Evolving Our Souls With Celestial Wisdom
• During the “lost years” of Jesus’ adolescence and young adulthood, he worked not only as a carpenter but also as a blacksmith and leather worker. He worked full-time to support his family until age 26. Later, he led a large caravan much of the way to India. As a tutor for the son of a wealthy merchant, he traveled around the entire Mediterranean world, privately teaching and transforming hundreds of people along the way. (This is one of my favorite sections of the story.)
• During his public ministry, Jesus’ mandate was to leave no progeny or writing on the planet; he was to avoid the establishment of an organized cult. Jesus never advocated the founding of a church whose mission was to create a religion about him.
• While on earth, Jesus technically ended the reign of Satan and Lucifer, who had led an angelic rebellion against his rule. (See more about this in summary of Part III of the text in the boxed section.)
• Jesus did perform spectacular miracles while on earth, including raising Lazarus from the dead, and then raising himself from the dead.
• In addition to the twelve male apostles, Jesus also had a circle of twelve female disciples. This fact was later suppressed.
Given all this new information on Christ, it is little surprise that some now regard the Urantia Revelation as a postmodern Bible. Since its publication almost sixty years ago, the book has sold over a million copies in English in all versions and has been translated into all the major European languages, with translations in numerous non-Western languages like Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese soon to come.
The Urantia text is a book-with-a-mission. Despite its high profile in some circles, its worldwide readership has grown almost entirely by word of mouth. Hundreds of study groups are now spread out across the world, and celebrities have come forward to support this controversial work, including Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson, and even Hollywood stars such as the late Jackie Gleason, Edie Adams, and writer-producer Norman Lear. Numerous musicians including Willie Nelson, Jimi Hendrix, and Jerry Garcia and are known to have been fervent students. While its “off-planet” pedigree will always be a subject of debate, writers, teachers, healers, and visionaries throughout the world are just now beginning to create a global cultural phenomenon around this mysterious work.
