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IN
HIS
“Personal Account of Finding the Urantia
Book” (circa 1960), Dr. Meredith J.
Sprunger recounts his conversations with
Dr. William S. Sadler, the Chicago
author and psychiatrist who was
mysteriously involved in the development
of the manuscript that became the
Urantia Book.
Sprunger
writes:
I asked Sadler
when and why he finally accepted the
papers for what they claim to be. He
replied that his professional pride was
at stake and so he maintained a critical
professional attitude until most of the
papers were received. His decision to
throw in his intellectual towel came, he
said, when they received the paper on
the twelve apostles. “I’m a
psychiatrist,” he said, “and I think I
know my business. But this paper gave me
an inferiority complex. Even if I had a
staff of psychiatrists and years to work
on it, I don’t think I could prepare a
paper of this quality. You almost have
to have access to the interior of the
human mind to write such a paper. So I
finally decided to admit that we were
dealing with superior knowledge.
Why Sadler
seemed to assume that only a
psychiatrist would be equipped to
write probing character studies is
puzzling. Had he never read Shakespeare
or Dostoyevsky, for instance? Also, what
exactly did Sadler find so impressive
about Paper 139? The UB’s portrayal of
the apostles extends throughout most of
Part IV, but Paper 139 itself is short
on deep psychological probing.
Further, was
Sadler not aware that scores of books
about the apostles were within easy
reach, in any large bookstore or
library, and that at least a few of them
were clearly sources for Paper 139?
If he had
delved into this literature, he would
have realized that nearly all the
“portraits of the apostles” were largely
the product of the writers’
imaginations, extrapolating from what
little could be gleaned from New
Testament accounts and early traditions.
For instance, the apostle Andrew is
mentioned only three times in the
gospels, very briefly, and yet a dozen
pious Christian preachers managed to
flesh out devotional portraits of him
for the edification of their equally
pious readers.
The standard
Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries
also profiled each apostle, drawing on
gospel accounts and early church
traditions. These articles relied much
less on the authors’ imaginations;
however, the authors, being devout
Christians, were more apt to credit the
historicity of early traditions than
other scholars would do. Two of these
biblical reference books provided source
material for Paper 139.
Coincidentally, I found my first
apostles source in 1994 at a used book
store in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, the
hometown of Meredith Sprunger. In fact,
I had just visited Meredith and his wife
Irene before stopping in at the
bookstore. The source was These
Twelve: A Study in Temperament
(1926), by Charles Reynolds Brown. I
didn’t find out about Meredith’s
abovementioned interview with Sadler
until some time later.
At the time of this
writing (December 2010) I’ve found five
definite sources, which collectively
parallel only about half the paper. Much
of the paper may well be unique. A
noncommitted reader of the Urantia Book
could then reasonably ask, Is the
original material “revelatory” (i.e.
does it reveal factual information
available until then only to
superhumans, as claimed in the UB) or is
it the result of the same type of
(human) creative imagination employed in
the “portraits of the apostles” genre?
The sharing
of source research alone will not settle
the question, but the increased
knowledge base provided by the parallels
will help the reader get a handle on how
the paper was written. Since my work on
this paper is not developed enough to
provide a full-paper parallel chart, I
thought it best to present my findings
on a source-by-source basis, over the
next several months.
The lead-off source,
and the subject of this article, is
Studies of the Man Christ Jesus
(1896), by Presbyterian evangelist
Robert E. Speer. I found it in July of
2008 via
www.books.google.com while looking
for parallels for Paper 141.
The book may be read
in its entirety here:
http://www.archive.org/details/studiesmanchris00speegoog
As the title
indicates, Jesus is the central figure;
the apostles themselves receive only
peripheral attention. The book is a
major source for Part IV - it was used
in four papers, including Papers 141 and
139 - and the apostle parallels were the
least obvious and most surprising to me.
Only after seeing the parallels with the
other three UB papers did I notice them.
They occur in Chapter III (“Some Active
and Passive Traits of His [Jesus’]
Character”).
That chapter
is divided into ten sections, each
describing a trait or set of traits.
(Turn to page 12 of the Speer book to
see the table of contents.)
The author
of Paper 139 evidently drew from this
chapter to fashion a subtheme that runs
throughout the apostle portraits, which
is: What trait of Jesus made a special
appeal to each apostle? Each apostle, as
described by Paper 139, was different in
this regard; and, as the parallel chart
shows, six of Jesus’ ten special traits,
as described by Speer, were respectively
admired by six of the twelve apostles.
Andrew, Simon Peter, Thomas Didymus,
James and Judas Alpheus, and Simon the
Zealot are the ones who match up with
six of Speer’s listed traits.
James
Zebedee, John Zebedee, Philip the
Curious, Honest Nathaniel, Matthew Levi,
and Judas Iscariot find only debatable
and vague parallels. For instance,
Philip most appreciated Jesus’
“unfailing generosity”. This trait only
partially corresponds to Speer’s fifth
listed trait, Jesus’ “love and
generosity to those who were alien or
hostile to Him”. In the interests of
clarity, I have not included such partial
parallelisms in the chart.
* * *
Part 2 of this study
will be posted early next year.
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papers paralleled 
