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In many respects, Andon and Fonta were the most remarkable pair of human beings that have ever lived on the face of the earth. This wonderful pair, the actual parents of all mankind, were in every way superior to many of their immediate descendants. And especially was their quality of mind far above that of the later descendants who stooped to mate…

It is just 993,498 years ago (from the year A.D. 2024) that Urantia was formally recognized as a planet of human habitation in the local universe of Nebadon. Biologic evolution had once again achieved the human levels of will dignity; man had arrived on planet 606 of the local system of Satania. And hence there was an immediate and new order of mob…

From the year A.D. 2024 back to the birth of the first true human beings is just 993,509 years. These first two humans—the twins—were a great trial to their Primates parents. They were so curious and adventurous that they nearly lost their lives on numerous occasions before they were eight years old. As it was, they were rather well scarred up by t…

Modern man and the simians did spring from the same tribe and species but not from the same parents. Man’s ancestors are descended from the superior strains of this mid-mammal tribe, whereas the modern simians (excepting certain pre-existent types of lemurs, gibbons, apes, and other monkeylike creatures) are the descendants of the most inferior cou…

About one million years ago the immediate ancestors of mankind made their appearance by three successive and sudden mutations stemming from early stock of the lemur type of placental mammal. The ancestry of the human species was not directly related to the pre-existent tribes of gibbons and apes then living in Eurasia and northern Africa, whose pro…

Throughout the glacial period other activities were in progress, but the action of the ice overshadowed all other phenomena in the northern latitudes. In the face of this challenge, 500,000 years ago, during the fifth advance of the ice, a new development accelerated the course of human evolution. ''Suddenly'' and in one generation the six colored …

Snow began to fall on the once highly elevated northeastern part of North America, and it continued to fall until it had attained a depth of 20,000 feet. Two million years ago the first North American glacier started its southern advance. The ice age was then in the making, and this glacier consumed nearly one million years in its advance from, and…

During the almost two years of his Mediterranean journey, Jesus made great advances in his human task of mastering the material and mortal mind, and his indwelling Adjuster made great progress in the ascension and spiritual conquest of this same human intellect. By the end of the tour, Jesus virtually knew—with all human certainty—that he was a Son…

By apparent chance, Jesus met a wealthy traveler and his son, a young man about seventeen years of age. These travelers hailed from India, and being on their way to visit Rome and various other points on the Mediterranean, they had arranged to arrive in Jerusalem during the Passover, hoping to find someone whom they could engage as interpreter for …

By the end of A.D. 20, the Son of Man had made every preparation for detaching himself permanently from the Nazareth home; and this was not easy for him to do. Jesus naturally loved his people; he loved his family, and this natural affection had been tremendously augmented by his extraordinary devotion to them. The more fully we bestow ourselves up…

The children were always welcome at the repair shop. Jesus provided sand, blocks, and stones by the side of the shop, and bevies of youngsters flocked there to amuse themselves. When they tired of their play, the more intrepid ones would peek into the shop, and if its keeper were not busy, they would make bold to go in and say, “Uncle Joshua, come …

Throughout his ministry to mankind, Jesus sought to not bring any undue influence to bear upon his family or others which would lead them to believe in him against their honest convictions. He always refused to take undue or unfair advantage of the human mind. He did not want men to believe in him unless their hearts were responsive to the spiritua…

Jesus’ twenty-second year of life was one of several years during which his brothers and sisters were facing the trials and tribulations peculiar to the problems and readjustments of adolescence. Jesus then had brothers and sisters ranging in ages from seven to eighteen, and he was kept busy helping them to adjust themselves to the new awakenings o…

As Jesus of Nazareth entered upon the early years of his adult life, he had lived, and continued to live, a normal and average human life on earth. Of his human nature he was never in doubt; it was self-evident and always present in his consciousness. But of his divine nature there was always room for doubt and conjecture, at least this was true ri…

As he approached his twentieth birthday, Jesus depended more and more upon the ultimate guidance of his heavenly Father, while he assumed the fatherly role of guiding and directing the children of his earth family. He was becoming experienced in the skillful wresting of victory from the very jaws of defeat; he was learning how to transform the diff…

Rebecca lived for only one purpose—to await the hour when Jesus, to her, the greatest man who ever lived would begin his career as a teacher of living truth. And she followed him devotedly through his eventful years of public labor, being present that day when he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem; and she stood by the side of Mary on that fateful an…

