Many students of the Urantia Book have been intrigued by these references to human sources and have sought to track these sources down. Until recently, however, the findings were meager, consisting mainly of passages from the world’s sacred scriptures. A few modern books had been identified as sources (e.g. The Religion of Jesus by Walter E. Bundy, A Preface to Christian Faith in a New Age by Rufus M. Jones and The Dawn of Conscience by James Henry Breasted), but not enough to prove that books had figured largely among the sources of record and planetary information alluded to by the revelators. Most readers have supposed that the revelators accessed some sort of celestial concept registry or memory bank to locate appropriate human concepts and expressions, only drawing on published sources in exceptional cases.

        in 1991 a couple of groups of Urantia Book readers decided, independently of each other, to collect all the human sources found so far. As a member of one of these groups, I took on the task of reading the above mentioned books carefully in order to glean all the parallel passages. As I read, I began to see that the parallels were far more extensive than previously realized. This led me to surmise that the revelators’ use of books was not so extraordinary after all.

        A few months later, while doing research for a paper on the Urantia Book’s treatment of race and eugenics, I happened upon E. V. Cowdry’s Human Biology and Racial Welfare. Published in 1930, this book turned out to be another unmistakable source. This discovery, which occurred in the spring of 1992, spurred me on to conduct a concentrated search for other source books.

        Below is a list of nineteen books which comprise the sources I have collected so far. All of these books, with a few exceptions noted in the list, contain sentences, paragraphs, or even whole chapters whose phrasings and organization of thoughts or information are so closely paralleled in the Urantia Book as to strongly suggest their use as source materials by the revelators. Most were discovered in libraries and used book stores in the Chicago area during the spring, summer, and fall of 1992, in the course of my research.

        The research, so far, has been very fruitful mainly because none of these books were obscure. They were all written by authorities in their respective fields, often by professors from prominent American universities, and many were reviewed in the popular and academic press. The book titles themselves were often giveaways; by their very titles, for instance, I targeted Purposive Evolution and The Architecture of the Universe (listed below) as likely primary sources. It is quite probable that many more books by American scholars of the early 20th century will be identified as sources. It may also be that writings from other periods and milieus will prove to be similarly rich in source materials.

       These books cover many fields, including religion, philosophy, archaeology, physics, astronomy, and history. The revelators explicitly acknowledge using the highest human concepts and insights pertaining to God and the seven superuniverses (p. 17) and to the life and teachings of Jesus (p. 1343). But it seems strictly in keeping with their purposes to cull from other areas as well, since mention is made on p. 1123 that: “Revelation unifies history, coordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology.” In their effort to produce a “new and enhanced coordination of planetary knowledge” (p. 17), involving the unification and integration of religion, science, and philosophy, it makes sense that the revelators would incorporate human understandings in all of these areas.

        So far I have traced parallels in about fifty of the Urantia Papers. One book alone, Origin and Evolution of Religion by Yale professor E. Washburn Hopkins, figures in twelve. I estimate that writings published before 1936 are used in about one-third of Parts I and II and in at least two-thirds of Parts III and IV. Most of these works will probably be found within the next few years. Eventually we will be able to map out the whole Urantia Book according to which parts are original with the book and which are not. And, again, this will not be too difficult since the revelators, while studiously avoiding word-for-word borrowings, made no attempt to disguise their sources by departing widely from the original human expressions.

        Clearly, these findings are of great importance to serious Urantia Book readers. In addition to providing further substantiation of the revelators’ acknowledgments, they spark new insights into what this revelation really is, and how human and superhuman voices and viewpoints interface in its production. As we gain a better grasp of how original it is (in its function as pure revelation), and how derivative it is (in its function of presenting superhuman restatements of human concepts and expressions), we will be better able to see how the revelation positions itself with regard to evolutionary human knowledge, wisdom, and faith.

        My own experience has taught me that, as a result of my former ignorance and underestimation of early 20th century thought, my sense of this positioning had been skewed. If unfamiliar with a concept or a piece of information presented in the papers —especially if it struck me as uncommonly beautiful, brilliant, or incisive—I would usually assume it was original with the Urantia Book, little realizing that it might have been known or expressed in some form or other, by some people of earlier generations. But in becoming more familiar with thought trends of that period and others, and with the discovery of more human sources, I’ve come to a better appreciation of the higher reaches of human thought reflected in the book, and can now begin to give the book’s human side its proper due.

