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The Revelation and Jesus
The life and teachings of Jesus appears to have attracted little attention over the whole period of contact with the revelators right up to the time when the Jesus Papers were received. Prior to the establishment of the Forum, Dr Sadler says: "We listened to occasional references to Jesus' life and teachings--but they (the revelators) were very cautious about the introduction of any new concepts regarding Michael's Urantia bestowal. Of all the Urantia Revelation the Jesus Papers were the biggest surprise." This reticence about Jesus continued right through the period of receipt of Parts 1-3. Out of a total of 2564 mentions of the word "Jesus" in all of the Papers, only 114 occur in Parts 1-3.
The question is why? In Part 1, Paper 2, "The Nature of God," has in its opening paragraph:
"The nature of God can best be understood by the revelation of the Father which Michael of Nebadon unfolded in his manifold teachings and in his superb mortal life in the flesh."
And in its second paragraph:
"The nature of God can be studied in a revelation of supreme ideas, the divine character can be envisaged as a portrayal of supernal ideals, but the most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth, both before and after his attainment of full consciousness of divinity. If the incarnated life of Michael is taken as the background of the revelation of God to man, we may attempt to put in human word symbols certain ideas and ideals concerning the divine nature which may possibly contribute to a further illumination and unification of the human concept of the nature and the character of the personality of the Universal Father." (33)
Then in the third of this short three paragraph introduction to Paper 2, we find:
"All our efforts to enlarge the human concept of God would be well-nigh futile except for the fact that the mortal mind is indwelt by the bestowed Adjuster of the Universal Father and is pervaded by the Truth Spirit of the Creator Son."
Coming from celestial revelators in the materialistic age that peaked around the 1930's, that is mind blowing stuff. It probably came long after doubters about the credentials of the revelators would surely have left the Forum. But the fact that these most marvelous and compelling revelations elicited little or no interest, and apparently led to no further questions of significance from the Forum members defies credibility.
Here at the beginning of Paper 2, the Forum members received confirmation from beyond our planet that Jesus of Nazareth truly was the incarnate Son of God, that both before and after his full self-consciousness of divinity, Jesus' religious life was our, "most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature," and finally, that the mind of each of us mere mortals is indwelt by both the Spirit of the Universal Father and the Spirit of Truth. Wow!!
How do we account for this apparent lack of interest? One way might be to postulate that the order and perhaps the content of the Urantia Papers as they are now given in Parts 1-3 had little relationship to the actual order and content of the Papers that were discussed in the Sunday afternoon sessions of the Forum. It is also possible that only a minor percentage of the content of Parts 1-3 was ever discussed in any animated way.
The period of receipt of the Papers was a period in world history when interest in things savoring of the religious or spiritual in the Western World had reached rock bottom. Also the Forum did not come together as a religious group but as patients of a husband and wife medical team. Their initial interest was stimulated by Dr Sadler's mention of messages deriving from supposedly celestial beings, messages that could not be shown to be fraudulent.
If we look at some of the statistics given by Dr Sadler we may get a feeling for why there appears to have been so little interest in Jesus. During the 17 years of its existence the total number of people who at some time were members of the Forum was 486. When in 1939 a group was formed to make a serious study of the revelation only 70 joined. Later, when, in 1955, the decision was made to publish the book and form an organization to promote the revelation, only 36 joined.
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