On Saturday afternoon, December 3, A.D. 12, death for the second time struck at the Nazareth family. Little Amos, their baby brother, died after a week’s illness with a high fever. After passing through this time of sorrow with her first-born son as her only support, Mary at last and in the fullest sense recognized Jesus as the real head of the fam…

By the age of sixteen Jesus had acquired the full growth of his human intellect, not the full experience of human thinking but the fullness of capacity for such intellectual development. He possessed a keen and analytical mind, a kind and sympathetic disposition, a somewhat fluctuating but aggressive temperament, all of which were becoming organize…

With the close of this fifteenth year Jesus completed the traversal of that dangerous and difficult period in human existence, that time of transition between the more complacent years of childhood and the consciousness of approaching manhood with its increased responsibilities and opportunities for the acquirement of advanced experience in the dev…

The adolescent Jesus’ profound periods of meditation, his frequent journeys to the hilltop for prayer, and the many strange ideas which he advanced from time to time, thoroughly alarmed his mother. Sometimes she thought the lad was beside himself, and then she would steady her fears, remembering that he was, after all, a child of promise and in som…

It was during the calendar year of his fifteenth birthday that Jesus first formulated the prayer which he subsequently taught to his apostles, and which to many has become known as “The Lord’s Prayer.” Also during that year, Jesus found a passage in the so-called Book of Enoch which influenced him in the later adoption of the term “Son of Man” as a…

Of all Jesus’ earth-life experiences, the fourteenth and fifteenth years were the most crucial. These two years, after he began to be self-conscious of divinity and destiny, and before he achieved a large measure of communication with his indwelling Adjuster, were the most trying of his eventful life on Urantia. It is this period of two years which…

Jesus, leaving Jerusalem with his parents, paused on the brow of Olivet; he raised his staff aloft and, quivering from head to foot under the surging of intense emotion, said: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, and the people thereof, what slaves you are—subservient to the Roman yoke and victims of your own traditions—but I will return to cleanse yonder temp…

In a very amazing way Jesus participated in the temple discussions but always in a manner consistent with his youth. Sometimes his pointed questions were somewhat embarrassing to the learned teachers of the Jewish law, but he evinced such a spirit of candid fairness, coupled with an evident hunger for knowledge, that the majority of the temple teac…

Again and again, during the Passover week, his parents would find Jesus sitting off by himself with his youthful head in his hands, profoundly thinking. They had never seen him behave like this, and not knowing how much he was confused in mind and troubled in spirit by the experience through which he was passing, they were sorely perplexed; they di…

Jesus remonstrated with his father: “The heavenly Father cannot love his children less than you love me. And I well know, no matter what unwise thing I might do, you would never pour out wrath upon me nor vent anger against me. If you, my earthly father, possess such human reflections of the Divine, how much more must the heavenly Father be filled …

At no time in his life did Jesus ever experience such a purely human thrill as that which at this time so completely enthralled him as he stood there on this April afternoon on the Mount of Olives, drinking in his first view of Jerusalem. And in after years, on this same spot he stood and wept over the city which was about to reject another prophet…

Jesus never shirked the responsibility of making the necessary daily adjustments between the realms of loyalty to one’s personal convictions and duty toward one’s family, and he achieved the satisfaction of effecting an increasingly harmonious blending of personal convictions and family obligations into a masterful concept of group solidarity based…

During the tenth year of his life, Jesus began to show a marked preference for the company of older persons. He delighted in talking over things cultural, educational, social, economic, political, and religious with older minds, and his depth of reasoning and keenness of observation so charmed his adult associates that they were always more than wi…

As regards graven images, Joseph felt impelled to rule that the rabbinical interpretation of the second commandment should prevail. And so Jesus no more drew or modeled the likeness of anything from that day as long as he lived in his father’s house. But he was unconvinced of the wrong of what he had done, and to give up such a favorite pastime con…

During Jesus’ eighth year of life, while he continued to make enviable progress at school, all did not run smoothly for either parents or teachers. He persisted in asking many embarrassing questions concerning both science and religion, particularly regarding geography and astronomy. He was especially insistent on finding out why there was a dry se…

Material accidents, commonplace occurrences of a physical nature, are not arbitrarily interfered with by celestial personalities. Under ordinary circumstances only midway creatures can intervene in material conditions to safeguard the persons of men and women of destiny, and even in special situations these beings can so act only in obedience to th…

The first great shock of Jesus’ young life occurred when he was not quite six years old. It had seemed to the lad that his father—at least his father and mother together—knew everything. Imagine, therefore, the surprise and disillusionment of this inquiring child, when he asked his father the cause of a mild earthquake which had just occurred, to h…

