© 2005 Jan Herca (license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
In some parts of my novel about Jesus[1] he appears named as “Salvin”. This name is actually taken from The Urantia Book, where we find all kinds of new expositions about the divine personality of Jesus.
The old and eternal discussion about the divinity of Jesus is a recurring theme throughout the centuries. Early Christian communities soon began to worship Jesus as a god, or even more, as God himself. This ended up leading to the idea of the Holy Trinity, a complex idea according to which God, being a single being, had three personalities or manifestations, one the Father, another the Son, and another the Holy Spirit. Obviously, Jesus was identified with the Son, the second personality.
This idea, which became popular long after the death of Jesus, ended up establishing itself as the Christian explanation of the divinity of Jesus, although it received innumerable criticisms and provoked bitter theological confrontations.
On May 20, 325, in Nicaea, the Emperor Constantine convened a council of bishops to try, among other things, to stop the influence of the doctrines of an Alexandrian priest named Arius, who questioned the divinity of Jesus.
The idea of the Holy Trinity as it was raised by early Christianity advocated that the divinity only exists in three personalities. Outside of these three persons, there is no divinity.
The Urantia Book launches a new consideration: divinity is a quality shared by many beings in the created universe, not just by three people (UB 0:0.1, UB 0:1.2, UB 0:1.18). This new vision establishes degrees within the divinity, which we can also assimilate with “degrees of perfection.”
According to The Urantia Book Jesus is a being with divinity capabilities (UB 4:4.4, UB 37:0.1). He is a god to all intents and purposes. But not God in the absolute sense. Like early Christianity, The Urantia Book establishes only three persons as the absolutes of divinity, beings who comprise all possible perfection of Deity. But unlike ancient Christianity, Jesus does not appear as the absolute second member of the Trinity (UB 33:1.2), but as an extraordinary and unknown type of being called Michael or Creator Son (UB 21:0.3, UB 32:0.3).
Michaels are gods in the strict sense, there are thousands upon thousands of them (UB 21:1.4), and they are capable of creating physical formations in the universe and endowing the planets. From this perspective, Michael beings like Jesus should come naturally to us as the totality of divinity. But according to The Urantia Book, on a higher cosmic level, they are only the representatives of the three absolute persons of Deity.
In The Urantia Book the physical formation created by Jesus is called Nebadon (UB 0:0.5, UB 1:2.9). And its center, in which is the heavenly abode of Jesus, is called Salvington (UB 15:7.7). This last name gives the feeling of being an adaptation to English of a word in another language that meant “the city of Salvin” (“Salvin town”). The word Salvin seems chosen because it reminds of “salvation”.
If we take into account that the authentic Aramaic name of Jesus, which is vocalized as Yeshua, meant “Yahweh saves” or “Salvation”, it becomes clearer why I have used “Salvin” as the celestial name of Jesus throughout my novel. The basic idea is that probably the authentic celestial name of Jesus, of unknown pronunciation, also means “Salvation” in the celestial language. This is why Jesus’ capital of creation is named “the city of salvation” in The Urantia Book, and why (there may be an explanation here) Jesus chose for himself a human name that meant the same as his heavenly name. (Entrusting Gabriel during the announcement to Mary to request that name for him).
This name does not appear in The Urantia Book, and is a simple invention of mine based on other names, as already explained. Therefore, it should be taken as something curious, but nothing more. In fact, The Urantia Book does not seem to want to give the divine Jesus a name, limiting itself to say that Jesus is the Michael (that is, of the order of Creator Sons) with number 611,121, or simply, the Michael of Nebadon (UB 33:1.1). The use of Salvin instead of Michael arises from considering the idea that creators like Jesus must have more personality to have a proper name and not a simple number.
Michael is also a Jewish name meaning “He who is like God” or “Who but God?”. In Jewish angelic mythology he frequently appeared as one of the great angels or archangels, alongside Gabriel, Raphael and Fanuel. In pre-Christian literature, as in Revelation, he appears with a transcendental importance: he is the one who has the great contest with the beast that personifies the Devil (Rev 12:7).
As I show in my novel, there is a possible explanation for the new interest that the figure of the archangel Michael aroused in early Christianity. But that should be the subject of another paper.
Jan Herca, Jesus de Nazaret. Partes XI y XII, 2010. https://buscandoajesus.wordpress.com/descargas/ ↩︎