obtain statistics on the number of sentences that commence with marker words and to quantify these in terms of word count.
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