Joseph and Mary finally took leave of Alexandria in August, 4 B.C.; and Jesus was about three years and two months old at the time of their return to Nazareth. He had stood all these travels very well and was in excellent health and full of childish glee and excitement at having premises of his own to run about in and to enjoy. But he greatly misse…

With the arrival of the first Adjuster on an inhabited world the guardian seraphim also make their appearance; they are indispensable to terrestrial escape. Throughout the life-lapse period of the sleeping survivors of a nonindividual order of survival, the spiritual values and eternal realities of their newly evolved and immortal souls are held as…

The one physical uniformity of mortals is the brain and nervous system; nevertheless, there are three basic organizations of the brain mechanism: the one-, the two-, and the three-brained types. Urantians are of the two-brained type, somewhat more imaginative, adventurous, and philosophical than the one-brained mortals but somewhat less spiritual, …

Mortal mind without immortal spirit cannot survive. The mind of man is mortal; only the bestowed spirit is immortal. Survival is dependent on spiritualization by the ministry of the Adjuster—on the birth and evolution of the immortal soul; at least, there must not have developed an antagonism towards the Adjuster’s mission of effecting the spiritua…

The majority of inhabited planets are peopled with the breathing type of intelligent beings. But there are also radically modified orders of mortals who are able to live on worlds with little or no air. Of the Orvonton inhabited worlds this type amounts to less than seven per cent. In Nebadon this percentage is less than three. In all Satania there…

All mortal-inhabited worlds are evolutionary in origin and nature. These spheres are the spawning ground, the evolutionary cradle, of the mortal races of time and space. Each unit of the ascendant life is a veritable training school for the stage of existence just ahead; and this is true of every stage of man’s progressive Paradise ascent, includin…

Spornagia are the only creatures in all the universe of Nebadon who experience any sort of reincarnation. They are only reactive to the first five of the adjutant mind-spirits; they are not responsive to the spirits of worship and wisdom. But the five-adjutant mind equivalates to a totality or sixth reality level, and it is this factor which persis…

Each of the Jerusem nonnative residential reservations consists of seven concentric and successively elevated circles. They are all constructed along the same lines but are of different sizes and are fashioned of differing materials. They are all surrounded by far-reaching enclosures, which mount up to form extensive promenades entirely encompassin…

Jerusem is indeed a foretaste of paradisiacal glory and grandeur. However, this first world of detention in the Paradise journey is far more material than spiritual. Relative to higher architectural worlds, the system capitals are unique in that they are the only worlds which exhibit well-nigh perfectly all three phases of universe existence: the m…

Jerusem, the headquarters of Satania, is an average capital of a local system. Two hundred thousand years after the rebellion, Satania is being administered most efficiently; and as the ages pass, the results of disharmony are being slowly but surely eradicated. Order and good will are being restored, and the conditions on Jerusem are more and more…

This probation nursery of Satania is maintained by certain morontia personalities on the finaliters’ world, one half of the planet being devoted to this work of child rearing. Here are received and reassembled certain children of surviving mortals, such as those offspring who perished on the evolutionary worlds before the acquirement of individual …

The Material Sons and Daughters, together with their children, present an engaging spectacle which never fails to arouse the curiosity and intrigue the attention of all ascending mortals. After finally attaining Jerusem citizenship, mortal survivors spend much of their leisure on the system capital observing and studying the life habits and conduct…

The four and twenty counselors are Christ Michael’s personal agents on Jerusem, and they have authority to represent the Master Son in all matters concerning the roll calls of Satania and in many other phases of the scheme of mortal ascension on the isolated worlds of the system. They are the designated agents for executing the special requests of …

The chief executive of a local system of inhabited worlds is a primary Lanonandek Son, the System Sovereign. In our local universe these sovereigns are intrusted with large executive responsibilities, unusually wide powers of personal discretion in the direction of system affairs. But in all the history of Nebadon these untrammeled executives have …

The administrative center of Satania consists of a cluster of made-to-order, architectural spheres, fifty-seven in number—Jerusem itself, the seven major satellites, and the forty-nine subsatellites. The seven major worlds swinging around Jerusem are generally known as the transitional culture spheres. The seven mansion worlds are the seven subsate…

Jesus’ new sacrament of the supper of remembrance, when it is partaken of by those who are Son-believing and God-knowing, does not need to have associated with its symbolism any of man’s puerile misinterpretations regarding the meaning of the divine presence, for upon all such occasions the Master is ''really present.'' The remembrance supper is th…