© 1991 Ken Glasziou
© 1991 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
by Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Qld.
Are the textual, punctuation, and spelling changes made to the original, first printing of The URANTIA Book of any importance? The Trustees of the Foundation do not think so. At least that is the answer I recently received to my protests concerning this matter. I was informed that my protest was placed on the agenda but was allocated such a low priority that it did not come up during a recent meeting of the Trustees. However it did receive some discussion during lunch. My major concern was with the textual changes. I was informed that since all of these had occurred long ago, during the second and third printing, the current Trustees accept no responsibility, and those who made the changes will have to answer to the Ancients of Days.
Why should these changes be of concern? Here is one reason. Assume that you are involved in translating The URANTIA Book into a foreign language. Which version of the book will you use? The problem is messy because most of us believed that there had only ever been one change, a change that had been corrected at the very next printing. That was the story I was told when I asked a member of the general council of the former Brotherhood some few years ago. This appears to have been the official line at the time, as I received exactly the same story when I asked a former Trustee who had also been an ex-president of the Brotherhood.
Not long ago, I received a letter from another expresident of the Brotherhood containing these words: “I have always advocated that any changes made in The URANTIA Book, including typographical errors, be public knowledge. This is basic to establishing credibility.” That appears to confirm that the ‘only ever one change’ story was the official line. Let’s inject some truth and give it the correct label of an ordinary, humantype lie. There was a time when I was naive enough to think that the Trustees of the URANTIA Foundation must be spiritually advanced ascenders, all on the very verge of fusing with their Thought Adjusters. Now I know differently.
Why should the changes be of concern? Here is another reason. Recently I received a 'phone call from a friend who had rejected main-line Christianity and taken up Zen Buddhism. This friend reads The URANTIA Book, accepting it as a superior philosophical work. He was excited, having just read the article from Matt Neibaur on the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that gave rise to the story of the three wise men and the Star of Bethlehem. Having a Ph.D. in computer science, mathematics and statistics, he was immediately conscious of the fact that it would have been totally impossible to forecast the dates for the conjunctions correctly at the time of the first printing of The URANTIA Book. The purpose of the 'phone call was to inquire whether I could assure him that the dates published in his current edition of the book were the same as for the first printing. Fortunately I had a list from Kristen Maaherra of the hundred or so changes that have been made since that first printing, and was able to assure him that the dates had not been altered. That person now takes seriously, the claim of The URANTIA Book to be a revelation given to us from sources beyond this planet.
Undoubtedly there are lots of other reasons why textual changes should not have been made to the book. Perhaps one of them has to do with violation of a trust. Article 3.1 of the Declaration of Trust creating the Foundation says: “It shall be the primary duty of the Trustees to perpetually preserve inviolate the text of The URANTIA Book.”
It is my view that no textual changes should ever have been made from the first printing of the book. None of the authors of the URANTIA Papers lay claim to infallibility. There are about eight changes that appear to be attempts by a human agency to correct what they deemed to be mistakes made by those authors. Human beings obviously cannot be trusted, hence I would not be prepared to delegate authority to anyone even to correct supposedly typographical and punctuation errors.
I would like to see the text of the first printing adhered to with no changes. Another possibility would be that textual changes revert to the original but that punctuation and spelling changes be permissible if indicated in a footnote and listed in an appendix. In any case, it would appear to be essential that a no-change first edition should always be available to those engaged in translation and scholarship.
The Trustee who placed my low priority protest on the agenda for the Foundation meeting left Australia recently, remarking that I am the only person who is concerned about this matter. Am I? Are you?