Let’s cut through all the conflicting theories and accounts about how The Urantia Book came into being and who was behind it . . . and go straight to the book itself to find out.
The Beings Involved in Creating The Urantia Book
Responsibility for The Urantia Book falls broadly into three groups:
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The actual authors—beings from diverse parts of the universe.
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The sponsors—groups of beings in the universe who authorized or sponsored the book’s content creation.
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The receivers—the human beings who received the papers and published them in book form.
The Book’s Actual Authors
The beings who composed the Urantia Papers reflect the enormous diversity of intelligent personalities that populate the universe.
The book’s 196 papers list authors that range from angels and superangels to spirit beings of divine origin. They include non-visible residents of this planet and perfected mortals from other worlds.
These are all beings that humans are ordinarily unaware of. They belong to a vast spiritual hierarchy, on many different levels of existence. Some are high enough to have direct experience of deity; others are much closer to the human level.
Here are a few of them.
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Angels. Some of the papers were authored by seraphim. They are members of the angelic orders who minister to human and celestial beings throughout the universe. They composed papers about marriage, about their own kind, and about the personalities known as Adam and Eve.
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Superangels. Archangels (an example of a superangel) authored several papers describing the local universe, in which planet Earth (called “Urantia”) is located. They were also responsible for several papers about the history of Urantia. Other superangels have evocative names, such as Brilliant Evening Star. Several superangels composed papers about life after death and the early evolution of worship on Urantia.
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Spirit beings of divine origin. One of these beings presents some of the most profound papers in the book, such as those dealing with God and the Trinity. This is a Divine Counselor, described as representing the highest source of information available about the nature and attributes of God the Father. Another such being, known as a Perfector of Wisdom, authored papers about the structure of the universe and some of its creators.
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Perfected mortals from other worlds. Throughout the universe, mortals like us are engaged in a nearly endless journey of spiritual perfection. Among the authors of the papers are those who have reached that goal, who came here from other parts of the universe. They go by names such as One High in Authority and One Without Name and Number. They each authored a paper about other universe personalities.
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Non-visible residents of this planet. We have this group of authors to thank for the sublime retelling of the life and teachings of Jesus. They are called the “midwayers” and exist on a level between human and angel. They are permanent inhabitants of Urantia, pledged to serve here until the planet attains a high level of spiritual evolution.
Sponsors of the Urantia Papers
A number of universe personalities, acting in commissions, are cited as having authorized or sponsored different groupings of papers. This suggests they supervised the writing and editing until the papers appeared in their final form.
One such commission is described as hailing from the capital of our superuniverse, one of the seven divisions of the grand universe of time and space. This commission was responsible for the papers dealing with Deity and the superuniverses in “Part I. The Central and Superuniverses” of the book.
A superuniverse is subdivided into many local universes. Another commission originates from our local universe, and it took responsibility for the papers making up “Part II. The Local Universe.” This describes the administration and personalities of our local universe.
The papers in “Part III. The History of Urantia” narrate the history of Urantia down to the time of Jesus’ appearance here. These papers were authorized by another commission of twelve local universe personalities and sponsored by numerous others. The commission’s director is identified as Mantutia Melchizedek, member of an order of high beings in the local universe.
The final “Part IV. The Life and Teachings of Jesus” was sponsored by what the book describes as a revelatory commission of twelve Urantia midwayers acting under the supervision of a Melchizedek in charge of revelatory information.
People Who Received and Published the Papers
The Urantia Papers make little mention of their human involvement.
A paper about the midwayers explains that midwayers are always employed in contacts made with human beings, including communications through which the Urantia Papers were transmitted.
The same paper says it was the midwayers who coordinated the personalities and circumstances on Urantia that set the ball rolling for the papers to be presented. It makes clear that no spiritualism or mediumship was involved but does not give further detail.
A paper about guardian angels speaks of a human subject used in a contactual communication but only in the context of the guardian angel assigned to this human.
Limitations Faced by the Authors
In the “Foreword” of The Urantia Book, the authors admit to the difficulty of expressing enlarged concepts and advanced truth in human language. They find our language highly limited in the ideas that it can convey.
Also, they had a mandate to make every effort to convey their meanings by using the word symbols of the English tongue. They were to introduce new terms only when the concept to be portrayed found no terminology in English which could be employed to convey such a new concept, partially or even with more or less distortion of meaning.
They faced other restrictions too. Under the laws of revelation they were not permitted to impart unearned or premature knowledge. They were to portray teachings that were not too far removed from the thinking of the age in which those teachings were presented. The religion of revelation was to be limited by the capacity of human beings to receive it.
Neither were the revelators allowed to anticipate future scientific discoveries. They admitted that their statements about the physical sciences would need to be revised in later years in light of scientific developments and new discoveries.
The Use of Human Sources
The authors of the papers on deity and the universes gave first preference to the highest existing human concepts up to that time. They selected more than one thousand of those concepts, representing the most advanced values and meanings they could find. They could only resort to pure revelation when the concept of presentation had no adequate previous expression by the human mind.
The midwayer who restated the life and teachings of Jesus employed the observations of his order of beings. But this author also drew freely on all sources of planetary information. Among those sources were the lost record of the Apostle Andrew and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
In all, the author assembled high thoughts and concepts from more than two thousand human beings, serving more as a collector and editor than as an original narrator.
Concepts which originate in the human mind will prove to be more acceptable and helpful to all other human minds, the midwayer explains. Only when human sources failed to supply an adequate thought pattern was there resort to superhuman records. These included the memory of other midwayers on Urantia and sources of information external to the planet.
The Book’s Unfamiliar Concepts
Students of the book are at first unfamiliar with many of the concepts it presents. These include the idea that a host of non-human beings authored a 2,097-page tome that reveals the nature of God and reality.
While this may sound far-fetched to many, one way to judge the book is by its contribution to your spiritual growth. Students of the book speak of having been truly changed by it. It has given them new hope and purpose through a deeper understanding of their role and destiny in a vast and friendly universe—a universe administered by loving personalities of divine origin and high values.
Find Out More
Learn more about The Urantia Book from The Urantia Book Fellowship.
Rev. Meredith J. Sprunger, a minister in the United Church of Christ and a psychology practitioner, wrote a brief account of who authored the book.
For a deep dive into the history of the Urantia Movement here’s a document from The Urantia Book Fellowship.
A community of students of The Urantia Book share ideas about the book and help each other to grow spiritually.