        Along with this heightened recognition of the book’s human component has come an awareness of how brilliantly the revelators reworked these sources to serve their own purposes. In comparing the source materials with the corresponding passages in the Urantia Book, I am continually struck by the presenters’ ingenious ability to seamlessly integrate human observations with revelatory supplementation or correction. Time and again they prove themselves deft and creative editors, performing the difficult task of remaining true to the original expression while at the same time slightly altering it to make the reworded sentence(s) more congruent with revealed teachings.

        One illustration of this technique will suffice for the purposes of the present essay. In his discussion of chemical elements, W. F. G. Swann writes on page 64 of The Architecture of the Universe:

      Compare this with the parallel passage on p. 480 of the Urantia Book:

      Notice the care and elegance with which the second passage is restated. While retaining the original sentence structures and using similar wordings, the superhuman presenter departs from the speculative tone of Swann’s last clause, inserting a revealed statement of decisive significance in its place. Scores of other examples of this technique appear in the books listed below; their cumulative effect is truly astounding. Other patterns of referencing, equally ingenious, are also discernible; these will be brought forward in later essays. (In this connection, it should be noted that in the listings, when I describe passages in some of the books as being “reproduced with little change” or “lightly rewritten,” etc., the changes may be small in form but quite significant in substance.)
 
        It must also be noted that these books have sometimes been of great help in further understanding the papers that use them. Often the presenters are obliged to present an abbreviated treatment of a concept or a history which is discussed at greater length in the human source. For instance, my under­standing of the book’s puzzling allusion to “cosmic self-­maintenance” (p. 482) was greatly enhanced when I came upon this concept presented at length in the Noble book (see below). In light of these benefits to the comprehension of both content and context, I feel it would be helpful for the readership to be made aware of these sources, and perhaps some of these books with expired copyrights could be republished. It would also be very helpful to scholars who will someday be critically examining the Urantia Book.
 
        The following listings are necessarily brief and incomplete. In the coming months I intend to analyze some of these books at greater length, detailing the often ingenious ways the revelators make use of them. My main goals in each of the essays will be: (1) to lay out the parallels between the book in question and the Urantia Book, (2) to show how the superhuman presenters enhanced the human statements with revelatory information or insights, and (3) to see whether and how the books shed light on the corresponding passages in the Urantia Book In the meantime, I and other readers will be on the lookout for more human sources. If anyone knows of books not included in this list, I would be very grateful to hear from you.

Source List as of December 1992

In this passage, the Urantia Book captures the essence of its own magnificent achievement, an achievement which is truly without peer or precedent in the history of the world. n

[In 1993 Matthew Block served on the office staff of The Fellowship for Student and Readers of the Urantia Book in Chicago.]

In the ten years since this article was written, I have found over one hundred more source texts, and no longer consider several of the books in the above list to be sources. These include:

* Aston’s Shinto: The Way of the Gods and Frost’s The Sacred Writings of the World’s Great Religions. Robert Ernest Hume’s selection of religious scriptures, Treasure-House of the Living Religions (1931), includes all the matching material in Aston and Frost and is the obvious source of Paper 131.

* Fosdick’s The Hope of the World. Francis Greenwood Peabody’s 1905 book, Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, includes a discussion of goodness and attractiveness and parallels several other statements in 171:7.

*Jones’s The Inner Life. John Baillie’s 1929 The Interpretation of Religion is the evident source for the preamble and a few other sections in Paper 102. Like Jones, Baillie cites Russell but, unlike Jones, carries the discussion forward in a way that closely parallels the UB’s ensuing remarks.

* Noble’s Purposive Evolution. J. E. Turner’s Personality and Reality (1926) is the obvious source of 42:11. He too advances the theory of cosmic self-maintenance, but his text corresponds with the UB more closely and extensively.
                                                                                  
                                                                                                                       --Matthew Block, January 2003